 I would like to invite you into a few moments of centering silence and seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn found in your order of service. Good morning and 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 Rob Savage and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. Visitors are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and look for people carrying teal stoneware mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our programs and community life and they look forward to the chance to talk with you. You can also stop by our information table outside of the library where you can find more information about our upcoming events and programs. In this lively, acoustical environment it can become difficult for those in attendance to hear what is happening in our service so we remind you that our child haven and commons area are excellent places to go when somebody needs to talk or move around. You can still hear the service quite well. If you do have a hearing assistance devices available please see one of our us or ushers if that would be helpful to you. This is a good time to turn off all electronic devices that might disrupt our service. Experience guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service so if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house please meet near the large glass windows on the left side of the auditorium. I'd like to now acknowledge those individuals who help our services to run smoothly. The lay minister today, Anne Smiley, the greeter, Jeanine Nosbaum, ushers are Karen Jaeger, Anne Smiley, Doug Hill, Hospitality, Jean Hills, flowerings were offered by Wilson Leonard. Tour guide today will be Pamela McMullen. Please note the announcements in the red floor insert of your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today's activities. Again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Welcome to me. Our opening words are from Walt Whitman's song of myself. I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained. I stand and look at them long and long. And they do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. No one is dissatisfied. No one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not a one is respectable or unhappy over the entire earth. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And please join with me in reading the words of affirmation that accompanied the kindling of the flame. Oh, hidden life vibrant in every atom. Oh, hidden light shining in every creature. Oh, hidden love embracing all in oneness. May each who feels himself as one with thee know he is also one with every other. And in the spirit of that oneness, I invite you to turn to your neighbor, exchange with them a warm greeting. Thank you, ma'am. And I'd like to invite now any children who are present to come forward for the message for all ages. Are there children present? I know there are. There we are. So last night was a special night. Maybe not as special as Halloween was, but it was still a special night because something special happened. Anybody know what that was? Fallback. Did you fall back? What fell back? There our fell back. That's right. We actually moved our clocks back an hour, didn't we? We went from daylight saving time to standard time, central standard time. And then of course, what are we going to do when spring comes? It's called spring forward. In the fall, you fall back. In the spring, you spring forward. But that's right. So we'll go back to daylight savings time in the spring. So this is a day where we have to be a little more concerned about time than we normally would. Which isn't to say that we aren't really interested in time a lot of the time. We wear watches and some people are looking at their watch all the time, which is kind of distracting. And some of us keep date books where we put all of our appointments in them, every half hour or every 15 minutes. Lawyers bill us for every five minutes of increment of their time. How many people have a calendar at home that's on the wall somewhere? So we keep track of the days and how many of you get up when the alarm clock rings in the morning? Or are your parents your alarm clock? Well, in any case, we spent a lot of time dealing with time. But that wasn't true a long, long time ago, particularly in this country before all the Europeans came from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean and came to this country because Native Americans, Indians, really didn't count minutes and hours and days the way that we do. And they really didn't see the point to why the Europeans did this, paid so much attention to time. And so there's one tribe of Indians called the Salish out of way up in the Northwestern part of the country. And they have a story about this. It's about 150 years old, this story. And the hero of the story is a little creature called a mink. A mink kind of looks like a ferret or maybe like a weasel, but it's a mink and he lives in the forest. And the Salish Indians thought that the mink was a very clever little creature and that actually a mink was a very good thief, could steal just about anything. And so a long, long time ago, the people had no light at all. And it was hard for people to move around into the darkness. They were always bumping into things. And because there wasn't any light, there wasn't much heat. So people were cold all the time. Well, it turns out that there was light on the other side of the world because the sun only shone on the other part of the world. So one part of the world was always dark. And so mink thought, I got to do something about this to help my people. He decided to steal the sun. Now that's not an easy job to do as you can imagine to steal the sun, but the mink was a very, very good thief. And so he did. He went to the other side of the world and he stole the sun. And then he placed it up in the sky so that both halves of the world