 Okay This is a community where curious and social issues in an accepting 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 Rosalind Woodward and on behalf of the congregation I'd like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We're a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. We trust today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirits and after I ring the gong we'll have a moment of silence just to gather our thoughts together and now we'll sing hymn number 34 please rise. That they save me and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself in which I have goodness and discernment and never hurry through the world but walk slowly and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out stay a while. The light flows from their branches and they call again it's simple they say and you too have come into the world to do this to go easy to be filled with light and to shine. I invite you to rise and join me in reading the words for the lighting of the chalice. Come into this place of peace and let its silence heal your spirit. Come into this place of memory and let its history warm your soul. Come into this place of prophecy and power and let its vision change your heart. And now I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange of friendly summer greetings. With tradition we are going to be observing our open mic joys and sorrows this morning. If you woke this morning with a sorrow so heavy that you need the help of this community to carry it or if you woke with a joy so great that it simply must be shared now is the time for you to speak. The sharing of joys and sorrows is our time in the spirit of acceptance and support to share with one another some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of a loved one in recent days or weeks. So for the next few minutes anyone who wishes invited to step up to the front of the auditorium light a candle and using the microphone provided by our lay minister and smiley this morning briefly share with us your message. You may also come forward to wordlessly light a candle and return to your seat. If you're unable to come to the front to light a candle please raise your hand and we will facilitate you right where you are. I now open the floor for the sharing of joys and sorrows. I'm Gail and my joy I want to share with all of you is that the Starlings volleyball team which we have helped fundraise for over the last several months is has their 15 and 16 year olds out in San Diego at the national tournament. So hooray and I have really enjoyed this past year providing transportation to kids who couldn't get to the practices without our help. If anybody wants to help see me but mostly hooray for the Starlings being in San Diego. They say June gloom in San Diego but we'll hope not. So one joy is I just remember to turn off my cell phone. Another joy the beginning of life. I'm going down to see my 10 month old great nephew on Wednesday and at the other end of the circle for my dear friend Jim who died in hospice 10 days ago and for all of his family but especially for his wife after a very long illness and difficult death. We hold them I hold them all in my heart. Good morning I'm Carol Angel and my sadness is also a joy. My sadness is that this is my last Sunday with you as I'm moving with my family to St. Paul and I feel sad that I'm leaving this community. I've only been here three years but I have felt really loved and nurtured and I want to appreciate all the ways you have supported not only me but my daughter and her family and the joy is that she has a wonderful wonderful ministry she's starting in St. Paul area and we have found homes and the move is going well so there's the joy of arriving there and the sadness of leaving here. Good morning my joy of course is this my daughter Susan and Terry are celebrating their 50th wedding. Anyway I'm happy about that. I'm Chuck Soprinsky my joy is yesterday got to go to Chicago reunite with some folks I went to college with some of whom I hadn't seen in 40 years and it's great to catch up with people's lives and the other joy I have is that we grew up in era before cell phones could document everyone's questionable decisions and therefore there's we can just kind of enjoy the memories of bygone days. My friend Carol she's in the hospital because her knee is broken. Actually she had a failed hip revision and got sepsis nine months ago and has been in a nursing home since then she's only 68 and just found out she might not even be able to ever get a new hip so we're feeling really sad for her. Thank you for your thoughts and kindness. Two things this morning one is that last Sunday at about 10 30 I received a text from David Metzer member of the congregation informing us that Bill Wortman had passed away at the hospice facility down in Jamesville I had actually seen him the day before less than 24 hours before Bill passed. He'd been sick for quite some time with congestive heart failure. We did have on Friday a memorial service at the Edgerton Performing Arts Center for Bill very lovely affair. He's now interred beside his wife at a small cemetery out in the country very near his home. So that is my sorrow and my joy I think is that my mother was reunited with my father 10 days ago I took her to the airport and on the 16th they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Some of you know my mother Nancy because she is a member of the congregation as well. Hi my name is Megan this is for my friend Rachel who just found out that she is finally cancer-free. My name is Marilyn Chohaney and I don't usually come up on these things but I'm just expressing gratitude that my daughter Cat Lonstorff is