 and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker, and I am Minister of Congregational Life. This morning I am joined by Reverend Roger Birchhausen, Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Daniel Karns, and the Ryan Joy family. We are grateful for the presence of Shira Stanford Osio Cantor for Congregation Shireisha Mayim. In this time of physical distance, we are grateful that each and every one of you are here with us. We are gathering together from here in Madison, from all over Dane County, from Wisconsin, from all parts of the globe. There are still blessings to be found all around us, and being able to be with you all in this way is definitely one of them. I invite you to join us for coffee hour after our service. That Zoom information will be on your screen at the end of our service, and you can also find that information on our website, fussmattison.org. And now may we take a few deep breaths together. It has been another tumultuous week in our nation, and perhaps in our own lives, and it is good to breathe together. So please take a few moments, a gift to ourselves of slowing down, simply be and deeply breathe. The opening words are a poem by Billy Collins called Picnic and Lightning. It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians are flattened by safes falling from rooftops mostly within the panels of the comics, but still we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no Valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body's rivers, the brain a monastery defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatience, the instant hand of death, always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf-like flakes of a fresco, red-brown pine needles a beetle quick to burrow under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next. In a moment, we will have our chalice lighting, and I invite you to join the Ryan Joy family in lighting a chalice or a candle at your home. The distance, the light from within us shines, sending love to all. Across the distance, your light is fuel that warms us and helps to keep our lights burning together. We keep the flame of community burning bright. Please join us in singing hymn number 18, What Wondrous Love. The story for all ages today comes from Robert Munch, and it is one of my favorite stories. It's one I actually told at FUS many, many years ago. I'm gonna tell the story, not read it for you, but you can certainly find the book and you'll like it. I found out from Reverend Kelly that this story was written by Robert Munch in the aftermath of the death of a second child through stillbirth, and that he sang the song that's in this as a way of crying. So the story begins. There is a mother and a baby, and the mother is in a rocking chair rocking the baby back and forth, back and forth, looking at her baby, she sings. I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. Well, that baby grew and grew and grew until he was a two-year-old and he was a terrible two-year-old. He would pull stuff out of the refrigerator. He would pull stuff, books off the shelf, and worst of all, he took his mom's watch and flushed it away in the toilet. Sometimes his mom wanted to send him to the zoo. Well, at night though, when that boy was sound asleep, she would quietly creep in his room, pick up that two-year-old and rock him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and she'd sing, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. Well, that two-year-old grew and he grew and he grew until he was a nine-year-old boy, and he hated to come in for dinner. He hated taking baths. Sometimes he said bad words when grandma visited. He drove his mom crazy. But still, late at night, if he was sound asleep, she would crawl into his room and she would pick up that nine-year-old boy and rock him back and forth, back and forth, and sing, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. Well, he continued to grow and grow until he was a teenager, and he had weird friends and he wore weird clothes and he listened to weird music. Sometimes his mom felt like she was living in a zoo, but still, late at night, if he was sound asleep, she would sneak in his room, pick up that great big teenager, rock him back and forth, back and forth, and sing, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. Well, that boy grew up into becoming a man. He had his own house on the other side of town, and still sometimes his mom, late at night, would strap a ladder to her car and drive across town, put that ladder up, look in his bedroom window, and if he was really asleep, she would crawl in and she'd pick up that great big man and rock him back and forth, back and forth, and sing, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. Well, the mom got older and older and older, and one day she called up her son and she said, you need to come and see me, I'm old and I'm sick. And so he went over and when he walked in, she looked up and she started to sing that song, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for, but she couldn't keep doing it, she stopped. And so he picked her up and rocked her in his arms and sang, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my mommy'll be. Well, he went back to his house, up the steps, and paused at the top of the steps for a long time. And then it went into the room of his new baby daughter and picked up that little baby and sang, I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby'll be. I invite you