 We're here, it won't be quite as loud as we thought it would be at the level, yes. Cool. And we'll just see what Justin and Mike are saying. I don't think they're going to hear this from you guys. I don't know. What's your name? I'm Sean, Steve's actually the one running the awards. Oh Steve. Okay. Please join with me in a moment of silence to center ourselves prior to being together for this lovely hour. Please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn, number 110. We will sing it through twice and the words appear in your order of service. Good morning. Welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to all of our visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers and others are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would be happy to speak with you and share their enthusiasm for FUS. And I'm missing a page. I've done this often enough. I should be able to remember. So I'm just a sec. I apologize. Anybody want to give me a hint? Michael, what comes next? That's crazy. I'll wing it. What? Now would be a wonderful time to turn off any noisy sound makers that might disrupt the service. And if you have a little person with you who really needs to run around and make some noise, you may want to retire with them to the children's haven over in that corner or anywhere out in the mountains behind the auditorium because you can see and hear from there and you'll still enjoy the service. I would like to acknowledge people who help make this service work. Our lay minister for this service is Tom Boykoff. Hi, Tom. Our greeter is Kareem Perrin. Our ushers are Liza Monroe and Dick Goldberg. We have staff operating the sound because we didn't have any volunteers. And the last time I knew Jean Sears was taking care of the hospitality, coffee and lemon water. And she asks if there's anyone who can help her after the service clean up a bit. Please just go to the kitchen and give her a hand. Thank you very much. I'd call your attention to announcements. In the red floors, insert to your order of service. There's several things going on even today and this week. And one of them I want to call your attention to specifically is that Sharon Salzburg will be here with us tonight for meditation and talk. She's a renowned meditation teacher. Many of you will have heard of her. She's the author of Loving Kindness and Real Happiness. Her wisdom and loving approach to kindness is so relevant and inspiring during these very challenging days. The program runs from 6 to 8 p.m. Here in the Atrium Auditorium and all are welcome. There will be a free will donation only for Sharon. Thank you. Hope today's service will touch your heart. Help your mind. That's not the right word. And stir your spirit. Thank you very much and thank you for your patience with my fellow up here. One day, you finally knew what you had to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began to tremble, and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Men, my life, each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds. And there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own. That kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do. Determined to save the only life you could save. Please now rise and join with me in reading the words for the lighting of our chalice that are printed in your program. How often we seek refuge in this sacred flame from the world's trouble and pain. Today may our lamp light the way for those who know no refuge. That we may open our minds, our arms, our hearts, our mouths to sing, Come, whoever you are, holy new and holy true. And now please turn to your neighbor for a warm Sunday morning greeting. And sit on this lovely rug and hear a story about a girl who loved to drum. And this story is based on the life of a real girl who lived in the 1930s. And she was of Chinese, African, and Cuban descent. And she loved to drum. And so this is a story about her. This is called Drum Dream Girl. Drum Dream Girl. On an island of music in a city of drum beats, the Drum Dream Girl sings of pounding tall conga drums, tapping small bongo drums, and boom, boom, booming with long loud sticks on big, round, silvery, moon, bright timbalas. But everyone on the island of music in the city of drum beats believed that only boys should play drums. So the Drum Dream Girl had to keep dreaming quiet, secret drum beat dreams. At outdoor cafes that looked like gardens, she heard drums played by men, but when she closed her eyes, she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind wavy palm trees in a flower bright park, she heard the whir of parrot wings, the clack of woodpecker beaks, the dancing tap of her own footsteps, and the comforting tap of her own heartbeat. All those rhythms. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts, and the dragon clang of costume drummers wearing huge masks. At home, her fingertips rolled out their dreamy drum rhythm on tables and chairs. And even though everyone kept reminding her that girls on the island of music had never played drums, the brave Drum Dream Girl dared to play tall conga drums, small bongo drums, and big, round, silvery, moon, bright timbalas. She seemed to fly as they rippled, wrapped, and pounded all the rhythms of her drum dreams. Her big sisters were so excited that they invited her to join their new All Girl dance band. But their father said, only boy should play drums. So the Drum Dream Girl had to keep dreaming and drumming alone until finally her father offered to find a music teacher who could decide if her drums deserved to be heard. The Drum Dream Girl's teacher