 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. That's enough silence everybody. Let's get musically present by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. Welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud but very shy member of this congregation. And I'd like to extend an especially warm welcome to any guests, visitors, or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special place, sometimes we have a tour guide at the end of the service to conduct a guided tour. If we don't, then join us for our fellowship hour after the service, and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking good care of each other, this would be a splendid time to silence all those pesky electronic devices. And yes, I still have a blackberry. But while you're taking care of that important task, let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, future member, we welcome children to stay for the entire service. But if you think your child would prefer a more private space from which to enjoy the service, we offer a couple options for you, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your child can hear and see the service. And one of the reasons we are able to hear and see the service today is because it is brought to us by a wonderful group of volunteers. They deserve a high five or a hug and a handshake, and I'm going to give them one virtually by announcing their names right now so that you can shake their hand and thank them later. Our lay minister today is Ann Smiley. Thank you, Ann. Our greeter upstairs was Tom Heiney. Thank you, Tom. Wally Brinkman and Katie Balfas are the ushers for this unruly crowd. Our coffee is hosted by Jean Hills and Terry Felton right after the service, and Betty Evenson has taken care of the foliage that you see right up here. Just one announcement, and it has to do with something that's happening in 47 days from now because Cabaret is coming. It'll be here real soon. We'll have a night in Ireland and we'll dance to some Irish tunes and you'll have to come to Cabaret to hear the rest of the song. So 47 days from today on Friday evening, May 12, we are hosting an evening in Ireland where this entire place will be transformed into one huge Irish party. It'll feature Irish music. I'd say it'll feature Irish food, but that might turn some of you off, but Irish food and some beverages and a lot of fun for everybody, including auction items donated by fellow members of FUS. This is one of the highlights of the FUS social calendar every year. In fact, when my kids were younger, they called FUS the Cabaret Church. So if you're interested in being part of the Cabaret team, we are inviting you to sign up, see if you have the luck of the Irish about you. A great theme, a lot of fun, and we invite you to make that date on your calendar. 47 days from today, May 12, Friday evening, right here, Cabaret. As the end of the announcements, I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I heard the 9 o'clock service and I know that this will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Thank you to our chorus for a rousing opening. Our opening words come to us from Gordon B. McKeeman. We summon ourselves from the demands and delights of the daily round. From the dirty dishes and unwaxed floors, from unmowed grass and untrimmed bushes, from all incompletenesses and not yet startednesses, from the unholy and the unresolved. We summon ourselves to attend to our vision of peace and justice, of cleanliness and health, of delight and devotion. Of the lovely and the holy, of who we are and what we can do. We summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young. We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry, and music to be the bearers of our dreams. We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life. We rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities. I invite you to rise and body or in spirit to join in our chalice lighting, the words of which are printed in your order of service. For every time we make a mistake and we decide to start again, we light this chalice. For every time we are lonely and we let someone be our friend, we light this chalice. For every time we are disappointed and we choose to hope, we light this chalice. Thank you. I invite you to greet your neighbors. I am sad to say we will not be having a story for all ages today, even though I dressed up for spring like an Easter egg. We will, however, as we do once a month, generally set aside a few minutes at the first part of the hour for the sharing of joys and sorrows. It's a time for members, friends, and visitors to relate to the entire gathered community some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone you are close to in recent days or weeks. General announcements, news items, and partisan appeals are discouraged. Anyone who wishes is invited to come forward to the front of the auditorium, light a candle in one of our two candelabras, and using the microphone provided by our lay minister, share your name if that feels comfortable, and a brief message. Please note that our services are livecast, so listeners are not restricted to this room. You may also wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and simply return to your seat. I invite you now to come forward to share these significant moments in our lives. Good