into this time of giving and receiving, where we give freely and generously to this offering, which sustains and strengthens our community, a community of memory, hope, faith and love. Our outreach offering recipient this week is Planned Parenthood, the trusted healthcare provider, educator, passionate advocate and global partner in delivering vital healthcare to millions of people around the globe. You will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will also see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. The underlying premise of my sermon last week is that these are anxious times. There have no doubt been other times in history where there's even more anxiety, more things to worry about than today. But it's hard to think of a point, at least during my lifetime, where there was such widespread anxiety across our country and the world. The same thing could be said about grief. Grief is always present, losing loved ones, losing parts of our lives that we love. That's part of the human condition, but we are in a season of more widespread grief. For starters, so far this year, there's something like around 300,000 excess deaths in the United States above the norm. Most of these deaths, presumably, are directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. These deaths have directly touched many of us, me included, and sadly, will touch many more in the coming months. And there are the grief journeys this year that are not about deaths, to name a few. High school seniors last spring, and maybe this coming spring, who lost most of the rituals and the markers of that important transition in their lives. Families who cannot physically see each other, especially loved ones who are in nursing homes or assisted care facilities. Black Americans and other marginalized people who feel even more unsafe outside, and even in their homes. Grief is also palpable here at First Unitarian Society. So much has changed over the last three years. This is the nature of ministerial transition. And then the pandemic hit that changed just about everything for the moment. And there's no doubt that some things here and everywhere will never return back to the old normal. With all of this going on in our lives, in our society, so much has been lost. So much will be lost. There is so much to grieve. This morning I'll focus on grieving the death of a loved one, but I want to create space this morning for those other kinds of grief. I think what I say applies to them as well. The first and foremost thing to know about grief is that there is no way around it. The only way to journey through grief is to feel it, to process it, to sit with it. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know, Pema Schodron wrote. In truth, grief never completely goes away because it always has more to teach us. We frequently circle back to older griefs and learn new lessons. But we can get to the point where we accommodate a particular loss and are able to move forward wiser, emotionally and spiritually deeper. When I encounter life's biggest challenges like grief, I find that I turn for meaning and guidance to mythology. And the myth that often accompanies me on the grief journey is the story of Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice. So just before they were to be married, Eurydice is attacked by a satyr. In the scuffle, in the struggle, she falls into a nest of vipers and gets a fatal bite in her heel. Orpheus discovers her body. An exquisite musician, he pours out his bottomless grief in beautiful songs of lamentation. He decides to travel to the underworld in hopes of seeing Eurydice again. His mournful music softens the hearts of Hades and Persephone, they offer him a deal. He and Eurydice can return to the realm of the living and live there forever together. But Persephone and Hades put one condition on this that as Orpheus and Eurydice walk toward the gates between the underworld and our world, Orpheus, Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus and he must not turn back to look at her. If he does, the deal's off for whatever reason. Orpheus looks back and loses Eurydice for a second time forever. How often during my grief journeys do I, like Orpheus, want my loved one back? I think about my beloved and perfect mom who died 10 minutes into the new year back in 2011. Especially during that first year, I desperately wanted to see her once more. I wanted to see that twinkle in her eye, that smile that told me that everything was fine in the world. If I knew how I just might have gone to the underworld to fetch her, I might have tried. Grief makes us think these magical absurd thoughts as Joan Didion captured so beautifully in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. And there's another way that the story of Orpheus in Eurydice speaks to me. Meghan O'Rourke captures this well when she writes, the story of Orpheus is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead, but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. That's how I felt about my mom for a while. For about a year, I was roaming in the realm of the dead. I was just not ready to let her go. Well, I've learned some things from walking through the underworld and grief. I've learned how much it matters to create time and space to absorb the physical reality of a loved one's death. Most Americans today, and even more Unitarian Universalists, have banished the dead from our proximity. Someone dies, the undertaker comes, whisks them away, and