 The morning's projection I thought was a very good thing. It's all very good. It makes it easier to stop being in the picture. I thought it was too early to appreciate the way we lost it. It was. It was too early. I see no suits. And I have no idea how many views. I have no idea how many views. I'm sure. I have no idea how many views. I have no idea how many talks. No. I don't think it's possible. No. Now that we're awake, let's please join together in a few moments of centering silence. together are in gathering him which is number 17 words also appear in your order of service this is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world my name is Karen Rose Gretler and on behalf of the entire congregation I'd like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning we are a welcoming congregation so whomever 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 to look for people carrying teal colored stoneware coffee mugs these are FUS members knowledgeable about our program and community life and they look forward to a chance to speak with you this morning you may also speak with anyone else you'd like to speak you can also stop by our information table outside of the library where you can find more information about our upcoming events and programs and that's right out there 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 back in that corner and the commons outside the auditorium are excellent places to go when anyone wants to talk or move around the services can still be seen and heard well from those areas we do have hearing assistance devices available please see one of our ushers if you feel that would be good and helpful for you this would be an excellent time to turn off all electronic devices that are not helping you here and which might make it harder for us to hear such as cell phone ringers please experienced guides are generally available to help give building tours after the service I do not know if there's one here for after this service if there is we erase your hand okay I don't see anybody if you need some help or information you may still go to that side of the auditorium after the service and see if there's someone who can come and help or you'll just be standing there but we'll try to find somebody to help you I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly this morning Mark Schultz is operating a sound high mark and smiling is our minister Patty witty is the greeter whom you met on the way in and also she was getting assistance from Dorit Bergen so we had to this morning which is our ideal our ushers are Samuel Bates Elizabeth Barrett Wally Berkman and Anne Smiley our hospitality folks making coffee and other things for us back in the kitchen are bisnitchki and genie hills and now I'd like to call your attention to the announcements in the red floors order of service which is part of the handouts that you receive this is the red floors there's lots of information about what's going on today and in upcoming days and weeks at us but I'd also like to tell you that one thing that didn't make its way in there is the men's group meeting all men are invited to join the men's group meeting on Monday October 23rd that's tomorrow at 7 p.m. in the Gabler living room the topic is preparedness with many natural and man-made disasters in the news how well prepared are you for those and other unknown things that might come up that's it I believe again welcome we hope today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit somebody's calling our what shall we do which is a responsive reading so if you please rise I will read the non-bolded parts which I don't know the real word for and you will read the bolded parts that are brokenness we know that in all creation only the human family has strayed from the sacred way we know that we are the ones who are divided we are the ones who must come back together to walk in the sacred way grandparent sacred one teach us love compassion and honor we're about to sing hymn number 54 now light is less but first we're gonna exchange friendly greetings with our neighbors greeting today comes from a water from Lisa Sikarello it's called a water woman has no body I'm on the wrong spot these kids don't want to hear this message for all ages let's do it everyone come up everybody come on up we're gonna do something special today we're gonna try something new we're gonna do a dance so if you want to dance you come up on the stage if you want to watch the other kids dance you stay down low and any adults or teens that want to come dance there's my lula so everyone that wants to dance come up here on the stage and I need I need I need a few I need a couple I think we're gonna have you all go right here okay can you all move over all the dancers right here again dance out of thanks but all right this is a dance about this is a dance about getting older okay so we're gonna have a few different stages in this dance first the music's gonna be kind of slow and we're gonna be babies can everyone be babies lay down and be babies on the floor all right make sure your bodies are just to yourself okay don't hit anybody else then we're gonna start crawling and then we're gonna be toddlers we're gonna stand up and be toddlers and then we're gonna turn into teenagers and start really dancing crazy dancing up tempo that's good you guys don't need any help let's just get going we got it I think all right oh and then we're gonna a few things we're gonna we're gonna start getting responsibilities who can tell me what responsibilities are what do you got doing stuff by yourself that's nice what you got taking care of things being alone okay more often so when we start getting