safe. She's on a reporting trip in Zimbabwe with all things considered Ari Shapiro and minutes after they left their table the bomb went off in Harare and and injured dozens and dozens of people so I was really concerned and I'm always concerned when she does an international reporting trip and so I expressed my gratitude. And to light one last candle that will represent any of the joys and sorrows that you carry in your heart that perhaps are too tender or too precious to share with us all. Even though it's breaking tradition to have joys and sorrows and a message for all ages I'm a little bit of a rebel so we're gonna have message for all ages so any kids that want to hear a story come on down. Storytime I'll try not to get burned. Try not to have my hair set on fire. Well if I lean too close to the flame in my wild gesticulation. So this the story this morning is called the most magnificent thing and we're going to have pictures up there. There it is. You guys ready? Maybe you do know this story. This is a regular girl and her best friend in the whole wide world. They do all kinds of things together. They race, they eat, they explore, they relax. She makes things. He un-makes things. One day the girl has a wonderful idea. She's going to make the most. She knows just how it will look. She knows just how it will work. All she has to do is make it and she makes things all the time easy-beasy. First she hires an assistant. Next they gather their supplies. They set up somewhere out of the way and get to work. The girl tinkers and hammers and measures while her assistant pounces and growls and chews. When she's finished she steps back to admire her work. She walks around one side. Her assistant examines the other side. It doesn't look right. Her assistant picks it up and gives it a shake. It doesn't feel right either. They are shocked to discover that the thing isn't magnificent or good. It isn't even kind of sorta okay. It is all wrong. The girl tosses it aside and gives it another go. She smooths and wrenches and fiddles. Her assistant circles and tugs and wags. When she is finished she stands up and takes a long look at it. Her assistant gives it a nudge with his paw. The thing is still wrong. She decides to try again. The girl saws and glues and adjusts. She stands and examines and stares. She twists and tweaks and fastens. She fixes and straightens and studies. She tries all different ways to make it better. She makes it square. She makes it round. She gives it legs. She adds antennae. She makes it fuzzy. She makes it long, short, rough, smooth, big, small, and one even smells of stinky cheese. But none of them are magnificent. Her hard work attracts a few admirers, but they don't understand. They can't see the magnificent thing she has in her mind. Gets angrier she gets. The faster she works. She smashes pieces into shapes. She jams parts together. She pummels little bits in. Her hands feel too big to work and her brain is too full of all the not right things. If only the thing would just work. The pain starts in her finger. It rushes up to her brain and she explodes. It is not her finest moment. No good at this. I quit. Her assistant suggests a walk. It's not much help at first. But before long, she starts to feel different. Bit by bit, the mad gets pushed out of her head as they stroll along. She comes across the first wrong thing she made. Bad feelings are about to start all over again. Then she notices something surprising. There are some parts of the wrong things that are really quite right. The bolt's on one. The shape of another. The wheel to seat ratio of the next. There are all sorts of parts that she likes. By the time she reaches the end of the trail, she finally knows how to make the thing magnificent. She gets to work. She works carefully and slowly tinkering and hammering, twisting, fiddling, gluing painting. Her assistant makes sure there are no distractions. The people are noticing. The one guy says, this is the perfect thing to word off bears. And the other woman is saying, this will stop that leak. And the little boy is saying, this one's all wet. The afternoon fades into evening. Finally, she finishes. She alerts her assistant. Look what her assistant's doing. He's tired. It's been a long day. The pair take a good, long look. It leans a little to the left. And it's a bit heavier than expected. The color could use a bit of work, too. But it's just what she wanted. They climb aboard and take it for a spin. They are not disappointed. It really is the most magnificent thing. The end. And so you guys get to go for summer fun. Thank you for your attention. And are we singing in him? We're doing something. His comments a few weeks ago and given my topic, I quickly got myself a copy and availed myself of this work. Here is what I'm using for today's reflections. She says, if it is sweet to be right, then let's not deny it. It is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong. As any food scientist can tell you, this combination of savory and sweet is the most addictive of flavors. We can never really get enough of reveling in other people's mistakes. Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifled the urge to say, I told you so. The brilliance of this phrase or its odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it, derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right at any rate, really extremely right and really extremely delighted about it. It is possible to refrain from this sort of gloating and consistently choosing to do so might be the final milestone of maturity, but the feeling itself, that triumphant, can seldom be fully banished. Of course, parading our own brilliance and exalting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exalt in other people's errors, I'm sorry, I lost my place, is not very nice, although it is certainly very human. This is where our relationship to wrongness begins to show its stakes. Of all the strife in the world, strife of every imaginable variety, from conflict over crumb cake to conflict in the Middle East, a staggering amount of it arises from the clash of mutually incompatible, entirely unshakable feelings of rightness. Granted, we find plenty of other reasons to fight with one another as well, ranging from serious and painful breaches and trust to resource scarcity to the fact that we haven't had our coffee yet. Still, an impressive number of disputes amount to a tug of war over who possesses the truth we fight over the right to be right. Likewise, it is surprisingly difficult to get angry unless you are either convinced that you are correct or humiliated and defensive about being wrong. Our default attitude toward wrongness then, our distaste for error and our appetite for being right, tends to be rough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and, as will not be lost on most readers, relatives. Indeed, an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship, you can remain attached to team you winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to your friends and family, but good luck trying to do both. The next reading is from Ram Dass. Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes in part out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable with your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be without separation. Music this morning. This morning's reflections, I want to take a look at what seems to me to be an increased cultural reliance on judgment, which in my lexicon means specifically thinking and perceiving through the binary oppositions of right wrong and good and bad. And how that thinking and perceiving affects each of us in our inner and our relational worlds. Like the character Aunt Lydia and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, who works at the Red Center and serves as the indoctrinator of the young women into a chilling theocracy in which their role is merely as vessel. We all seem to be a little bit too much in love with either or these days. Several years ago, I remember seeing a segment on a news program in which an issue was raised. I've long forgotten the issue. But then the exploration of that issue was framed thusly. Is this good or is this bad? And just a few weeks ago during, in a rare circumstance, I've seen some commercials during a television broadcast. I usually religiously avoid commercials with liberal use of the mute button when applicable. One commercial for some brand of yogurt ended with these words. I hastily scribbled the words on the back of a response in public television program guide. And the words were this. It feels right to do things right. These are hardly pithy examples of my thesis regarding a cultural reliance on the framework of judgment of good, bad, right, wrong. But I would say that none of us needs to look terribly long or hard to find others. So my definition of judgment articulated a few minutes ago departs from definitions found in the dictionaries I consulted. Here's a definition of the word from Miriam Webster, judgment, the process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing the capacity for judgment, for judging a formal utterance of an authoritative opinion, a formal decision given by a court, finally when it's capitalized, the final judging of humankind by God. So there's nothing terribly objectionable to the proffered definitions here. And yet what I've found in the deeper teaching work I do with folks every day is that there is a need for greater clarity and a more pointed discernment. I make a distinction between judgment, which I've already defined narrowly, as thinking in right, wrong, good, bad, and assessment. Assessment in my lexicon requires discernment. It requires taking a look at the what and the how, and noting complexity, contradiction, conditions, causality. Assessment is not reducible to binary oppositions. Assessment is also essential to self care, whereas judgment is entirely extraneous to it. Let me give you an example of what I mean here. Say I was walking into a crowded nightclub. For the purpose of attending to self care, I might note the crowd, the nature of the crowd. I might tune into some semblance of discomfort with the size of the crowd, the noise, the heat. I might then think about strategies to ease that discomfort, perhaps by finding a spot on the periphery, or perhaps I would consider removing myself altogether. If I was operating through the lens of judgment, thinking in right, wrong, good, bad, however, I might think that the owners of this nightclub made a bad decision to allow this many people in the door. I might start feeling angry and righteous toward those owners whose decision is now impinging upon my pleasure. I might start writing an angry letter in my head to those owners expressing my outrage. I might then leave in a huff. Maybe some of you are thinking now, aren't you just splitting some dumb hairs here, Beth, in your orientation to these words? What's wrong with thinking in right, wrong, good, bad? How can you have morality without those words and concepts? Philosophers, ethicists, theologians, all have wrestled with this subject for millennia, and you're just going to leapfrog over all those discourses and dissertations and dialogues and say that good, bad, right, wrong thinking is wrong? Well, no. A thousand times, no. I'm not saying it's wrong, for as Audre Lord writes, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What I am saying is that I've become increasingly convinced that right, wrong, good, bad thinking or judgment keeps us trapped in dualisms, trapped in the toxicity of the inner critic, and serves as a force of divisiveness and separation, as Ram Dass says in the reading from today, and operates as such a force both within us, intrapersonally and between us, interpersonally. I want to spend a few minutes now exploring how a judgment framework might affect the inner workings of an individual. Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, begins an examination of the journey beyond yourself by looking unsparingly and somewhat humorously at the voice inside your head, which by chapter two he identifies as his roommate. He writes, In case you haven't noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say? And when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you're hearing, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a voice inside my head. That's the voice we're talking about. In Singer's view, the voice inside your head is part of the human condition, part of the self that is watching and constantly narrating, and is distinct from the aspect of your inner being, Singer describes as the awareness. Singer goes on. If you would like to meet your roommate, just try to sit inside yourself for a while in complete solitude and silence. But instead of finding silence, you're going to listen to incessant chatter. Why am I doing this? I have more important things to do. This is a waste of time. There's nobody in here but me. What's this all about? Right on cue, there's your roommate. You may have a clear intention to be quiet inside, but your roommate won't cooperate. And it's not just when you try to be quiet. It has something to say about everything you look at. I like it. I don't like it. This is good. That's bad. It just talks and talks. For some people, maybe even you in this room, that inner roommate can turn vicious, excoriating the self for being wrong and bad, and thereby setting up a desperate search for ways to be right and good. Ironically, some of the clinging to right, wrong, and good, bad frameworks comes from a desire for certainty. If we can be certain that something is right and good, perhaps we can finally rest there, and our inner voice, our roommate within, will be satisfied and our inner dilemmas relieved. But like the sufferer of an extremity of anxiety known diagnostically as obsessive compulsive disorder, the achievement of a rightness through compulsory ritual, which finally releases the individual from moments or hours of torment gives way to doubt. A toxic doubt rather than a useful doubt, the foundation of which is bad, good, right, wrong thinking and perception. Right, wrong, good, bad thinking is more like being on a seesaw rather than stability. There will be wild swings up, down, and dilemmas remain unsolvable, unresolvable, or another metaphor might be ping-pong. Back and forth, the ball goes right, wrong, right, wrong, good, bad, good, bad. For the anxious obsessive person, this seesawing and ping-ponging will mean redoubled efforts to establish rightness and thereby goodness in order to ward off the terrible immanency of wrongness and badness. Perhaps your inner roommate and nearest critic lacks the viciousness and vitriol that animates the level of anxiousness and despair I just mentioned. Perhaps your inner judge and critic fosters what Tara Brock, psychotherapist and teacher of the Dharma, defines as the trance of unworthiness in her first book, Radical Acceptance. She writes, feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It's a vicious cycle. The more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel. Underneath our fear of being flawed is a more primal fear that something is wrong with life, that something bad is going to happen. Our reaction to this fear is to feel blame, even hatred, toward whatever we consider the source of the problem ourselves, others, life itself. But even when we have directed our aversion outward, deep down, we still feel vulnerable. So the binary and oppositional terms right wrong good bad inherently begin to foster and substantiate yet another binary that of subject and object. As Tara notes, our fear generates blame and hatred. And blame and hatred become the source for othering. And othering, as we know, opens the door for distrust, dehumanization, and domination. Othering is not simply an interpersonal phenomenon. I work with people who struggle with a subject object split is internal, leading to a divided self full of shame, self loathing, and self attack. In the book from which the reading for today was excerpted, Catherine Schultz uses the terms making a mistake, making an error, and being wrong interchangeably. I make a distinction between those terms in order to facilitate the healing journey for people. The distinction is between doing and being. To make a mistake or to make an error is something a person can inevitably will do. But to be wrong is a statement of a different order. And one which a person with a template from childhood of interpersonal or developmental trauma as Bessel Fonderkulk has named it in his brilliant book, The Body Keeps the Score, that person will hear that as an ontological pronouncement. The self is experienced as essentially and profoundly bad and wrong. And this badness and wrongness is often either deeply embraced and enacted in behavioral choices or resisted through the embrace of high achievement, perfectionism, in lifelong attempts to recuperate rightness and goodness. So rather than reclaim rightness and wrongness as Catherine Schultz proposes in her book, through what she