 I would like to invite you into a moment of silence. I would like to invite you into a few moments of centering silence. Now please remain seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn, found 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 Dorrit Bergen. I'm filling in for Maureen. 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 speak with you this morning. 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 areas are excellent places to go when anyone needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. We do have hearing assistance devices available. Please see one of our ushers if that would be helpful for you. And this would be a good time to turn off all electronic devices that might disrupt the service. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. Our lay minister this morning is Anne Smiley. Your greeters were Maureen Muldoon and Becky Dick. Your ushers are Daniel Bradley, Anne Smiley, and Lynn Scobie. And coffee is being made by Sharon Scratish and Jean Hills. Please note the announcements on the red floors insert in 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. This church is not a place of rigid convictions, immutable truths, or abstract theologies. It is a community of those who have lived, suffered loss, and who wish to develop greater courage and compassion. This is a congregation where the strands of our ideals, our hopes, and our sympathies form a cable, a cable strong enough to bear us across those deep valleys of fear, grief, pain, and disillusionment. Each of us has experienced such places, or we surely will. And by joining together, we gain strength. And this is why we gather in this special place, a people alive with curiosity and earnest to be more responsive to one another's needs. Please rise and body and spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Our words of affirmation are responsive. Please join your voices in repeating the bolded sections. May this house be a sanctuary, a safety zone, a place of rest, a house of peace. To that end, may we inspire the young and fortify the old. May this house be sanctified by what happens here. And in the spirit of that healing, I invite you to turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. At the end of the month, we typically set aside a few moments at the beginning of the hour for the sharing of joys and sorrows. A time for members and friends and even visitors to our midst to relate to the entire gathered community some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone close to you in recent days or weeks. General announcements, news items, partisan appeals are all discouraged during the sharing of joys and sorrows. And so for the next few minutes, anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium and light a candle in one of the two candelabras to my left or my right and then using the microphone provided by Anne Smiley, our lay minister, share your name if that feels comfortable as well as your brief message. Please note that our services are livecast, so listeners are not restricted to those who are sitting in this room. Then you may also come to the front and wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and then simply return to your seat. And so I open the floor for the sharing of these significant matters of our lives. And I would begin by lighting a candle of sorrow for Kelly and Bob Radford, members of the congregation. Bob has been one of our lay ministers for many years. They lost their son Stephen this past week, and this morning he is actually being buried at the Natural Path Cemetery in Verona with my colleague Kelly Crocker assisting. And so we send our very best wishes and our condolences to Kelly and Bob Radford. Lynn Scoby, this is kind of a memorial candle for the Ramirez family who just lost their nine-year-old son, who was a former student. We're Lori and Dave Creswell, and lighting a candle of joy. We were gone for 15 months taking care of grandchildren in Minnesota, which was joyful, but this candle is for our great joy of being back here with all of you. It's not about not being with the grandchildren, it's being with you. Wonderful to be back with our church community and our sangha community and the whole Madison area. We shared our home with the ministerial intern. I'm Diana Rodin, and I light this candle in memory of my dear cousin Dawn, who died last week in Minnesota. I'm Linda Tate, and I'm lighting this candle for information that my daughter, Michelle Barton, who lives in Wooddale, Illinois, passed to me this past week. Michelle is an early child educator in the Spanish-speaking room this year, and she has a co-teacher named Leticia, who is originally from Mexico. Some years ago, Leticia lost a child in the fourth grade, and this past week or so she lost her husband. He had gone to back to Mexico to her parents' ranch to do some work with them, and he was kidnapped for ransom and then murdered. And so she has now experiencing a double loss, and so I want you to hold both Leticia and my daughter Michelle in your thoughts and prayers. I'm Tom Heiney, and thinking back about all souls or holodeve, thinking back over the year, this is from my mother Leah, who