 I don't know if I said that. I did it. I'm sorry. But then there were the two of us. Oh, she brought it. So, with this, um, there's not everything that works out. It's very common. Right. We're all in the same place. We're all in the same place. We're all in the same place. We're all in the same place. Yeah, we're all in the same place. So, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please. Thanks. I love you. I love you. I just love that. I love it. I love it. I love it. Please join in a moment of centering silence. And please join in our in-gathering hymn, number 1011. The words are printed in your order of service. 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 John Powell, 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 happen to be on your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service in the commons area over in the Atrium Edition. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. If you're accompanied by a young child, remember if they need to move around, the loja area to my right is a good place to retire with them. And this is a good time to turn off any electronic devices that might cause a disturbance. It takes many people to run these services. I'd like to thank some of our volunteers this morning. Our lay ministers are Shirley Chosey and Bob Redford. Greeters, Cindy Kepke and Joan Collins. Our usher is Paula Apfelbach. Please note the announcements in your red floors. Some we want to emphasize this morning. This is Children's Chapel Day, so fifth grade kids, if they're not already, should go straight to the Atrium Auditorium. Sixth graders will be visiting Temple Bethel this weekend, and seventh graders will start out in the Adult Worship Service and then be released for classes. Please join us this Thanksgiving, this coming Thursday for the annual potluck dinner here at FUS. Plan to spend the afternoon with FUS members, their families and friends. And the dinner will be served at 2.30 PM. Everyone is welcome. We ask you to bring your favorite Thanksgiving dish to share and a $3 to $5 donation per person to help fund the dinner. And the FUS Family to Family Holiday Giving Program provides gifts and food cards to more than 130 families in Dane County to help make their holidays brighter. Next weekend, you can stop by in the commons and be matched with a wish list. A variety of many tasks make this program work. And so if you can spare just a couple of hours in the next month, please sign up to help our elves. Please look in the red floors and the social justice bulletin board for a link to sign up to volunteer for a special job. Again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. If they will listen, sing them a song. If not, keep silent. Just be there among them. For there's nothing else for you to do, but to be one of them. And we now have our opening to. And time around the season. Skate over 10 clear frozen streets. Words like when your older must be. It's yellow mirrors of Sunday making. And the seasons, they go round and round. And the faded ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't return. We can only look behind from where we came. Seasons, they go round and round. Ponies go up and down. Carousel, and so they're used to it. While the child is lost, a stranger comes. They'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams, and plenty. For the last we've all been here is through. And the seasons, they go round and round. And the faded ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel. Every time we get old. Thank you. My lips were moving. Would you please stand for our chalice lighting. And join me in the words that are printed in your order of service. At this time of year, as darkness shrouds the earth, may the light from this chalice represent the power we need for our personal journeys and the vessel that uplifts and holds us. And perhaps you'd take a moment to show everybody that this is a welcoming congregation. See some young faces, and I'm happy to see you all. I understand that most of the little children are in children's chapel. So I talked to Michael and we decided I would read this book anyway. Because after all, we call it a message for all ages. And we have many ages here, not all. This book is called What Does It Mean To Be Present. And it is a book that was recommended by Reverend Kelly in her Bringing It Home section of this month's FUS November newsletter. Which hopefully some of you have seen. And those of you who do have children, I hope that you're using that part because it gives all kinds of good examples of what you might do at home with your children or grandchildren. So I am going to read it as a true message for all ages. And you needn't come down and sit on the floor and I'll use this mic. What does it mean to be present? Does it mean showing up when you're supposed to? No. Does it mean sharing something at show and tell? No. Does it mean wrapping yourself up? And I will show you that picture. This little girl has wrapped herself up like a present because to her that's what it means to be a present. No. Being present means listening carefully when other people are speaking. Noticing when someone needs help and taking the time to give them the help they need. Focusing on what's happening now instead of thinking about what's next. Appreciating