would have an equal amount of sunlight. That's why we have night and day. Now the people were very, very happy about this and they praised mink and he grew very, very proud of what he had done. And so he thought to himself, well, maybe there's something else that I can steal that would really help my people. And he kind of scratched his head for a while. He thought, I'm not sure what there is I could steal. So a long time passed, but then these Europeans came over across the Atlantic and began settling in North America. And he said to himself, I wonder what these new people have that might be worth stealing. And he saw what it was. The Europeans had this thing called time. And they used time to give them great power. So mink decided it would be a good thing for him to steal time. So he waited until it was dark. And he sneaked into the Europeans house and there in the biggest room in the house they kept time up on a shelf. And they kept it in a shiny box that made noises. Tick tock, tick tock. And two arrows on the front of the box moved in circles as it went tick tock, tick tock. And mink could see that this was a very powerful thing. So he took it down off the shelf and he carried it off. So now mink and his people, they had time. But pretty soon, mink found out that it was not an easy thing to have this powerful time. Because now he had to watch the hands on that shiny box all the time so that he would know what time it was. And he had to keep these keys around his neck to wind up the box of time so it would keep ticking. And now mink had time, but he didn't have the time to do the things that he used to do. There was no time for him to fish or to hunt. He had to get up at a certain time. He had to go to bed at a certain time. He had to eat his meals at a certain time. He had to go to meetings. He had to go to work when the clock said it was time. And so he was no longer free nor were his people. And because mink stole time, this powerful thing, it now owned him and the people. And it's been that way ever since. Time owns us the way that we used to own the sun. We do not need to check the time all the time, do we? But a lot of us do, don't we? So to the extent that we just kind of are always thinking about what time is it and what do I have to do now? Am I late? Well, then it can get to be really frustrating, can it? So we've got to make our peace with time and not let it be as powerful as sometimes we allow it to be. So that's the story. And now we're going to have our tea and sing to us another song. OK, you can go to classes. Enjoy your classes. Somebody's too tired to go to class. And so we continue our service with a reading familiar to many from the book of Genesis. And God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures. And let the birds fly above the earth to cross the firmament of heaven. And so God created the great sea monsters and every living thing that moves with which the waters swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the waters of the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and morning a fifth day. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, cattle creeping things, beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the seas, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. And so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves upon the earth. And God saw everything that he made and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning a sixth day. The second reading from a contemporary writer, a Buddhist teacher, Joanna Macy, was also a deep ecologist from her reading, Vistieri, sperm whale, blue whale. Dive me deep, brother whale, in this time that we have left. Deep in our mother ocean where once I swam, gild and finned, the salt of those early seas still runs in my tears. But the tears are too meager now. Give me a song, a song for the sadness too vast for my heart, for a rage too wild for my throat. Nile crocodile, American alligator. Ooze me, alligator, in the mud from whence I came. Belly me slow in the rich primordial soup, cradle of our molecules. Let me wallow again before we drain your swamp, before we pave it over, before we blast it to ash. Gray bat, Aleutian goose. Quick, lift off. Sweep me high over the coast and out farther out. Don't land here. Oil spills coat the beach and the rocks in the sea. I cannot spread my wings glued with tar. Fly me from what we have done. Fly me far, far away. Florida panther, Utah prairie dog. Hide me in the hedgerow badger. Can't you find one? Dig me a tunnel through leaf mold and roots under the trees that once defined our fields. My heart is bulldozed and plowed over. So burrow me a labyrinth deeper than longing. Southern bald eagle, lotus blue butterfly. Crawl me out of here, caterpillar. Spin me a cocoon. Wide me to sleep in a shroud of silk where in patience my bones will dissolve. I'll wait as long as creation if only creation will come again, and I can take wing. In the time when his world, like ours, was ending, Noah made a list of animals, too. We picture him standing by the gangplank, calling their names, checking them off of his scroll. And now we are checking them off. Ivory-billed woodpecker, brown pelican, Florida manatee, cougar, wolf. We reenact Noah's ancient drama, but in reverse, like a film running backwards and the animals all exiting. I invite you to remain seated as we sing together versus one and four of all creatures of the earth and sky, adult life, to cultivate a meditation practice of one sort or another. But because sitting for prolonged periods of time has always been difficult for me, in the mid-1990s I decided to study movement meditation, and taiji in particular. But at the time I didn't really know much about taiji other than it had long been associated with the Chinese Daoist religious tradition. Now on visits to San Francisco, I had seen groups of mostly older Chinese executing the taiji form in a