was a stone hauler here, a member here, a Quaker, and voted before she died at the age of 105 last January, and I don't think she'd be happy with the outcome. Hope you can hear me. My name is Debbie Lofts-Gordon, and as Judy Troia over here said, I remember you when you were little. So I've been off and on coming here, and I just wanted to say two things. There is a God or some universe out there, because I was in London and I was in Paris, but what people don't know is I had a bowel obstruction because my surgery went awry, and the doctor looked at me and they said, how can you explain this? Because I was one in one billion person that was supposed to die. And I said, angels, because I had no clue. I had actually no clue how I survived. I did not eat for three days. I threw up bio, and my mom thought, you know, I might lose my daughter to France. And I said, I am not going to die in France. God, do you hear me? I'll punch you in the nose if I die in France. But I do like London, so I plan to go back in December so if you can pray that I can stay at the hospital. I appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Marlene Pearson, and I have a sorrow and two really great joys. My sorrow is my oldest sister. We lost her last year, and she just meant so much to all of my sisters. She really kind of led the path for all of us. And that was very hard. But our great joy was at our oldest daughter who was dedicated here 29 years ago. Yeah, 29 years ago. Right when Michael started his... Right, 30 years ago? Yeah, and that's when we joined. We joined because of you. And anyways, with our great friends Nancy and Mark. And anyways, we are just absolutely thrilled at her marriage, and we were very fortunate because Michael was able to officiate, and it was a beautiful time. And it was nice after that year of mourning. And the other joy is that I have a lot of sisters. I have another sister who was afflicted with an illness, and she seems to be doing very well, and we're really, really happy about that. My name is Aaron, and I actually celebrated six months of sobriety yesterday, so I am lighting this candle today in honor of God for providing me the strength to make it through these past six months. My name is Rob Cunningham, and this is my daughter Elena. I wanted to come up and light a candle for in remembrance of Elena's close friend and friend of our family, Anaya, whose dad died unexpectedly last week. And we also wanted to also express a joy that we have Anaya in our lives and that we've been able to have her with us a lot. So for Anaya and her mom, Decarla is our candle today. His joy is to be a police officer. I'm going to carve a pumpkin to my uncle. It's like one more candle to represent all of those unspoken joys and sorrows, because we hold those with equal concern in our hearts. At this time, I would invite you to join me in the spirit of meditation. As October draws to a close, and autumn's last adamant leaves are whipped from their branches by the galloping wind, as scarves and caps come out of storage and storm windows replace the screens that once invited summer into our homes, as squadrons of geese set out for southern destinations and earthbound squirrels hasten to provide against the dire straits of winter. At such a time as this, do our thoughts return to things past, to life retreating, and to life that is no more. A piece of us is never prepared for winter, never reconciled to departure and to death. Long into November, our hearts protest summer's passing. The end of warm days and fragrant nights, shirts leave strolls along lush lake and river banks. Likewise, on this weekend before all hallows, images of old dear companions who once graced the summer of our lives crowd in upon our memories. Let us not be hasty to push them out again. Let us not be charry of the sadness and perhaps the regret that their presence evokes. May these brave and lovely spirits live again in our tender thoughts, for our recollections attest to their enduring importance, and they prove that death and distance are powerless to sever the bonds that connect truly loving hearts. And now I would have us recall those members and former members and friends of First Unitarian Society who have passed away during this last year. These are their names. Mark Hoover, Lillian Redding, Ann Nelson, David Stuckey, Charles Bentley, Orville Stretch Lilliquist, John Fultz, Fran Bicnell, Gabriel Rochester, Jack Furver, Carol Millard, Helene Burns, Mary Mickey, and Madeline Canner. Let us continue on in a moment or two of further silence as we commemorate those who are no longer with us. Blessed be and amen. And now as we sing together verses one, two, and five of Thanks Be For These, we invite our children to depart for their classes. Please be seated. We continue with this notice that was recently published in the Buddhist journal Lyons Roar. Michael Stone passed suddenly from this world on July 16th. The story of what led to this moment is complex and it's also heartbreaking. Michael was loved for his brilliant mind and his generous heart. He was an eminent Buddhist and a yoga teacher, an author, an uncommon activist, and an uncommon human being. He shone brightly was the