responsibilities when you're like my age we start dancing slower and slower and then we get so busy we stop dancing and we just look at our watches okay and then we have a midlife crisis anyone tell me what a midlife crisis is what do you got it's like when you act like a teenager in the middle of your life that's great what it is is you kind of you realize you get so busy that you don't have any time to have fun anymore so you want to have more fun and that's when we start dancing again okay and then we get really and then when our kids go to college we start getting really having a lot of fun dancing and then we start slowing down that's our body start to get old and tired and then we're gonna bounce back and go in reverse do the whole thing all right so you got it so we it starts off slow gets faster slows down and then we check our watches and then slow and then fast and then slow okay we'll do it all together and the grown-ups have a special part in this if you look in your orders of service there's a line that you help me sing Kesha sings at once it's after this dance parts done the kids will be laying down Kesha sings it once you don't know what you've got till it goes till it's gone and then we all sing it together all right let's do it yeah we're all babies wait for this wait for this music to start for the music there we go we're toddlers we're learning how to walk that's nice all right now we're gonna learn how to dance now we're in high school now we're in college and we really get to dance I'll show you dance here's a dance you you you you you you you you you you all right now we're starting to slow down again we're getting busy we have responsibilities and jobs and garbage to take out all right now check your watches too busy to dance huh I'm too busy to dance now we have the midlife crisis and we all look in the mirror and say why don't I dance anymore and then the music starts going again so we start dancing we don't really remember how to do it anymore but we're trying and now our kids have gone to college and we really get to dance again this one's this one's called the chalice arms up and then and then our bodies are starting to get a little bit tired so much dancing in our lives oh and we sit down and then we lay down as anyone ever looked at the ceiling look and now we're gonna go backwards slow getting more energy again and then we're slowing down again because we forgot how to dance a little bit we're checking our watch we're taking out the trash we're back in high school and now we're toddlers now we're kneeling down and now we're babies again alright this is our part thanks everybody here's the thing about getting old sometimes it's kind of sad sometimes it's kind of happy but it's always more fun when you're dancing thanks all right you guys are gonna go to classes you guys are gonna go to classes and we're gonna sing 105 105 205 amazing grace emptiness is a blessing it can't be owned if it doesn't exist my father said bloom but never fruit a small trickle eating its way through stone I am one kind of alive I see everything the water sees I told you a turn was going to come and turn the tower did what are the master's tools but a way to dismantle him who will replace the blood of my mother in me a cold spring rising she told me a woman made of water can never crack of her defeat she said this is nothing we'll now have a special presentation by the our very own dance fellowship they will be performing their piece at the hawks well the story takes place on a desolate mountain side where a seemingly dried up well is guarded by a hawk an old man is waiting to drink the miraculous waters which occasionally rise up from the well it is said that when the waters rise up the old man is thwarted by a sudden urge to sleep he has kept camp here waiting for the waters to rise up for 50 years rock pass bare heights the wind sucks across the mountain this is no country for old man an aged man is but a paw tree thing hanging on a stick crappity hanging on as a dog's tail he has shot eyes a shot heart is that a lie right and the wind sucks across the mountain there's no more there is no more but now the watchman takes his stand how long watchman how long is it now is it here is it now is it here is it here long watchman how long who's talking what is the hour of the night someday at some noon they'll learn that sleeping is not the hawk rises from the bottom of the spit turning and turning widening gyre center cannot hold dark he is loosed upon the world the power to shot the sky the mountain lies before a thirsty soul oh living waters rise eyes upon the brimming water the stones within evermore under the twilight a mirror still light order loses clothes holy room little floor column wall and sing and curse and shout what is past or passing to come new place to preach from April Fool's Day 1997 I'm 12 did you realize that you've hired an intern minister that was 12 in 1997 we were hiking in one of my family's favorite spots waterfall Canyon in Ogden Utah for several miles you follow a longest stream a largest stream up into the wasatch mountains where eventually after several stream crossings and a tricky loose shale section you are greeted with a lovely waterfall set into the mountains this was actually the day that I tried meditation for the very first time in the then still early days of the internet I found a website on one of my favorite topics Star Wars that helped you learn how to be a Jedi and included was a very simple breath meditation which I dropped behind my family to try seated on a log next to the stream this new spiritual discipline for my 12-year-old Mormon self made me feel especially in tune with nature