morning. My name is Maureen Muldoon, and this candle is for my stepmother, Judy, who has been married to my father for 20 years. Bless her. And let's see, she just turned 75, and she is officially retiring next week. So this is for her. My name is Laura O'Flanagan, and I have a double joy. One is that I have before me today the man who married Paul and I, and so that's very special to hear his good news. And we have a rescued puppy at home that is such a joy. My name is Paul Abramson, and about seven weeks ago, a dear friend of our community, Jim Cain, passed away. And Jim had been involved with many social organizations and arts organizations in Madison, and we were close friends, and I miss him quite a lot, so I just wanted to pay tribute to him here today. My name is Pam, and my joy is just the gratitude I feel for having this community that shares joys and sorrows. Thank you. My name is Katie, and mine is a sorrow for our friend Judy Kaufman, who passed away last week. She's a grandmother of my son's close friend and a founding member of the Jewish congregation who shares our landmark auditorium. Sorry, Perlan. Any other joys or sorrows to share? Anyone in the balcony? And I will light one for a personal joy that my wife and extended family are able to visit this morning. So I thank them and welcome them for coming. So let us take a moment of silence to remember those who are not with us today, to honor the joys and sorrows shared here, and to hold close to us the cares left unspoken, but which abide in our hearts. Blessed be. If you would, please rise in body and spirit for our next hymn, number four, the Order of Service that we are sharing today's outreach offering with the UW-Madison Odyssey Project, which offers economically disadvantaged adults the opportunity to begin college studies with the hope that they will go on to further and finish their studies at a four-year university like UW-Madison. Emily Auerbach is the director and founder of the program and is here with us today. And as in the past, we welcome today one of Emily's students to read an original composition on the theme of our service. Joining us today is Renee Robinson, who will share a poem by Langston Hughes, something of her own journey and her own composition. Renee, please. Good morning. It is indeed a pleasure as well as a privilege to stand here today. In the Odyssey Project, we read many poems and stories about persistence in the face of adversity and about continuing the struggle of our ancestors. One poem we read is by Langston Hughes from the 1930s. The title is The Negro Mother. Children, I come back today to tell you a story of the long dark way that I had to climb that I had to know in order that the race might live and grow. Look at my face, dark as the night, yet shining like the sun with love's true light. I am the child they stole from the sand 300 years ago in Africa's land, carrying in my body the seed of the free. I am the woman who worked. Sorry. I am the dark girl who crossed the wide sea, carrying in my body the seed of the free. I am the woman who worked in the field, bringing the cotton and the corn to yield. I am the one who labored as a slave, beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave. Children sold away from me, my husband sold to. No safety, no love, no respect was I due. 300 years in the deepest south, but God put a song and a prayer in my mouth. God put a dream like still in my soul. Now through my children, I'm reaching the goal. Now through my children, young and free, I realized the blessing denied to me. I couldn't read then, I couldn't write. I had nothing back there in the night. Sometimes the valley was filled with tears, but I kept trudging on through the lonely years. Sometimes the road was hot with the sun, but I had to keep on till my work was done. I had to keep on, no stopping from me. I was the seed of the coming free. I nourished the dream that nothing could smother deep in my breast, the Negro mother. I had only hope then, but now through you, dark ones of today, my dreams must come true. All you dark children in the world out there, remember my sweat, my pain, my despair. Remember my years heavy with sorrow and make of those years a torch for tomorrow. Make of my past a road to the light out of the darkness, the ignorance, the night. Lift high my banner out of the dust, stand like free men supporting my trust. Believe in the right, let none push you back. Remember the whip and the slaver's track. Remember how the strong and struggle and strife still bar you the way and deny you life. But march ever forward, breaking down bars, look ever upward at the sun and the stars. All my dark children made my dreams and my prayers impale you forever up the great stairs. For I will be with you till no white brother dares keep down the children of the Negro mother. I will now share with you a short story I wrote about me. I was born in Chicago, number 11 of 14 children. At one point in my life, we had 10 people in a three-bed room, one bathroom apartment. It was lively, challenging and sometimes disappointing, but never a dull moment. It was family, my family. I didn't have a choice in the matter. We were poor. How poor were we? We were so poor that my uncle who worked at the Campbell soup factory would bring us cans of soup that couldn't be sold because of flaws, dents