bedrock of a community of yoga and meditation practitioners, first in Toronto and then to an expanded international community. If you met or studied with Michael Stone, you would remember him as wise, charismatic, poetic. He seemed unshakable, capable of holding everyone else's suffering. And he did. But he struggled with his own suffering. Michael lived with bipolar disorder his whole life. Bipolar disorder is characterized by a fluctuation between normalcy, mania, and depression. Along with his lust for life was an impulsivity that he struggled to quell through yoga and Buddhist practice. His brain was rapid-fired, wide-open. That was part of his brilliance, part of his sensitive nature. Michael came to spiritual practice innately at a young age and then to formal study as a teenager. It was also a way that he found to take care of his mental health. For a long time he was well enough to resist the diagnosis, to stay balanced naturally through practice and self-care. But as things got worse, he began to open up to his intimates, family, and friends. And he did seek medical care. He established self-care routines. He exercised. He went to bed early. He ate a special diet. He saw in naturopaths and herbalists and trainers and therapists. He continued his daily spiritual practice. As things worsened, he turned to psychiatry, to medication as well. Now, seeing his meds was ever-changing and precarious. He struggled to be open with those around him about how much and how deeply he was struggling. He really, really tried. But as versed as he was with the silence around mental health issues in our culture, Michael feared the stigma of his diagnosis. He was just on the cusp of revealing publicly how deep he was by bipolar disorder and how he was doing. But unbeknownst to everyone, he was growing more and more desperate. On July 13th, he got a haircut. He exercised. He ran some household errands. And then he finally acquired a street drug. Initial toxicology tests suggest that he had opioids, including fentanyl in his system. He was found at midnight all day unresponsive. It would be easy to shake one's head and think, what a shame. Culturally, we don't have enough language to talk about this kind of thing. And rather than feel the shame and the tragedy of it, can we just begin to ask the right questions? What can we do for ourselves and for others who have impulses and behaviors that we have trouble understanding? Impulses that might scare us off, that might reduce us to silence. But most of all, how can we take care of each other? The second reading is a brief poem by Anne Sexton, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, writer of many children's books and plays. She too suffered from bipolar disorder and in 1974, at the age of 46, she took her own life. Noon walk on the asylum lawn. The summer sun ray shifts through a suspicious tree. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow, it sucks the air and looks around for me. The grass speaks. I hear green chanting all day. I will fear no evil, fear no evil. But the blades extend and reach my way. The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face in the presence of mine enemies. Mine enemies. The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place. I found occasion a few nights ago to watch a film that I had seen when it was first released in 2012. I'm sure some of you have seen the film as well. Silver Linings Playbook. It's a romantic comedy. It ended up with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. It's an engaging movie. It's funny and it's poignant by turns and it's populated by some really great actors. And although romantic comedy is a familiar and perhaps an overworked genre, and while this film remained true to form in many respects, what set it apart was its treatment of mental illness. Pat Solitano is a high school teacher. He's bipolar and he's just been released from the hospital after a six month commitment. Tiffany Maxwell copes with unresolved grief and depression in the aftermath of her policeman husband's unexpected death. These are not caricatures. Pat and Tiffany's struggles are believable and they provoke sympathy rather than snickers from viewers. Yes, there are scenes of high humor, but this couple's mental afflictions are treated in the film with unusual sensitivity. A decade earlier, another film with a similar focus won the Oscar for Best Picture. A Beautiful Mind traces the career of the Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash, who developed schizophrenia in his early 20s and battled that disease throughout his lifetime. And although that movie did contain some inaccuracies, it did give the broader public an opportunity to see what it might be like to live as and to live with someone suffering from severe mental disorders. Other recent features have followed a similar positive pattern. Michael Clayton takes shelter being two notable examples. And contrast this with the way the filmmakers treated the subject here to fore. Think of Alfred Hitchcock's psycho, or Halloween, featuring a man who escapes from an asylum and goes on a killing spree. The plot to another thriller, Shutter Island, unfolds in an asylum for