was amazed. The girl knew so much, but he taught her more and more and more, and she practiced and she practiced and she practiced until the teacher agreed that she was ready to play her small bongo drums outdoors at a starlit cafe that looked like a garden. Where everyone who heard her dream bright music sang and danced and decided that girls should always be allowed to play drums and both girls and boys should feel free to dream. And that is the end of our story for today. Time to go to summer fun, okay? Thank you for your attention. Called a litany for survival. For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision, crucial, and alone. For those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice, who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours. For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us. For all of us this instant and this triumph we were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. And then this from Alice Walker in search of our mother's gardens. How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive year after year and century after century when for most of the years black people have been in America it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write and the freedom to paint to sculpt to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider if you can bear to imagine it what might have been the result if singing too had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin among others and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you begin to comprehend the lives of our crazy sainted mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been poets, novelists, essayists and short story writers who died with their real gifts stifled within them. How they did it these millions of black women who were not Phyllis Wheatley or Lucy Terry or Francis Harper or Zora Herson or Nella Larson or Bessie Smith brings me to the title of this essay in search of our mother's gardens which is a personal account that is yet shared in its theme and its meaning by all of us. I found while thinking about the far-reaching world of the creative black women that often the truest answer to a question that really matters can be very close. But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? Even like Ma Rainey's songs which retained their creator's name even while blasting forth from Bessie Smith's mouth, no song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write that we all write are my mother's stories. But the telling of these stories which came from my mother's lips as naturally as breathing was not the only way my mother showed herself as an artist. My mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in and not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias either. She planted ambitious gardens and still does with over 50 different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before she left home for the fields she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass and laid out new beds. When she returned from the fields she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit, uproot and replant roses, or prune branches from her taller bushes or trees until night came and it was too dark to see. Because of her creativity with flowers even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms, sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythias, spirea, delphiniums, verbena and on and on. I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant. Her face as she prepares the art that is her gift is a legacy of respect she leaves to me for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She is handed down respect for the possibilities and the will to grasp them. Sounds like the center of the state with eyes and ears, these women working in the day, in the end of the day. Wonderful music this morning. Really happy that you're with us. So to begin these remarks I want to take a minute or two to tell you about the path to this pulpit this morning. Because for me the question of emergence and finding voice isn't simply an academic one. This is also my question, a quiet one, not a burning one at this stage of my life. My previous PhD in literature path led to a counseling psychology path and for the past 22 years I've been engaged in a deeper teaching in my own counseling practice. I've been content to be in the quiet enclave where such healing practices occur, eschewing the public domain bolstered by Emily Dickinson's words in a poem that Michael shared last week in his reflections on the evanescence of fame. It goes like this, I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell, they'd advertise, you know. How dreary to be somebody, how public, like a frog, to tell one's name the live long June to an admiring bog. That poem from a poet who wrote almost 1,800 poems of which fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime. She was not willing to be public like a frog. So as my literary studies became more focused, and I approached the dissertation stage back there on that PhD path, I became more interested in the question of women's literary engagement and production and the, quote, forces ranged within us and against us, and within us in Adrian Rich's words that invite as well as inhibit finding voice. Focusing on what was then called minority women's literature, black, lesbian, Jewish, Native American, I was exploring the narrative of the Künstler Roman, which is a fancy German word meaning the novel of the artist's development. Looking at how the forces of racism, classism, sexism, and how those forces are encoded in the intimate