and my body that probably contributed to my eagerness to after completing the hike splitting off from my family and trying to scale down a 30-foot cliff I remember the moment very clearly when my hand slipped from those rocks only a few feet down the face of the cliff that fall was one of the very clear moments in my life when I knew without a doubt that I had made a very bad choice I awoke to find myself screaming for help unable to move my neighbor who just happened to be on the same hike as us that day found me and between him and my father they carried me down the 2.5 mile trail with a compound fracture in my arm a collapsed lung and a very bad knock to my head I told this part in and the other services but when Kate and I were dating she saw the scars I saw on my arm from the pin they had to put in and I told her that I got it mountain climbing and she thought I was this like super rock climber instead I'd just fallen off a cliff when I was 12 two of my favorite cousins died incredibly tragic deaths when they were 11 and I had always thought that once I made it past that age death wouldn't knock on my door until my 70s at least but it had just knocked pretty loud my mom always used to love to say that God had saved me that day for some special task when she realized that special task had turned out to be you ministry she stopped talking about it she's not watching it's fine actually I don't really know what to think about that event now that day and I'm very grateful I didn't die certainly and I learned that I love staying in hospitals but does coming close to death really teach us anything about death it certainly has made me very anxious for answers still I don't think that there was any part of me when I chose this topic of aging and death for the sermon that had any hope of finding some kind of all-encompassing answer or even an original answer that would bring real healing to this topic but I knew it was a question I had to confront if I ever wanted to know if I had what it took to be a you minister I'm gonna be honest modern American culture has been kind of a letdown and on the subject of death death for us has become the ultimate enemy in our society we've built an entire way of being around denying the reality of our death in our modern society our value is most often tied to our ability to consume and produce and our progress is measured by our ability to upgrade the amount and quality of stuff we can consume on and on we do everything we can to prolong life when it's filled threatened but are woefully unequipped for expanding the quality of life when aging moves us out of the realm of peak productivity of course there might be some gifted individuals among us here today that have fully reconciled with the idea of your own death and the death of everyone that you love and you will be able to greet those deaths calmly and then go about your day but here's a little bit here's a little tidbit for those of you in that situation you were excruciatingly boring and and no one believes you for those of us more interesting and prone to heartbreak death is the wound that will never heal now would be a great time to do a deep examination of the practices of other religions and cultures that allow them to integrate death more fully and holistically into the living experience but I've done the homework and since this test isn't graded I can just give you the answer pretty much everyone else is doing this better than us but here's the other trick I found no culture is actually good at death we just as far as I can tell haven't evolved enough or reached a level of enlightenment that even as we get better at finding healing around the subject of death we will never make death okay and I'm I'm certainly no better I'm doing just as much as the next guy to pretend that my life has no expiration date but worrying signs are starting to pop up after years of hard running one of my knees seems like it will just be grumpy for the rest of my life my skin is getting these weird little spots my eyesight is getting a little inconsistent and I've noticed that if I don't stay mildly active even with my grumpy knee my slowing metabolism puts a little pouch right here at least my hairline is still fantastic few more years the thing about the illusion of permanence upon which so many aspects of American culture are built is that it's a very difficult illusion to maintain even if I'm able to ignore my knee and my beer belly to especially poignant of them examples of decay always pushed through tooth decay and scratches on my phone screen those are the worst now just the other day and this is a true story as I was writing the sermon or preparing to I walked out of the dentists where I had not one but two cavities filled to find not one but two new scratches on my phone screen basically life was this close to over but then I went to H&M and bought this new suit and everything was okay again it's weird I found when doing research for this sermon that nobody writes books on death or aging everyone tons of people write books on death and aging but no one writes it for 30 year olds for people my age so I brought in an expert everyone say hello to 72 year old me from 40 years in the future we've had some great discussions hours and hours of deep wisdom have been imparted and he's taught me many great things unfortunately I was not able to hear any of those things over my anger at him for not being 30 anymore what I found doing the research for the sermon was that I have a deep anger at myself for getting older I feel guilty for not living up to the models of youth that we hold so highly in our society because there are moments that I cannot run away from