the next thing we know, they're in a cardboard box or an urn. One writer likens how we deal with dead bodies to the flush toilet. We just flushed it away and it gets removed. Well, my mom died early on a Saturday morning. One of my brothers was not able to get there before she died and he felt it was important to see her body before she was cremated. But we couldn't arrange for that to happen until Monday morning, a couple of days later. I accompanied him to the mortuary to look and pay his respects. My mom did not want to be embalmed, so she looked like she had been dead for a couple of days, which is not a favorite moment of my life. And yet I swear that moment was a valuable part of my own grief journey. The fact of her death was pretty hard to deny standing next to her body. That thought, that picture in my mind, went through my mind when I had those bouts of magical thinking that maybe somehow she wasn't gone or could come back. I've also learned in grief that it's easy to get tired, distracted, and disoriented. This makes sense. It's exhausting to trudge in the underworld, I'm sure, or if yes was exhausted too. And of course, trying to be in two worlds simultaneously, the world of the living and the world of the dead is enormously disorienting. Life goes on when we grieve we have to work or go to school, do the chores, shovel the snow, do the laundry, pay our taxes. We can't take a time out from this world so we can concentrate fully on the underworld. I've learned in grief that self-pity is pretty easy to fall into. Joan Didion writes, when we mourn our losses, we also mourn for better or for worse ourselves. As we were, as we are no longer, as we one day will not be at all. So suddenly I imagine my daughter and my son lowering and earned with my ashes into the earth. And man, I feel pretty pitiful. I've also learned more deeply that I need community. I need family, I need friends, I need congregation. Community is my lifeblood. My kids and wife's loving support, friends driving seven hours to come to my mother's memorial service, a congregant sending me an email that said, welcome to the club of sons who have lost mothers. All those things were so important to me. They mattered immensely. And so even though there was a sense, my journey in the underworld was solitary, I never felt alone. And finally, I've learned to treasure more deeply life's sweetness. Lost teaches us not to take for granted those sweet things in life. Every day a loved one graces our life is a blessing. Now it's easy to forget this truth when we emerge from the underworld of grief. And I try really hard to remember it each and every day. There can come a time when we stop searching for our loved one in the underworld. A day can come where we turn back and rejoin fully the world of the living. Even then the remnants of grief can pull us back into the underworld, but then only briefly. The trajectory of our lives is above the ground on top of the earth, not in the realm of the dead. Looking back on my grief around my mom's death, a particular dream I had was a marker for me in this journey from the underworld back to the world of the living. In this dream, I was communicating with my mother. She was dead, but like in the magical world of Harry Potter, she was alive in a portrait. Like Harry's mom and dad who were dead, she could interact with me. She couldn't talk, but she could sign. And though I never, I don't think she ever knew sign language. In this dream, she signed to me, I love you. That, it turns out, was all I needed to know. I could let her go. I could make my way back to the gates from the underworld to the world of the living. And so I came back forever changed. This is a community of reflection and contemplation, of joy and sorrow, of friendship, sharing, laughter and tears. We bring the cares of our community before us as we light a candle of sorrow and hope for the Ryan Joy family. As they process the news that their sister-in-laws kidney tumor that was to be removed this week has metastasized to her lung and lymph nodes. She'll be starting immunotherapy immediately. And we hold Sarah O'Callaghan, her husband and their three children, as well as Alyssa and Mike and all their family in our hearts. A candle of memory for Maureen Muldoon's stepfather, Al Summit, who passed away in hospice in August of this year with her mother by his side. Al would have celebrated his 101st birthday, just this past October 25th. He is dearly missed, but his family is thankful. He is at peace. And a candle of great joy for Jerry and Ann Moser on the birth of their first grandchild, Willa Riley Rose Moser, who was born October 22nd. All are doing well and we send the Mosers our love. And we light a candle in grief and gratitude in honor of all those who are ill, all who are dying alone, who are scared or worried of what may come. With the light of this candle, we send our love to all those who are grieving, to all those we love, in grief, in honor, in recognition and in love. Let us in our closing hymn, number 128, for all that is our life, for sorrow. My favorite lines in poetry come from one of Mary Oliver's poems. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing that your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. May you go in peace. Is in grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch once was lost. But now I'm far as blind, but now I see. It was grace that taught my heart to feel and grace my feet. I shall stand this flower shall fade.