park adjacent to Chinatown. And watching them, I found it to be quite intriguing and chanting, in fact. And I had also read translations of ancient Daoist texts, like the Dao De Ching, and collections of anecdotes attributed to that quirky sage, Chengsu. And so with this limited exposure, I decided that I would give taiji a whirl. Well, I found quite soon that it really was my cup of tea. And under the tutelage of teachers at the Madison Taiji Center, in two years time I had mastered the basic mechanics of what is known as yang style taiji. But in the process, I also learned that this is but one of a large variety of exercises that fall under the general rubric chigong. Now at FUS, we have currently two groups that meet weekly to work on another graceful chigong form that is known as the Japanese crane. How many people here actually practice that crane exercise? Several of you. And that brings me to the topic at hand. Because for people living in the Far East, the crane is a beloved bird. It frequently appears in artwork. And long ago, the crane's distinctive mannerisms, the way it flaps its wings, its one-legged stances, these found their way into chigong. And so did many other movements that were based on the behavior of animals, most notably tigers and bear and deer and monkey. So the roots of chigong are very ancient. They harken back to a time when people believed that by imitating animals, the energetic qualities of those animals could be tapped into. The agility of the monkey, the strength of the bear, the swiftness of the deer, the cunning of the tiger. And so these early peoples practiced what we now call sympathetic magic, a magic that brought them into communion with other animals. And thus they believed, helped them to cope with the dangers and the vicissitudes of the surrounding wild environment. Now what motivated those practitioners of 4,000 years ago no longer really moves many of us today. We utilize, in our world, we utilize chigong primarily for its therapeutic benefits. It promotes greater bodily awareness, suppleness, flexibility. Through it, we can develop a more stable posture, a better sense of balance. Chigong triggers the relaxation response, leads to greater mental clarity. And so as a form of complementary medicine, it is recommended by many holistically oriented health care providers, particularly for those of us who are growing older. And all of this is a very good thing. But there's also some merit in returning to the rationale that informed the practice of chigong in the first place, to strengthen our relationship with other members of the sentient universe. But in order to do that, we must first acknowledge that we ourselves are indecisively a part of that universe. And that is a conviction that we in the modern, technologically oriented, increasingly urbanized world, that is a conviction that we have a very difficult time maintaining. So accepting for the domestic creatures with which we share our homes or perhaps our barnyards, our exposure to the larger sentient universe or to the wild inhabitants of the planet is very, very limited, minimal at best. So how then are we to achieve that relatedness? How do we develop a greater appreciation for their living and not just for ours? Well, the present environment doesn't lend itself to such connections, nor do our habits of thinking. The great Western religions, as that passage from the book of Genesis indicated, these religions have insisted that we humans are a unique and special creation, qualitatively different from and superior to every other creature, the finned, the winged, and the forelegged. And this, to the earth's sorrow, is where this ideology, this theology of separateness, has left us. But the authors of Genesis are not solely responsible for this state of affairs. Socrates and his student Plato, they also were eager to bestow on human beings a status that placed them at a distance from other sentient beings and from nature in general. And thus, Plato argued that the phenomenal world that is revealed to all of us by our five senses, that this world is ultimately unreal. It's merely the shadow of ideal forms that exist on some higher plane that can only be apprehended intellectually by the rational soul that we uniquely possess. As David Abrams has written, European civilization's neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and the tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond or outside of the bodily world. The psyche is that aspect of oneself that is refined and that is strengthened by turning away from ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate these eternal forms. Socrates, who was a primary source of inspiration for Plato and then for Aristotle, Socrates spent his adulthood cultivating the life of the mind in the urban environs of Athens. In the natural world outside the city gates, that held no appeal to him whatsoever. I am a lover of learning, Socrates remarked, and trees and the countryside, they don't teach me anything, whereas the men in town surely do. Socrates and his immediate successors heralded a monumental shift in the way that humans regarded themselves and how they should relate to nature. In an earlier era, Abram's notes, human beings did pay attention to nature and to its signs. In Homer's great poetic epics, the gods speak to men directly through the patterns in the clouds and the waves in the flight of the birds, whereas for a later generation, such nature-based knowledge and information was considered more or less dispensable. These religious and philosophical precedents have continued to inform, to this very day, our appraisals of human nature. Instead of emphasizing the traits and the qualities that we share in common with other creatures, we are more likely to point to the dissimilarities, and in particular, those uniquely human attributes that give us a qualitative edge over and the right to dictate terms to the world's other life forms. Never mind that we humans share 96% of a chimpanzee's genes. 