or by my way out of those moments come late at night after a day when I've been disappointed myself again and let down my beloved ones again in any of a million different ways and I recommit myself to doing things better to being more present to being kinder to making more time but I can't shake the feeling that I've been here before thousands of times yes tomorrow might be a little bit different but what about the day after that and the day after that can this new found again found commitment really changed my life and how many days after that do I really have I don't want to die and that's just a fact after the service our youth from the compass points class which I helped teach on Saturday afternoons are going to be asking you what you think about life after death my ideas are pretty nebulous but I'm pretty sure that there is no religion that teaches that whoever ignores death best wins I don't have great answers and I really hope you didn't come here for answers today that's not what this space is about honestly a lot of the ministerial interns job is just figuring out what it means to be a ministerial intern or to be a minister Christian ministry is a lot simpler clear in its mission try to be Jesus for folks which is super easy I found who are we you you ministers supposed to be for other people ourselves how dreadful a metaphor that's been on my mind lately is that of the whole digger imagine our culture our great human community as a great open field our emotions our joys and sorrows rain down on that field and aging along with its unfortunate result death make the rainfall as consistently as any other tragedy in our lives too much of Western society is model around denying this death and building up hills of consuming so that the rain will run down and pool in other people's lives anywhere but our own and at the top of those hills we put these little money filters so that all of our wealth will be collected and none of our humanity I feel like we use unitarian universalists have our own special hills one of our hills is just our obvious level of privilege but I think we also have a hill that is called thinking away our problems that if we just get the right liberal mindset trained in a watered-down version of Eastern religion we can disconnect fully from our emotions and become fully rational beings because our ration because rational beings something inside of us believes can rationalize their way out of aging and dying which is just absurd what I've learned or what I'm beginning to learn is that all these hills we built to our for ourselves to avoid our emotions to give us the illusion of permanence is that these are incredibly dry places where nothing decent will grow if this church this society is to be anything good it must continue to be an increasingly be a low place where our joys and sorrows can pool or we can take some of that precious water and share it with our community take it to our own homes and give it to those who are most in need so that we can grow things that will sustain our lives I'm young I'm inexperienced but the fragility of life the tragedy of impermanence of loss is the burden that began to press on my mind from a very young age and it is I deeply believe not something that we have to deal with in order to get our real life of productivity and efficiency started it's not our weakness in fact it is exactly the opposite is the tough part as I watched my Facebook feed news feed flood this week with women's stories of sexual violence I felt a great many things lots of guilt lots of anger but it also brought to my heart this lesson our strength and our fragility are one in the same men are particularly awful at this we get this idea that to be strong we have to hide all possibility of showing evidence of our vulnerability and then a little rain comes and our top soil all washes away and we lash out in destructive and immoral ways our instinct is to be stronger to build our hills higher and higher but it only makes it worse when we fall so what I'm trying to learn is to stop building piling on to my ego and instead learn to dig use my emotions my own experiences as the tools that I can use to make our little hole called first Unitarian society a little bit deeper so that it can hold more of the happy and the sad together so I know you're not going to remember any of the things I say today not in a day from now and certainly not in those deep days when death lurks nearby but if I can give you a little permission to right now open your hearts up a little more to the good and the bad that life's rains down on our plane then I will be satisfied and maybe I can start doing the work for giving myself for getting older we get one shot of this folks may we open our hearts while we still can we were quite literally born for this this week's offering is shared with the healing house a project of the Madison area urban ministry healing house is a place a homeless child or family member can go to heal after surgery there's more information in your bulletin and they have a table outside please give generously number 101 abide with me if you can please rise and body or spirit an addiction comes from Nancy Wood my help is in the mountain where I take myself to hill the earthly wounds that people give me I find a rock with sun on it and a stream where water runs gentle and the trees which one by one give me company so I must stay for a long time until I have grown from the rock and the stream is running through me and I cannot tell myself from one tall tree then I know that nothing touches me nor makes me run away my help is in the mountain that I take away with me go in peace and please be seated for the postlude