realms of relationships shape the developing artist and her creative expressions. This morning, then, I returned to the woman question in light of Hillary Clinton's emergence as the first woman to be nominated for the highest office of this land and use this historic moment to consider the perils and possibilities for women's continued emergence and finding voice. Now, young women might not be marking this moment as historically or even personally significant, taking the gains made by women in the last 30 years or so for granted, but for others of us who came of age in the second wave of the women's movement and before, this is a heady moment indeed, and against the backdrop of Hillary's emergence, are reminders of the work left to do to ensure the inherent worth and dignity of every person in this interdependent web of life. This, from a recent article in which a group of female scholars analyzed the New York Times coverage of the presidential primary, looking at every article from March 2015 through January 2016. They found that 80% of the political scientists quoted in those articles were men. The writer of this article herself, a female journalist, went on to illustrate and investigate the deep institutional and attitudinal gender bias shaping that kind of statistic to which she herself routinely succumbs. Another reminder of the work left to do, the recent so-called honor killing by the brother of Kwandio Baloch, a Pakistani woman who became a social media celebrity. She reportedly called herself a one-woman army against the repression of women in Pakistan. Two days before her death, she said in a Facebook post, as women, we must stand up for ourselves. As women, we must stand up for each other. Her brother has said he had no regrets about drugging and strangling his sister, whom he accused of dishonoring her family. In Pakistan, more than 500 people die in so-called honor killings every year, almost all of them women, and thus the practice of murdering women accused of violating highly restrictive social rules is widespread and done with impunity by male relatives. The perils and possibilities of women emerging and finding voice are exemplified by Kwandio Baloch. In her case, the perils have become obvious in her death. The possibilities lie in the fact that her brother was arrested, that because of her popularity via the social media, attitudinal change about the status of women in Pakistani society might have a positive effect on social policy. So as we can continue to consider the question of women, emergence and finding voice, I also want to think like a psychologist and look at what are the impediments for emergence and voice, what are the forces ranged within us and against us that keep us silent inhabiting the margins, the private sphere. Bell Hooks, in an early book of essays called Talking Back, Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, writes about her experience growing up black and female in the American South where children were meant to be seen and not heard, she writes, to make yourself heard if you were a child was to invite punishment. And yet she says that what was born in her was, quote, the craving to speak, to have a voice, and not just any voice, but one that could be identified as belonging to me, to make my voice I had to speak, to hear myself talk, and talk I did, darting in and out of grown folks' conversations and dialogues, answering questions endlessly, asking questions, making speeches. Needless to say, the punishments for these acts of speech seemed endless. They were intended to silence me, the child, and more particularly, the girl child. Had I been a boy, they might have encouraged me to speak, believing that I might someday be called to preach. There was no calling for talking girls, no legitimized, rewarded speech. Overt and covert punishments externally then, leading to shame and fear internally, are the forces from without and within that prohibit voice that make women's emergence and finding voice the struggle it can be for so many. So now I want to look at several idiosyncratically chosen texts by and about women to illustrate the difficult and daring movement out of silence and into speech, a movement that Bell Hook's names as quote, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is an act, it is that act of speech, of talking back that is no mere gesture of empty words that is the expression of our movement from object to subject, the liberated voice. My thoughts first turned toward the autobiographical novel of Harriet Jacobs called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. In this merging of the genres of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel, Jacobs, under the pseudonym of Linda Brent, describes her life from early childhood where she was born into slavery. She describes the relative ease of her early life where she was taught to read and write and sew by her mother's mistress in extraordinary circumstance, really, for a slave child. And then the difficulties after that mistress dies and she's placed in a new household with a five-year-old mistress whose father treats Linda as mere property. As Linda approaches puberty, he mounts increasing pressure to exploit her sexually, Jacobs writes. He told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in everything, that I was nothing but a slave whose will must and should surrender to his. The war of my life had begun, and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered, alas for me. In the narrative and in life, Harriet Linda was not conquered by her master instead in an act of resistance. She takes