92% of a mouse's genes. We are more like them than we are different. But unlike the mouse, and perhaps unlike the chimpanzee, we have risen to self-consciousness. And we possess a talent for abstract thinking. Writing and recordkeeping have been a major factor, as we know, in the rise of civilization. They are the midwife of advanced technologies, but these marks of human superiority have indeed proven to be something of a mixed blessing. For by divorcing ourselves from nature, we become less and less able to see anything in nature but a landscape, or to hear anything besides indecipherable chatter. And so despite Charles Darwin's evolutionary insights, it has been for us extremely difficult to reweave our species into the intricate interdependent web because we are so, so invested in this fanciful, self-congratulatory view of human nature. But it is extremely important for us to undertake that task, that reweaving. Or in our hubris, we've made something of a hash of things, haven't we? Anthropologists and earth scientists now label the era that we live in the Anthropocene because of the tremendous pressure that the human species is exerting on the planet. The latest of Earth's five major extinctions took place 66 million years ago. But we may well be our species, the prime mover, in a sixth mass extinction, in which 75% or more of the Earth's species eventually disappeared. Our world, the British climatologist James Lovelock sourly observed, our world is suffering from what he calls disseminated primatimea. Disseminated primatimea, a plague of people. This may not be something we can think our way out of. What seems rather to be called for is a shift in consciousness, not just a new set of technological solutions. Because as the philosopher John Gray says, if there's anything unique, really, about the human species, it is the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from its experience. And even if we have the means to stave off some of the more horrific consequences of climate change and species depletion, we may lack the necessary will to act and to act decisively. Again, Gray says, the mass of humankind is not ruled by intermittent moral sensation, still less by its long-term self-interest, but rather by the needs of the present, the needs of the moment. That's where most of our action springs from. Where there's a will, there's a way. That's an old cliche, but where do we find the will? A preliminary and perhaps indispensable step in the healing of this dysfunctional relationship and with it, a growing awareness of the myriad ways in which our planets and our own interests dovetail. Well, for that to happen, we do have to make more of an effort to experience our own kinship with other animal beings. As Diane Ackerman writes in her brilliant book, A Natural History of the Senses, we have much to learn from and about the senses of animals. Otherwise, how should we hope to be good caretakers of the planet? Should that turn out to be our role? Our several senses reach far beyond us. They are an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone that has ever lived and they bind us, our senses bind us to other people and to animals across time and country and happenstance. It isn't our minds so much as our five senses that elicit in us this sense of belongingness that put us in touch with our essential animal nature. It's precisely our busy minds that keep us at a distance, confining us to this immaterial thought world that may or may not connect with what nature needs for us to know. Barbara Deming writes, spirit that hears each one of us teach us to listen. Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat. We can hear it in the water, in the wood, even in the stone. We are Earth of this Earth, bone of its bone. But we have forgotten this, and so the Earth is perishing. What the moment calls for, I think, is a more contemplative approach to the crisis we face. There are many ways in which this can be done, accomplished. For instance, I was reading recently about a man named Stephen Blackmer. He's trained as an environmentalist, and he has a degree from the prestigious Forestry and Environmental Studies program at Yale University. We went out into the field, pursued his work as an activist from a strictly secular standpoint. But eventually he wanted work of this kind that spoke to him at a deeper level. He decided to go back to school, to seminary, to become an Episcopal priest. He was duly ordained, and now he presides over his open-air Church of the Woods, which he founded in the New Hampshire Forest. Now in Stephen Blackmer's view, sustainable service to the planet needs to be preceded by or accompanied by deliberate efforts to connect spiritually with the ecosystem that we inhabit. His favorite biblical text is the one in Exodus that describes Moses' encounter with the burning bush. God speaks from out the bush. Take off thy shoes, for the place where you stand is holy ground. Blackmer takes that passage at face value. He celebrates the Eucharist in his Church of the Woods barefoot under the forest canopy. We must think of all ground as holy ground, he says, because without that recognition, there is no way out of our ecological woes. Now lots of us today participate in outdoor activities. We hike, we go birding, we fish, maybe we hunt. But what someone like Stephen Blackmer is offering is not just another recreational opportunity, tunity, where once again nature is placed in the service of exclusively human interests. What he's after is the recovery of reverence and the regeneration of an empathetic response to an ailing world. And so as a priest, Stephen Blackmer has chosen to add this ecological dimension to traditional Christian worship and then to move that worship into a setting that is consonant with that shift. But there are other ways