the criminally insane. All very scary. Because once upon a time, severe mental illness was presented in such a way as to evoke gratuitous fears and to stoke the fires of stigma. Perhaps this shift in filmmakers' sensibilities is a sign of progress, of expanded public awareness. But then on the other hand, in some important respects, we are still trying to find our way forward. Consider, for example, the epithets that Donald Trump routinely employed when he was running for president. Jeb Bush was a basket case. Lindsey Graham, a nut job. Trump told Ted Cruz that he was nuts and unstable. He insisted that Bernie Sanders was wacko. But the problem wasn't just with Donald Trump. Commentators, as Colby Ikowitz pointed out in the Washington Post, took the candidate to task for all of his indecent characterizations of undocumented Mexicans, Muslims, women, prisoners of war. All of those references were inappropriate. But it was rare that he was ever challenged in his repeated callous references to mental illness. It is still socially acceptable, the media expert Otto Wall observes, for cartoonists, policymakers, healthcare professionals, and the public at large who are now stereotyped, avoid and otherwise denigrate people who are experiencing mental afflictions. Kay Redfield Jameson has spent a lifetime coping with her own bipolar disorder or manic depressive illness, as she prefers to call it. For much of her career as a professor of psychology, she tried to contend with her condition privately because she was afraid that if she revealed too much, academic institutions and her own professional peers would reject her, that they would penalize her. And she also resisted taking the necessary medications, feeling that, hey, I should be strong enough to manage my periods of mania and depression without drugs. I didn't want to need a crutch, she wrote. Well, over time, Jameson worked through these issues. She did come out of the closet. She became a leader in her field, but she still regrets hearing those derisive words, wacko, crazy, mad, certifiable, which remain so popular. The pain of hearing these words in the wrong context or in the wrong tone is sharp, she says. The memory of insensitivity and prejudice lasts with you for a long time. Moreover, she continues allowing such language to go unchecked or uncorrected. Leads not only to personal pain, but it contributes both directly and indirectly to discrimination in jobs and in insurance and in society at large. The media's sensationalist treatment of mass murderers further complicates the issue. Now, if a killer cannot be classified as a terrorist, commentators quickly turn to mental illness as a probable cause. Now, sometimes, sometimes it is. But what is almost never pointed out is that studies have shown that persons with severe mental illness are more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of violent crime. Usages and images such as these are profoundly stigmatizing. But what does that mean? What are we talking about when we use that term? Stigma finds its origins way back in ancient Greece where it was applied to individuals who bore a physical mark, usually a brand burned into their skin, that served to indicate their disreputable or depraved status. And so slaves, prisoners, criminals, traders, they were all stigmatized. They were branded, and thus they were relegated to the margins of society if they were not banished completely. In Christian culture, the plural stigmata, that refers to the wounds those marks inflicted on Christ at his crucifixion. Now here, what would normally be taken as a mark of shame becomes rather, for the faithful, a sign of Jesus' unjust and unmerited suffering at the hands of sinful humanity. The stigmata thus becomes signs calling the observer to repentance and to gratitude for Christ's supreme sacrifice. But in the Christian world, stigmata could have negative connotations as well. Witches, for example, were believed to possess certain physical attributes that attested to their evil status and thus led to their wholesale persecution. And the same was true for certain aberrant behaviors that were associated with mental illness. Manic or psychotic episodes were thought to be evidence in the medieval Christian world of demonic possession, and thus these individuals too were stigmatized accordingly. And there was, unfortunately, ample biblical warrant for this. At least two occasions in the Gospels, Jesus exercises demons from individuals who were showing clear signs of mania or schizophrenia. Because of the spiritual and moral taint associated with them, persons coping with mental illness have continued to bear this heavy burden of social stigma. It connotes, as Stephen Hinshaw writes, an internal mark of deep degradation to the individual who carries it and also a license to the social majority to perpetuate and escalate their judgemental attitudes and responses. Not to be sure. Other segments of society have been similarly affected. So individuals with physical disabilities or who perhaps are severely overweight have been stigmatized in our society. Certain diseases such as AIDS cause a similar estrangement as does a prison record. Transgendered people know the