a white lover, Mr. Sands, bears two children whom her master subsequently claimed as his slaves. Eventually, she escapes and for seven long years hides in a crawl space in her grandmother's house evading capture and finally through a network of friends and abolitionists she makes her way to New York. In a letter to the abolitionist Amy Post, Harriet Jacobs wrote, God gave me a soul that burned for freedom and a heart nerved with determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of liberty. Triumphant over fear, determined in pursuit of liberty, Harriet Jacobs sought her freedom, and then in that freedom risked even more by documenting her experience of exploitation and abuse in her autobiographical novel, whose subtitle is, An Authentic Historical Narrative Describing the Horrors of Slavery as Experienced by Black Women. A contemporary of Harriet Jacobs with an entirely different life experience is Julia Ward-Howe, whom we Unitarians claim as one of our foremothers. Widely known mostly for her penning the words to the battle hymn of the Republic, a recent biography of Julia Ward-Howe by esteemed feminist scholar Elaine Showalter reveals a profound tension between her public and private selves mostly due to her marriage to Dr. Samuel Gridley-Howe, referred to as Shev short for Chevalier. He'd been awarded the title of Chevalier by the King of Greece for his six-year participation in the Greek War for Independence. A resume of Julia Ward-Howe would illuminate an intellectual, literary, and an industrious life of a woman born into privilege, her father, a wealthy New York banker. She knew six languages, books in her lifetime, she traveled all over the world, she was an ardent abolitionist and later in life an ardent advocate for women's suffrage. She founded and led the American Women's Suffrage Association as well as the New England Women's Club, among others. She was the first woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Behind the resume a life lived revealed by Showalter's biography was a woman who struggled significantly within the restrictions of her husband's deeply patriarchal views of a woman's place, which was in the home and involved in maternity and not in the public sphere or in literary production. The biography also reveals Julia's own internalization of those norms, as we'll see later. Julia Ward-Howe was referred to in childhood on as the diva. She was spirited, musical, and vibrantly intellectual. Her family supported her intellectual and literary pursuits. She was privately tutored, studied mathematics, philosophy, music, and history. After the death of her mother in childbirth, however, her father's grief turned him toward Calvinism and the sense of freedom and joy that have pervaded Julia's childhood by the age of 12. Julia began to note the differences between the education and expectations of and for her brothers versus her and expressed frustration and longing, as noted in this quote from an earlier biography. She said, I made rhymes and even dreamed of speeches and orations, often wishing that I had been a boy in view of the limitations on a girl's aspirations. After the death of her father in 1839, Julia's mourning took the form of a retrenchment in Calvinist theology, much like her father and her father did after the death of his wife. Showalter notes with significance a turning point in Julia's life when, after her older brothers, sudden death from typhoid fever and at the urging of her first significant female friend, also that brother's fiance, she studied her way out of the mental agonies which Calvinism can engender and became a unitarian. Showalter comments that this was a first and very decisive time that Julia's studies, her intellectual pursuit, led her to action and to autonomy. So Julia and Chev, Chev who was a Harvard trained physician and also established a lifelong career as a liberator of the blind from institutionalization, he was also an educator of the blind and deaf, met in 1841 and married in 1843. There were signs in the courtship of the difficulty to come as Chev, many years Julia's senior would switch from flirtatious to patronizing and corrective in his letters to Julia. For her part, Julia's letter announcing their engagement revealed what I just called a full-throated embrace of a fairytale fantasy and her role in it, she wrote, the Chevalier says truly I am captive of his bow and spear, his true devotion has won me from the world and from myself. The past is already fading from my sight, already I begin to live with him in the future which shall be as calmly bright as love can make it. I am perfectly happy to sacrifice to one so noble and so earnest the daydreams of my youth. He will make life more beautiful to me than any dream. Well, her perfect happiness in her sacrifice of self gave way to increasing despair as Julia struggled within the confines of this marriage and her adaptation to her role as mother as articulated in a letter to her sister, Louisa. This was about three years after they married. Dearest Weavey, what is this problem? Are we meant to change so utterly? Are our hearts to fade and die out with our early bloom and in giving life to others? Do we lose our own vitality and sink into dimness, nothingness and living death? I come to him, my poetry, my music, my religion. Elaine Showalter painstakingly documents the tension in the marriage that results from Shev's complete lack of support for Julia's literary pursuits. Three years into the marriage Julia writes again to her sister, Louisa, quote, my voice is still frozen to silence. My poetry chained down by an icy band of