of achieving the same objective, even if you're a Unitarian Universalist. Here in the upper Midwest, I discovered, Qigong and Taiji are usually taught and performed in an indoor setting. But traditionally, they have been outdoor activities with practitioners gathering in places where those animal inspired movements match the environment and where one can connect with nature's restorative and healing powers. But you don't need to learn Taiji to do this. Just slow, mindful walking in a woodland, in a prairie can have a very similar effect. The ostensible purpose of this is to circumvent the obsessive self-consciousness, the interminable interior conversations that interfere with our sensorial awareness. And so the rituals, the practices I've been describing help us quite literally to come back to our senses. And when this happens, the environment takes on a whole new significance. The forces of nature do begin to speak to us and caring begins to feel more like a natural act than a moral obligation. Is this wanted self-consciousness that we boast about such a marvelous endowment? Well, John Gray says it's as much a disability as an asset if only because of the way that it alienates us from other life forms, but also because it is this self-consciousness oftentimes the underlying source of much of our worry and the objectless anxiety that we complain about. Think of the animals, Walt Whitman wrote. They do not sweat, they do not whine about their condition. They do not weep for their sins. For us to experience a vital connection with the non-human world, self-consciousness must be temporarily placed in abeyance. It must be suspended. And that's what a contemplative or spiritual practice is designed to do. This is not about going backwards. It's not about returning to some primitive level of thinking and being. David Abrams says there's no going back, but we can try to come full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and memetic ways of knowing and apprehending the world. And this is a way of being in the world, of knowing the world that a poet like Mary Oliver has cultivated all of her life. It is the hallmark of much of her work. So I give her the last word. I'd seen their hoof prints in the deep needles. And I knew they ended the long night under the pines, walking like two mute and beautiful women toward the deeper woods. So I got up in the dark and I went there. They came slowly down the hill and they looked at me sitting under the blue trees. And shyly they stepped closer and stared from under their thick lashes and even nibbled some damp tassels of weeds. This is not a poem about a dream, although it could be. This is a poem about the world that is ours, or could be. And finally, one of them, I swear it, would have come to my arms, but the other stamped a sharp hoof in the pine needles like a tap of sanity. And they went off together through the woods. And when I awoke, I was alone. And I was thinking, so this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outward. So this is how you pray. Blessed be, and amen. We have visitors today from Veterans for Peace and they have displays outside in the comments. We hope you'll stop by and our offering will be shared with that good organization. Please be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. We would acknowledge this morning the passing of Mary Mickey, remarried Mary Mickey Udall, longtime member of First Unitarian Society, spent some time in Colorado, away from our community. And she did pass away at the age of 95. And a memorial service for her is being planned for the spring. We also acknowledge and remember Harriet Gorsky who is recuperating from pneumonia at Attic Angels Nursing Home, Rehabilitation Home. Harriet has been having a lot of difficulty during the past few months with pneumonia and other associated pulmonary complaints. And so we hope that she can return home soon. And then tomorrow, John McEvna, a member of our Board of Trustees, will be entering the hospital for shoulder surgery. And so we wish him successful surgery and a rapid and complete recovery. In addition to those just mentioned, we would acknowledge any unspoken joys or sorrows that remain among us. As a community of concern and caring, we hold these in our hearts as well. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope. So by virtue of our brief time together today, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And before our closing hymn, there is an announcement that I was asked to make. We have a special opportunity today to be part of an upcoming promotional video for the First Unitarian Society. I saw a few minutes of a sample, a sample footage for this video the other day and am excited about its final shape. This video will serve in part as an invitation to our faith community. And our filmographer, the person who's making it and who some of you have met before, they've been working hard these past few weeks to showcase everything that is good and exciting about our congregation. So I would encourage anyone who has a few extra minutes after the service, during the fellowship hour, to pass through the library and lend your face to a montage that is being created. So if you're not camera shy, it would be a great opportunity for your picture to be taken. You don't have to buy anything and to have as many pictures as possible in the finished product. And so with that, please do turn to our closing hymn, which is number 317. Grandmother, spirit of the ancestors, all over the world the faces of living things are alike. With tenderness they have come up from the ground. Look upon your descendants that they may face the winds, that they may walk the good road to the day of quiet. Grandfather, grandmother, great spirit, fill us with the light, give us the strength to understand in the eyes to see. Teach us to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that lives. Blessed be and amen.