what you have even if what someone else has seems better. Waiting patiently for your turn. Treating each new experience as an opportunity. Bless you. And understanding that making mistakes is how we learn and grow. Being grateful for your family and friends and telling them so. And savoring each bite of your delicious food. Cuddling with your puppy and enjoying how soft and wriggly he feels. Relishing the warmth of the sun and the sound of the rain. Feeling the sand between your toes and watching the rolling waves. Smelling the briny seaweed. Listening to the calling seagulls and tasting the ocean salty spray. Allowing the rhythm of your breath in and out. In and out to make you feel peaceful. Closing your eyes and being still enough to hear your inner voice. Being present means living in the moment. And now I have been asked to say something that if you haven't already heard it, I'm very sorry to tell you this. But our faith community has lost a bright light and a loving presence. Patricia Lee and Artie died yesterday afternoon following her amazing and difficult struggle with cancer. She was extremely active as an FUSR. Leading Cabaret for several years. Teaching youth with her wife Linda. And participating more recently on the equity ministry team. All these among her many, many activities. And her many loving interactions with everyone she knew in our community. We will truly miss her. And I understand that there will be a memorial service for her. Han, I believe it's December 19th in this auditorium. Thank you very much. The service for the song this morning. From author and conservationist Terry Tempest-Williams. This is called Listening Days. Harold Shapiro writes in The Musical Mind that a great percentage of what is heard becomes submerged in the unconscious and is subject to literal recall. If we have in fact a tonal memory, what do the voices of our ancestors, our elders, have to say now? What sounds do we hold in our bodies and retrieve when necessary? What sounds disturb and what sounds heal? Where do we store the tension of traffic honking horns or the hum of fluorescent lights? How do we receive birdsong, the leg rubbings of crickets, the water music of trout? What do we know? I wonder. To wonder takes time. I walk in the hills behind our home. The leaves have fallen, leaf litter perfect for the shuffling of tojes. The supple grasses of summer have become knee-high rattles, ridge winds shake the tiny seed heads like gourds. I hear my grandfather's voice. All sound requires patience, not just the ability to hear, but the capacity to listen, the awareness of mind to discern a story. A magpie flies toward me and disappears in the old thicket. He is relentless in his cries. What does he know that I do not? What story is he telling? I love these birds, their long, iridescent tail feathers, their undulations in flight. Two more magpies join him. I sit on a flat boulder to rest. What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whispering of grasses, and the shimmering of leaves. And this poem, morning by Mary Sarton, by May Sarton, rather, a Unitarian from New England. Salt shining behind its glass cylinder, milk in a blue bowl, the yellow linoleum, the cat stretching her black body from the pillow. The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small kind gesture then laps the bowl clean, then wants to go out into the world where she leaps slightly and for no apparent reason, across the lawn, then sits perfectly still in the grass. I watch her a little while, thinking, what more could I do with wild words? I stand in the cool kitchen, bowing down to her. I stand in the cold kitchen. Everything wonderful around me. Next, more special music. Thank you so much. I won't ask what came to people's minds when they heard that song. When Michael asked me if I could fill in for him today when he traveled in North Carolina for the ordination of Sasha Ostrom, our former intern, I asked him, what was the theme for the month? He said, being present. Sure, I said, I can do that. I figured all I had to do was come and stand here for 20 minutes. And that would perfectly illustrate the theme. But could I do it? Could I stand here and be present to this group of reasonably accepting people for 20 minutes? Or would I have to try and explain? Well, we already know the answer to that. Because the pressure would kill me. Besides, men like to explain things. So, being present sounds easy, but it's not. In fact, that's a basic rule for most spiritual practice. Simple, but not easy. The principles are clear, but living them is often very difficult. As you can see from the Order of Service, my specific topic is stop, look, listen. That's what we're supposed to do at railroad crossings. What we usually do, slow down, glance, and accelerate. Maybe make tomorrow's headlines. But stop, look, listen is a good way of organizing these reflections, sort of, I hope. Let's start with listening. Wait, we did that already. When we heard that gong, it's how we start every service. That little sound that just hangs in the air for a long time. I love that. Sometimes I wish it would just go on and on. Together, we make a silence. And in that silence, we listen. Uh-oh, a child is crying. How do we respond? Is our meditative moment ruined? Or do we listen more carefully? What