and bends. The cans didn't have labels but contained numbers which we memorized because we had to. If you didn't know the numbers, you were stuck with the soup that no one wanted, which in our house was the tomato soup. Survival, that was my life. Not only did I have to survive on the south side of Chicago, in the ghetto, the low end as we call it, but at home as well. Can you imagine 14 children buying for attention, 14 children wanting to be loved, 14 children striving to be better than the next? It wasn't all good, but neither was it all bad. We were taught principles, morals and Christianity. We were required to excel in school. You would think that such an upbringing would produce upstanding and productive individuals, and it did for ten of us. Unfortunately, I was one of the four who didn't quite meet the challenge. I was persistent at taking the wrong path and making poor decisions. I had my oldest son at 16 and was forced to attend a high school for pregnant girls. I married at 17 and had my second son at 18. It was a blessing to have a husband who was also the father of my children, where I come from that really didn't happen. But unfortunately with that came physical abuse. I could go on and on about the many ups and downs due to the poor decisions I made over those 30 years. But I want to talk about the good news. I made it out of that situation and relocated to Madison, Wisconsin. I got a job, I got an apartment, then a used car. I joined a church that made me feel at home and there I heard about the UW Odyssey Project, one of the best decisions that I've ever made. Odyssey is for people just like me, those who wanted to do better but couldn't for whatever reason. Having made so many poor decisions in my life, I feel I'm somewhat of an expert in understanding how easy it is for people to mess up, to make mistakes and to choose wrong paths. But Odyssey gives you the feeling like the little red engine we read about in elementary school. I think I can. I think I can. It releases the wow factor as in, he did that? She did what? Really? They left Britain to do the same thing in America? I didn't know that. Then it begins. The desire to know more, the desire to understand, the drive and tenacity to do better and to critically think, analyze and understand what you're reading. And what's so fantastic about Odyssey? It's generational. I tell people that all the time. Not only does it change the lives of parents, it changes the lives of their children, which will change the lives of their children. Odyssey is a mind-opening experience. Before Odyssey, if someone had asked me to write a poem or told me that I would be analyzing Socrates, my favorite, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Frederick Douglass, I promise you, I would have rolled my eyes up, down and sideways. But there I was at my Odyssey graduation, earning 6 UW credits and reading the poem that I wrote about my journey at Odyssey, which I will recite for you at this time. My journey written by me. My journey started about nine months ago. How I would fare, I really didn't know. Now, reading and writing, I thought it would be, but from six to nine, that I didn't see. The professors were there for all to meet outlining history, humanities, and philosophy. I was scared, but I didn't know why. Maybe it was the 30 years that quickly gone by. So getting acclimated was a little rough at first, but soon thereafter, to read books I would thirst. See, prior to Odyssey, I didn't read. All the info I got was from the TV, but things have now changed, mainly the screen from the TV to the computer. I am now a Google queen. My journey, my journey, who would have thought would be the beginning of me being taught, being taught the importance of opening my mind instead of sitting around and wasting my time. So thank you, Odyssey, for choosing me. I have found knowledge, my greatest discovery. He said this on repeated occasions when I was growing up. The inherent sarcasm and its underlying suggestion that my life would be filled with disappointment was not exactly what I wanted to hear in my pre- and post-pubescent years. Ultimately, though I found it to be true in some ways, I had been sheltered from life's hardships. A childhood of relative privilege had not prepared me for what I would see or come to understand as an adult. Suffering I learned is common as mud, and reality won't always match our expectations. Reality will knock us down sometimes. Some disappointment is an inevitable part of life, and our determination is tested, as Shakespeare posed to us in Act 3 of Hamlet, as the Danish prince considers ending his life, to be or not to be. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. Perhaps you or someone you know has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, survived experience of violence, personal tragedy, or catastrophe. I was going to read a list of them to you beginning with fire and flood, but the longer it got, the more depressing it became. Perhaps you can identify as having been widowed, divorced, unemployed, disabled, mentally ill, formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless, an immigrant, or refugee. Starting again often is not optional for many people, but is made necessary by their experiences. Perhaps you have not had to face such hardships or misfortune. Perhaps you've been able to choose when and where and how you manage life's more mundane transitions, moving a household, changing schools or jobs, starting or ending a relationship. Along the way, every one of us has made our share of mistakes. We have fallen short of our ideals. We've done bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons. We have hurt someone we love. We've had a friend or loved one die or leave us. Perhaps our bodies won't do what they once did, and yet regardless of whatever experiences we have faced, somehow here we are. Each time we've known disappointment or loss, we have survived, picked up the pieces, learned what we could, asked for forgiveness when needed, and started again. While last week's service dealt more with loss and saying goodbye, this week's deals more with discovery and saying hello, developing resilience and being open to possibilities. I don't know that the adage is true that whatever doesn't kill you will make you stronger, but there's something to be said for resilience. Karen Rivich and Andrew Chateau in their book The Resilience Factor identify four fundamental uses for resilience, overcoming the obstacles of childhood, steering through everyday adversity, surviving a life-altering event as an adult, and reaching out in a spirit of exploration. I think all four of them are relevant to today's discussion. Resilience is one of the first things we teach our children, isn't it? When they fall down, we teach them the essence of the song by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again. Well, it's easier to do this when we know that rewards or opportunities lie ahead of us, which is one of the effects, I think, of the University of Wisconsin's Odyssey Project. Today we receive with deep gratitude Rene's powerful and beautiful contribution, the good news of someone who has overcome some of life's struggles and started again, who turned a corner and found new hope and new life. And I want to thank Rene again for being here. As I prepared for this service, I came to appreciate how the Odyssey Project honors and empowers adults who have shown tremendous resilience in their lives. Bad things happen to good people. Trying to understand how evil can exist in the world if God is all-loving and all-powerful, trying to understand this is called theodicy. Many in our society, particularly the Unitarian Universalists, atheists, agnostics, humanists, other religious liberals, and those identifying as none of the above, many in our society no longer see the theodicy problem as relevant and simply do not worry about it. That is a sermon for another day. But I began to wonder how theodicy, why bad things happen to good people, might be connected to theodicy. And maybe it's a stretch, but how I wondered how the word theodicy might be rolling around in the back of the head of the minds of the project's organizers as they considered the long journeys and changes of fortune that people face. As Renee pointed out in her reading, we often don't have a choice about what life puts in front of us. It can be a long, hard climb. And at the same time, she reminded us that it's easy to mess up, make mistakes, poor choices, follow the wrong path. What do we do when our hearts are broken or we feel deeply wounded in some way? How do we respond to life's hardship? Experience has taught me that we may respond in any number of ways. We may curl into a seething bundle of rage. We may feel doomed, stuck, impotent, immobilized. We may lash out in anger and frankly complicate our lives further. We may dissolve into sorrow, weep in pain and grief and feel all the feels. We may seek solitude and the wisdom to be found in the natural world. We may reach out to those we know for comfort and perspective. All of these are natural responses. With time and good fortune, our wounds may heal. We may come to understand our heartbreak or woundedness in a greater context from a new perspective. Our vision might expand so that we may see both life's sorrows and joys and that we may understand that we are more than only our moments of pain. Even as such experiences might help define who we are, we come to see them as finite moments or periods in our lives. We give those experiences meaning. And having done so, perhaps we come to better understand life. Perhaps we even dare to love or trust again. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, Life based on a big love towards the world is full and rich. I've employed this phrase when I have known hardship, when I have been knocked down. One of the ways I've learned to get back on my feet to help recover that big love towards the world is to remind myself with great irony that my life still is full and rich. You may see me walking down the hall chanting it to myself, full and rich, full and rich, full and rich. I have come to understand my father's view of the world but I also have come to know that simply being alive is a miracle and a blessing. Some source of all has breathed life into our being. The challenge of living a fuller, richer life, it seems to me, is to accept and integrate our losses and still keep our minds and hearts open to possibility. Sometimes we can, sometimes we must start again. But starting again can be difficult, even harder than when things end. Unitarian Universalist minister and poet Lynn Unger says, Here's the thing