indifference. I begin at last to believe that I am no poet and never was one saved in my imagination. Despite this expression of despair and foreclosure Julia did continue to write and in 1853 her first book of poetry called Passion Flowers was published to significant notice. This publication was the provocation of a significant rupture in the relationship between Julia and Shev because Shev was furious about the book and responded as though publicly humiliated. Divorce was contemplated but Julia was unwilling to choose the loss and dislocation from her children that would have been the inevitable consequence. One of the really significant points of interest for me in the reading of this biography is Showalter's discussion of a manuscript found amid the boxes of Julia's papers held in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The manuscript is of a novel begun by Julia between 1846 and 1848 which was never finished nor published and which is A Künstler Roman, the story of an artist development. Interestingly, she writes this narrative with a protagonist named Lawrence who is born with both male and female sexual organs but is raised as a boy by his parents. We can see that in the imagining of this kind of narrative Julia was seeking a way out of the confining strictures of gender where the woman artist in Showalter's words is not only a divided soul but also a monster doomed to solitude and sorrow. Feminist literary scholar Joanne Fry suggests in her book Living Stories Telling Lives that women writers choose what she calls fantastic narrative modes as a way for them to free themselves from the power of current gender-based assumptions that serve to stifle imagination and voice. So we can see that Julia has no freedom for her intellectual pursuits for her literary voice in its expression a freedom that was hard won in her historical moment in general and within her marriage to Chev in particular and that that pursuit was not without personal peril and cost. Perhaps nothing could be more stifling of imagination or voice than time served in prison, time served in solitary confinement. A recent play I had the privilege to attend, Mariposa and the Saint from Solitary Confinement to Play Through Letters is a contemporary work by Sarah Fonsica, a tribal woman and a mother of two who is in isolated confinement in prison in California and Julia Steele-Allen, an activist organizer and playwright. Again seemingly impossible odds the two corresponded back and forth beginning in 2012 slowly developing a narrative revealing the rigors and realities for Mariposa in prison. In the collaborative drafting of the play Julia provided a channel for Sarah's expression of a self that survives despite the terrible isolation, degradation and deprivation of prison life. The play featured two characters Mariposa and a masked anonymous guard whose presence was both ubiquitous and ominous as a symbol of the forces ranged against her. The monologues of the character of Mariposa revealed the forces ranged within her, fear, anger, despair at her condition, loss of self and sense of connection to anything larger. At one point in the play breaking the fourth wall Mariposa played by Julia Steele-Allen at the behest of Sarah Fonsica turns to the audience and asks a question I have for the normal. If you were suddenly ripped from your life with no access to the world, nothing, no one to help you what would you mourn? What would you ache for? You can answer. Bell Hooks then reminds us that speaking out is not a simple gesture of freedom in a culture of domination. Finding a voice is an essential part of liberation and struggle. When we end our silence when we speak in a liberated voice our words connect us with anyone anywhere who lives in silence. May all of us then find our way to voice, to the fullest expression of who we are, challenging the forces ranged within us and against us against us and within us so that we may all be free. Blessed be an amen. Please be generous this morning in your giving to First Unitarian Society for our programs and our possibilities. To this time and place we bring our joys and sorrows find a place where they can be received, celebrated and shared. So we pause today to acknowledge that we have cares although there were no cares actually written in the book today. So may we silently in the spirit of empathy and hope hold in our hearts and our hands the unspoken joys and concerns of this community. Because of this time shared may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. So if you would now rise and join in what I hope will be arousing him, number 1026 in the teal hymnal If every woman in the world Adrian Rich The epigraph Thinking of Carolyn Herschel Astronomer Sister of William and others A woman in the shape of a monster A monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them. A woman in the snow among the clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles in her 98 years to discover eight comets whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses galaxies of women there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind an eye virile, precise and absolutely certain from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the nova every impulse of light the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last Let me not seem to have lived in vain What we see we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body the radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so involuted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me and has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind