Please join us on Sunday, November 9th at 10:30am for our service “Art of Imperfection: Wabi-Sabi” presented by Kari Davidson.

Our discussion will be based on a session plan from a sister congregation in Hartford, CT, found on the Unitarian Universalist Small Group Ministry Network. 

Wabi-sabi is a traditional Japanese aesthetic which finds value and beauty in the unfinished, the humble, the aged, and the flawed. The concept is attributed to 15th/16th century Japanese tea masters, who, perhaps as a reaction to Chinese opulence and grandeur at the time, served tea in rustic huts using simple utensils made of common materials like bamboo and clay.  

Included in the UU literature is the following: 

“Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time”

Let’s talk about wabi-sabi, and how we might discern it in objects, the seasons, and our own lives, as we enter November, with its leafless branches and chilly mornings.  Please feel free to bring an object, or a photo of something/somewhere that you consider “wabi-sabi”, and what it means to you.

The service will be held in person in the parlor at the Delaware County Cultural Arts Center (The Arts Castle), at 190 West Winter Street in Delaware, Ohio.

Topics: TBA