somewhat humorously describes as an investigation into wrongology, I propose moving away from a framework that causes the kind of harm I've already described, in which Schultz illustrates somewhat breezily, humorously, in the excerpt from her book I shared with you today. I see intimately and every day how a fervent attachment to rightness causes harm in intimate relationships and offer the caveat in my version of the therapist's axiom Schultz noted. I say, I can be right or I can be close to you, but I cannot be both. If our starting point is a premise of do no harm then our choices and behaviors will have an ethical base. We will need to investigate deeply what constitutes harm and debate and discernment about harm without resorting to right, wrong, good, bad thinking will facilitate deeper and more spiritual responses to the human condition. In my own practice of unhooking, and that's Pema Children's term, from the framework of judgment I've challenged myself to replace the words good, bad, right, wrong from my language in the day to day. I challenge each of you to try this for a week and see what happens. I will share with you that there is an exception to my daily practice and that is in relation to my dogs. I tell them often and with great affection that they are such good dogs. Further, we all need means and mechanisms by which to assess and evaluate and respond to the questions and challenges in life, I offer the use of an essentially pragmatic approach and that is to ask these two questions. What would be useful and what would it be in the service of? So let me illustrate how these questions might work by relating an experience I had while doing my practicum for my counseling psychology degree at the University Health Services. This is now 25 years ago. In the fall of that year some of you might remember that there was a stampede at Camp Randall at the conclusion of a football game. The student section stood and moved en masse down the bleachers and a barricade prevented further movement forward. Several students were injured in the crush. The counseling service prepared for the aftermath of this event with trainings on post-traumatic stress and we practicum interns began to see students struggling with anxiety related to this traumatic event. One student with whom I had already developed a therapeutic alliance came in for her scheduled appointment. I asked as we'd been coached to ask if she'd been at the stadium and she affirmed and then she related the story of her experience. She told me that she felt herself move without volition down the bleachers. She noted that her arms were pinned to her sides by the terrible proximity of the others around her and she thought how with her arms pinned to her side she would not be able to access her inhaler. Unnecessary indeed even life saving accoutrement for her as she had severe asthma. She told me she thought how stress can aggravate asthma so she decided to focus on keeping herself as calm as possible and that is what she did. Psychologically she was one of the more intact students I counseled in the weeks after the event unwittingly she put into practice the questions I posed above. She thought about what would be useful staying calm and what it would be in the service of warding off an asthma attack. Had she thought in the framework of judgment perhaps she would have escalated her anxiety as she searched for the right way to respond to this crisis feeling her predicament to be even more perilous if she guessed wrong. Finally recognizing the harmful effects of clinging to judgment frameworks and practicing differently facilitates movement toward a spiritual path of healing. We let go of judgment then in the service of a larger purpose than that which is implied in the biblical passage serving as the title of this reflection. We let go of judgment not simply to avoid being judged by others but because we recognize the terrible limitations and deleterious consequences of that framework itself and we do so in the service of healing. As Carolyn Mace notes in her wonderful book defy gravity healing beyond the bounds of reason. Healing does not require that you master the unreasonable side of your reason nor does healing require inner perfection of any order. A common trait shared by people who have healed is that they cease being unreasonable in ways that no longer matter in the greater scheme of life. Against the scale of life or death how important is winning an argument how important is holding a grudge how important is anything other than how well we love others how deeply we regard the value of the gift of our life and what we do with our life that makes this world a better place. May it be so blessed be and amen. And now if you would participate in this morning's offering please be generous. We appreciate the many gifts of those who've helped our service this morning. Our greeter was Kareen Perrin and Claire Box, Usher Paula Ault, Dan Carnes has been helping with sound, hospitality aka coffee, Terry Felton, Lucy and Bob Lasseter and the lay ministers this morning and Smiley and Lois Evenson. Tom Detmer is going to serve as our tour guide if you'd like a tour of this historic building you can meet over here by the ramp after services today. I don't believe there are any other announcements so I would invite you to rise as you're able and join in singing Amazing Grace. Remember there was no nature no them no tests to determine if the elephant grieves for calf or if the coral reef feels pain trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it what once was before anything happened no I no we no one no was no verb no noun only a tiny dot brimming with is is is is all everything home.