kind of crying? Tantrum? Waking up? I'm too hot? It's the sound of life, of the continuity of our community. Now, that's attention. So, how about seeing? While the verb to see is short, it is by no means simple and suggests a wide range of meanings. If somebody's been diagnosed as near-sighted or far-sighted, we know that this describes their ability to identify details at a certain range of distance. But a person can be short-sighted at a description with temporal rather than optical connotations. It refers to someone who doesn't see or doesn't plan for the future very well. Seeing is also used as a synonym for understanding. I see what you mean, we reply, when somebody's explanation makes sense to us. We get their drift. The Gospels often use the verbs to see and to hear in this sense. Over and over, Jesus sends a story or a parable with the lines of those who have eyes to see, let them see, those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Seeing connotes not only understanding, but agreement or consensus. When two people share a common viewpoint, we usually see, we say that they see eye to eye. For some reason, the debates keep coming up in my mind here. Here are these men up there, a couple of exceptions, talking away, but I don't know if there's a kind of understanding of eye to eye there. Anyway, it's easy to see from these comments that we are a very visually centered culture, western culture is very visually centered. Sight is important to us. Why would the word otherwise be used interchangeably with wisdom or understanding? Prescience or even mystical apprehension. We don't say hearing, tasting or smelling is believing, but seeing is believing. Most religious traditions and most cultures, I suspect, draw a distinction between looking and seeing, or between mere listening and tuning in to the world. Indeed, one might even suggest that the object of the spiritual journey lies precisely here in the development of one's abilities to see truly and to hear deeply. There are, of course, many impediments to this process, not the least of which is the arrogant presumption that we already are able to see and hear quite well. Thank you. That is, of course, what European painters suppose until the great English innovator John Constable came along and began to use his brush and his colors in very unique and dynamic ways. Remember that light and shadow never stand still. He admonished his contemporaries, whose static canvases often look like visual studies in neoplatonic philosophy. You can look it up later. Constable and the Impressionist School, which he inspired, repudiated the classic categories which heretofore had dictated what the artists saw and recorded it. Liberated to see in a fresh way, the Impressionists began to experiment in earnest with techniques for reproducing their translucent, ephemeral vision to take two-dimensional surface. The Impressionists made liberal use of the primary palette in order to convey the brilliance, the richness of the world they saw, and adopted a more painterly brush technique to convey a sensation of movement and quivering light. In other words, Impressionism wasn't simply another way of painting. It represented another, at that time, changed way of seeing. When Picasso first encountered African art, he was further freed from realism. An eye is not just an eye, it's also a shape, and can be reshaped by design rather than imitation. And who says you have to look at things from one vantage point? Why does a nose have to go in front if we can tell that it's a nose? Was it Cezanne who went up into the Eiffel Tower early on and looked down on the city of Paris, saw a collection of colored cubes? He was looking, of course, with the eye of a painter. Had it been myself, I wouldn't have seen what Cezanne saw. In fact, I wouldn't have been looking down. Or up there at all. In the 20s, René Magritte painted a precise and realistic rendering of a tobacco pipe, which he entitled, Ce n'est pas d'un pipe. This is not a pipe. And he sold it, too. Well, of course not, it's not a pipe, it's a painting. But we're conditioned to look at the canvas and see a pipe, not a painting. But that's the French sense of humor for you. After all, they saw Jerry Lewis's films as a brilliant social critique of American life and values. We saw a noisy, exuberant, vulgar clown. We both laughed, but in very different ways. If we really want to see, we have to find a way to reconfigure our visual conditioning. First, we have to acknowledge that we're far more conditioned than we imagined. What we expect to see conditions our seeing. A gifted young black Harvard graduate working on a doctorate in cultural anthropology took on a year-long study as a participant observer, working as a busboy and then as a waiter in a country club dining room in Connecticut. Camouflaged in his white uniform and trained not to speak to the members unless they spoke to him, he found that he had become quite invisible to the diners and could listen to the most candid and private information with no difficulty. Later he wrote a book. He illustrated the phenomenon that Ralph Ellison had written about earlier in The Invisible Man. We must be careful not to overstate the case for sight. To hear is also a synonym for understanding or comprehension. When someone says, I hear what you're saying, they're not referring to auditory clarity, but to the grasp of the meaning behind the speaker's words. So, too, some ancient myths and certain mystical traditions attach a great deal of importance to vibrations, resonances, to the music of the spheres or the song of the creator, as it were. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Wayne Dossack, the author of The Business Bible, reported an urban experience in hearing and listening. A few days ago, a psychologist friend and I were walking down a crowded, noisy city street when she said to me, listen to the chirping of the birds. Don't they make a beautiful sound? Amazed. I said, are you joking? There's too much noise, all the cars and trucks, the blaring horns, the ambulance sirens, people shouting at each other above the din. It's impossible to hear the sound of a tiny bird in all this racket. My friend opened her purse, took out a quarter and tossed it on the ground. The coin bounced on the sidewalk, blinking as it rolled. Half a dozen people stopped by the sound of the quarter, followed its rolling path and stooped to pick it up. My friend calmly observed, we hear what we want to hear. Of course, we are awash in information most of the time. We would freak out if all our senses were opened up at once. This is what seemed to happen as a result of certain pharmaceutical experiments were common on campus in my early teaching career in the 70s. Students would drop a little acid and whee! Everything was alive, was vivid, was often overwhelming. Too much, man. Information overload more technically. For some, this was such a terrifying experience that they wanted nothing more to do with this stuff. For others, of course, they found LSD a life-changing experience if not particularly useful for future employment. I'm not talking about the very useful texting acronym here, TMI, or too much information, which really means, I wish I hadn't heard what you told me and don't tell me anymore. I'm not even talking about the general amount of noise in many settings. I'm talking about the overabundance of people and corporations trying to get our attention and sell us stuff, not just things, but ideas. That's what all those millions in campaign funds are about. And the multiplicity of media through which they're trying to get at us. By the way, I'm not complaining about the media, which gave me a living for many years, and John, too, for that matter. That's a useless exercise. We can't uninvent the computer. Cognitive dissonance. The attempt to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at this very controversial television show of the late 60s, all in the family. Archie Bunker, a loudmouth, determinedly ignorant bigot, was brought low week after week by having his notions or stereotypes graphically disproved. But in-depth studies of viewers found that conservatives saw Bunker not as defeated, but as a hero, bravely standing up for his principles. The findings mystified and frustrated Norman Lear, the liberal crusading producer, but the power of the individual viewer to select and interpret the show the way they saw it proved more powerful than Lear's intentions. For most of us, what we learn to do is manage our attention, directing it to the matter at hand, focusing, and ignoring all the other stuff which is not relevant at the moment. This is a problem if the matter at hand may not be as interesting or lively or attention-grabbing as the other stuff. It's why term papers and business reports and sermons take so long to write. The other stuff is calling to us. The jangle of the modern world which has been jangling ever since. There was a modern world. And there has always been a modern world. The pesky devices that we invite you to turn off are around far longer than the cell phone. Henry Thoreau, irritated by a plan to build a telegraph line from Boston to Philadelphia, wondered, does Boston have anything to say to Philadelphia? Maybe he was anticipating the clicking of the telegraph key, breaking into the quiet of Walden Pond. I guess the practical advice I'm working toward here is that we need to take more moments to tune in, to really see, to really listen beyond the surface into the depths of what is there. We know that messages pile up on us until it all becomes too much, man. As Michael and the railroads suggest, we have to stop, look, and listen beyond the surface to the substance that lies beneath. I'll conclude with a personal recollection. The first UU minister in my experience, Shannon Bernard of Community Unitarian Church in White Plains, New York, took a leave of absence to receive a radical T-cell transplant procedure addressing the cancer which had spread through her body. When she returned to us she said, the treatment killed everything in my body but the cancer. In other words, she was dying. In her last sermon to which we listened very carefully, she said, well, I've got the whole business of living down to two words. Pay attention. In other words, be present to your life. It's simple. It's not easy, but I promised you that already. Now, pay attention to the offering. It's coming. Our closing hymn is number 1012 in the Teal Book when I am frightened. Life itself is a benediction. If we pay attention to it, we invite you to do that. Be in peace and remain. Thank you so much.