power of stigma very well. Muslim women who wear the hijab or sick men who wear their turbans all have felt the sting of stigma. But having said that, as a society we are making strides in destigmatizing many of these conditions. The kind of conditions that have led to prejudice and discrimination. And of course this is not going to happen quickly. It's a slow process because we as human beings we are always programmed to look with suspicion, to look with disdain at people who are demonstrably different, who do not look like us, who are not part of the tribe to which we obviously belong and to whose mores we subscribe. These old, ancient prejudices are notoriously hard for any of us to uproot. But if there is any one class of individuals today for whom stigma is an ongoing persistent problem not just in the United States but throughout the world we suffer from severe mental illness. And they represent as much as 6% of the entire population. A third of all of our homeless citizens perhaps 40% of those doing time in our jails and prisons. 42,000 Americans commit suicide each year nearly three times the number of homicides. And for most of these people who take their own lives, this is a devastating cause. And unfortunately religion continues to be a factor here. There are today those in our Christian culture who perceive malign forces at work among the mentally ill. Exorcisms are still performed. Pentecostal preachers still claim to be able to drive out the devil from the afflicted. In one of his books, Parker Palmer remembers a conversation that he had with a woman who like him had struggled for many years with severe depression. And they sat together and they shared their respective stories and in the end she turned to him and asked him plaintively, Parker, why do some people end up killing themselves and other people get well? Why is that? Parker had been fortunate enough to survive his own bouts with debilitating depression so he thought really carefully to hide to those questions. But nothing came to him except this. I have no idea. I really have no idea. Well afterwards, Parker felt sad and regretful and remiss because he could not offer this particular woman something more constructive. But then a few days later he received a letter in which the same woman thanked him for that statement, thanked him and he said, my response had given her an alternative to the cruel Christian explanations common to the church to which she belonged. Because in her religious community a failure to recover from depression indicated insufficient faith or divine disapproval of something she had done or failed to do. But religion isn't the only culprit here. Until fairly recently the scientific and the legal communities were also complicit in reinforcing stigma. Secular experts in the field claimed that insane individuals had literally lost their reason. That which defines all of us as human beings, our reason. And because they were not in their right minds such people were thought to be more akin to animals or immature children and thus they could be stripped of their dignity and also their essential rights. It was not considered cruel or unusual or inappropriate to warehouse the severely mentally ill and dreary asylums and to subject them to brutal treatment protocols. Some prominent asylums even invited the general public in to view the freaks housed therein. As many as 20,000 visitors a year entered Bethlehem Hospital in London that are known as Bedlam to gawk at that institution's 200 wretched residents. Similar entertainment was provided in America's first metal asylum in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. Progressive reformers like the Unitarian and Dorothea Dicks did lobby tirelessly for decades demanding more humane dignified forms of care and yet the discrimination continued almost unabated. As scientists and lawmakers climbed aboard the eugenics movement in the early 20th century laws were passed in 30 states mandating the forced sterilization of the developmentally disabled and with individuals who had serious and chronic mental illness. It is hard to imagine a more officially sanctioned and institutionalized form of stigmatization than this. Stephen Hinshaw writes in an official decree persons with serious mental disturbances were forbidden to reproduce. For Stephen Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley this history is particularly meaningful. His own father was a brilliant philosopher taught at the University of Ohio, Ohio State University. And Hinshaw's father spent a lifetime in the throes of severe manic depression. He was absent for months at a time from his family's life confined to one asylum or another. And in an effort to spare them their father's stigma, Stephen and his sister were kept completely in the dark for all of those years they were growing up. They didn't know where their father was. It was only when Stephen was in college and studying psychology himself that his father finally revealed his shameful secret. And after that the two enjoyed conversations but then one day not long before he passed away the older man confided to Stephen you know there are times when I wished that I had cancer. Taken