about endings. You don't really have to do anything about them. If you have lost a friendship or a job or a marriage or a beloved stuffed animal you will probably feel sad or likely angry and possibly guilty or resentful, regretful. But if something has truly ended there's nothing you can do about it except just to learn to live with the loss. But beginnings are a heck of a lot of effort. It's not easy to walk into a room full of people you don't know. When you start a new job you have to learn a whole new set of policies and procedures. When you start a new grade in school you not only have to learn the classroom rules and meet new people and figure out just what your teacher expects you're also facing a whole bundle of new things to learn from multiplication to writing paragraphs from cursive to algebra. Endings may be hard because of how they feel but beginnings are where the real work comes in. Unger suggests that anytime we take on something new we basically commit an act of faith. We walk up to the open door of a new relationship, a new skill, a new job or hobby or idea without knowing where it will take us. But you know you're going to have to put some work in before you have any idea of what your new beginning will grow into. And the best part she says is that as long as we can maintain this beginner's view we get the special sense of excitement that comes from exploring the unknown. To be a beginner is to be filled with a sense of possibility with the feeling of new worlds unfolding in front of you. As I understand the Odyssey project this is one of its greatest gifts that by learning new things, developing new skills and coming to know themselves better Odyssey students experience this sense of possibility of worlds unfolding before them. They find the courage and the will to embrace the unknown and to change the patterns of life that have defined them. They have listened to the still small voice within and have discovered Diga Duncan's in fry. Their thoughts are free. Their thoughts give them power. Renee and hundreds of other Odyssey students are proof that some of us do make it out of bad situations. That with the mind-opening experience of education comes empowerment feeling like the little engine that could with the compounded benefit of affecting not just one life but generations. Unitarian Universalism's guiding principles celebrate the inherent worth and dignity of these students and the free and responsible search for truth and meaning that has made such a difference in their lives. I imagine the experiences of Odyssey students being like those expressed in today's songs bringing their spirits to the sea feeling a light within an inner flame burning away their tears awakening and arising from bended knee. Unitarian Universalist minister and Robert Fogum is known for a story he wrote in which the neighborhood children are out playing hide and seek. But there's always one child who hides too well. And just as the others are about to give up searching, Fogum shouts, get found, kid! Fogum prefers the game of sardines. Has anybody here played sardines? In which one person hides and all the rest join him or her until everyone is packed in like sardines. This simple game illustrates the Universalist theology that in the end all are found, that God provides salvation to all. Fogum thinks God is a sardine player and that God may be found in the same way everybody gets found in sardines by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end. That's a beautiful image for me of a spiritual practice finding God by the laughter of those heaped together at the end. We came here today to this community of fellow seekers as Gordon McKieman said in our opening words to summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages, and the knowing of the very young. We would open our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts to the amplest dimensions of life. We rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities. In the days ahead, every time we make a mistake and we decide to start again, every time we are lonely and we let someone be our friend, every time we are disappointed and we choose to hope. Let us harken back to the songs and stories we heard today and the time we've spent together. Let us go forth with our minds and hearts open to those amplest dimensions of life and live in faith that new worlds will unfold before us. May we walk in peace, united. May we live in love, enlightened, and know that we are one. Oh, source of all help us to grow. May it be so. May it be so. As I mentioned earlier, today's outreach offering will be shared with UW Odyssey Project. More information is available outside in the Commons after the service. Please be generous. Our eyes and body are in spirit for our closing hymn, number 277, seated for our closing words and our post. Our closing words are adapted by those of Melissa Carver-Zemer, Associate Executive Director of the UU Ministers Association. Let us give thanks for the will to survive and for the grit of survivors. Let us give thanks for the determination to thrive and ask a blessing upon all the people taking risks to find their way there. Let us praise persistence and perseverance in the name of love and let us praise the power that will not stop calling us toward transformation. For the sake of us all, here on the earth.