the back Stephen repeated the word as a question cancer? Was his father losing his mind again? Well cancer is a real illness the old man said calmly but each of my experiences was related to a mental disorder. And he noted how ironic, how disheartening it was for a philosopher to be afflicted with such a disease. How I longed to have a real illness he summed up. Stigma as this example indicates can profoundly affect the self-image of those who experience it. They internalize society's disapproval and now they must deal not only with the complications of the disease itself but with this pervasive sense of unworthiness and inadequacy. And some may even begin conforming to society's stereotypical expectations of the mentally ill which as Hinshaw writes sets in motion a vicious circle of negative interactions. And then there's also the associated problem here of what we call courtesy stigma whereby family members and others close to the affected individual are marginalized as well. That to avoid that fate Steven Hinshaw's mother and K. Jameson's sister and Michael Stone's students did their best to hide the fact that there was a problem here so that they would not necessarily be tainted by it as well. Courtesy stigma. How do we combat the stereotypes, the prejudices, the discrimination that produce and maintain stigma in our culture? Self-disclosure is a very powerful tool and in recent years more and more people have been coming out and sharing their stories. A quarter of a century ago William Styron, the author of the acclaimed novel Sophie's Choice published an account of his own struggle with debilitating depression. Darkness visible a memoir of madness became a surprise best seller during the early 1990s. Scott Stosell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly recently wrote of his efforts to overcome an acute anxiety disorder and since he did reveal his situation he has received so many letters from fellow sufferers that as he puts it it makes me feel like I finally did something really right. Because they anticipate and dread being stigmatized many people delay or they forgo treatment for mental illness and too often this does mean that they're going to lose jobs, they'll lose their family, their homes and even their lives if the symptoms become too overwhelming. Fully half of returning military veterans who suffer from PTSD never seek help because they are afraid of appearing weak and undesirable. But narrative accounts by other veterans who have received proper care that could be a powerful motivator for such reticent men and women in uniform. And point of fact these reflections come to us today courtesy of Carolyn Waxler who purchased this topic at last spring's Cabaret Service Auction. Carolyn is herself a psychologist and she has coped with her own and her mother's depression over many many years and she in fact told the story of her family's history with mental illness in this particular collection entitled Breaking the Silence. It's edited by Stephen Hinshaw. Thank you Carolyn. So as a society we need to start taking mental illness a lot more seriously because the resources are inadequate to meet the demand. Oh we hear politicians paying lip service to the problem all the time but then they turn around and they vote against funding for hospitals and treatment facilities. Indeed the most recent congressional budget proposals call for deep cuts in Medicare and in particular for programs that address addiction and mental illness. And then two most private insurance policies lack what we call parity provisions that provide the necessary coverage for not only physical disorders but for mental maladies as well. Because of stigma many of those who suffer from severe mental illness retreat into isolation which then increases the risk of self harm. And so joining a support group a peer support group we're taking an active role with an organization like the National Association for the Medley Ill NAMI whose mission is to overcome stigma that can all be very empowering give people a sense of their own agency. And then finally for those of us who wittingly or unwittingly collude with this culture of shame there is PG divine's formula for readjusting our own attitudes very simple intention attention patience intention attention patience. Through effort and through deliberate practice he argues people any of us can overcome the stereotypic thoughts and reactions that are given to us by our culture that are natural to us as a species and substitute for these stereotyped breaking beliefs. And finally do we have a role here as a congregation? In answer to that question the psychotherapist Patricia Deegan had this short telling response for God's sake she said just love them. Blessed be and amen. It is now time for the giving and the receiving of the work and the agency that are receiving your gifts have a table outside that describes their work please be generous. Now to our closing hymn which is in the Teal hymnal number one thousand and twelve. May the love which overcomes all differences which heals all wounds which puts to flight all fears and which reconciles all who are separated may that love be in us and among us now for the possible.