 Very nice to see you. Please join me for a few moments of centering silence. Now please let's join in our in-gathering hymn. We give thanks number 1010 and the words are printed in your order of service and we'll sing it through twice please. Welcome to 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 Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the entire congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium except no I just remembered they're doing photographs in there. So meet people in the commons out behind. Forgot that the first one. Bring your beverages and your questions. Members of our staff and lame ministry will be on hand to welcome you. We also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would be happy to speak with you and to share their enthusiasm for FUS. We welcome children to stay with us during the service. However, please remember that it is often difficult for those in attendance to be here in this lively acoustical environment. So our child haven back in that corner, the little glass room and the commons out behind the auditorium are great places to go if a child wants to talk or sing or hop around and you're welcome to go there and you can see and hear the service from there as well. We acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. Now this service as well as the first one, we have staff operating sound for us because we didn't have any volunteers. Hint, hint. Our lame ministers and smiley. Our greeter is Jeanine Nussbaum. Our ushers are Helen Dyer and who is it? Doug Hill. He pitched in as well. And hospitality making coffee and ice water and other things back in the kitchen are Sharon Skratish and Jeannie Hills. Please note the announcements in your red floors insert to the order of service. This includes information about today, this week and upcoming events and services at FUS. I would like to read one particular announcement that pertains to today. Sharon Salzburg will be here with us later today at FUS for meditation and a talk by this renowned meditation teacher. Sharon is the author, a book she may recognize, loving kindness and real happiness. Her wisdom and loving approach to kindness are very relevant and inspiring during these difficult and challenging days in our country and our world. The program will run from 6 to 8 p.m. right here in the auditorium. All are welcome. It's a free entry with a free will offering donation to Sharon if you're able to do that. Again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. Add to do and began. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles, mend my voice cried, but you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones, but little by little as you left their voices behind the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world determined to do the only thing you could do determined to save the only life you could save. Please now rise and join with me in reading the words for the lighting of our chalice that are printed in your program. How often we seek refuge in this sacred flame from the world's trouble and pain. Today may our lamp light the way for those who know no refuge, that we may open our minds, our arms, our hearts, our mouths to sing, come whoever you are, holy new and holy true. And now please turn to your neighbor for a warm Sunday morning greeting. Grownups that want to sit like a kid and hear a story about a girl. This is a story that is based on the life of a little while ago. She was of African and Cuban and Chinese descent who lived on an island and she very, very, very much wanted to drum. So this is her story. She lived in the 1930s. This book is called Drum Dream Girl. On an island of music in a city of drum beats, the drum dream girl of pounding tall conga drums, tapping small bongo drums and boom, boom, booming with long loud sticks on big round silvery moon bright timbales. But everyone on the island of music in the city of drum beats believed that only boys should play drums. So the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming quiet, secret drum beat dreams. Outdoor cafes that looked like gardens. She heard drums played by men, but when she closed her eyes, she could also hear her own imaginary music. When she walked under wind wavy palm trees in a flower bright park, she heard the whir of parrot wings, the clack of woodpecker beaks, the dancing tap of her own footsteps and the comforting pat of her own heartbeat. All those rhythms. At carnivals, she listened to the rattling beat of towering dancers on stilts and the dragon clang of costume drummers wearing huge masks. At home, her fingertips rolled out their own dreamy drum rhythms on tables and chairs. And even though everyone kept reminding her that girls on the island of music had never played drums, the brave drum dream girl dared to play tall conga drums, small bongo drums and big round silvery moon bright timbales. Her hands seemed to fly as they rippled, wrapped and pounded all the rhythms of her drum dreams. Her big sisters were so excited that they invited her to join their new all-girl dance band. But their father said, only boys should play drums. So the drum dream girl had to keep dreaming and drumming alone. Until finally, her father offered to find a music teacher who could decide if her drums deserved to be heard. The drum dream girl's teacher was amazed. The girl knew so much, but he taught her more and more and more and she practiced and practiced and she practiced. Until the teacher agreed that she was ready to play her small bongo drum outdoors at a starlit cafe that looked like a gardener, where everyone who heard her dream bright music sang and danced and decided that girls should always be allowed to play drums and both girls and boys should feel free to dream. And that's the end of our story today. Thank you so much for listening and you guys can go do your summer fun. And we will rise to sing hymn number 168. It's called A Litany for Survival. For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision, crucial and alone, for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice, who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns, looking inward and outward at once before and after, seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours, for those of us who were imprinted with fear, like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk, for by this weapon, this illusion of some safety to be found, the heavy-footed hoped to silence us. For all of us, this instant and this triumph, we were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises, we are afraid it might not remain. When the sun sets, we are afraid it might not rise in the morning. When our stomachs are full, we are afraid we may never eat again. When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish. When we are alone, we are afraid love will never return. And when we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So, it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive. The second reading this morning is from Alice Walker's essay In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive year after year and century after century when, for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write. And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing too had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our crazy, sainted mothers and grandmothers, the agony of the lives of women who might have been poets, novelists, essayists, and short story writers who died with their real gifts stifled within them. How they did it, those millions of black women who were not Phyllis Wheatley or Lucy Terry or Francis Harper or Zora Hurston or Nella Larson or Bessie Smith brings me to the title of this essay in search of our mother's gardens, which is a personal account that is yet shared in its theme and its meaning by all of us. I found while thinking about the far-reaching world of the creative black woman that often the truest answer to a question that really matters can be found very close. But when, you will ask, did my overworked mother have time to know or care about feeding the creative spirit? Unlike Ma Rainey's songs which retained their creator's name even while blasting forth from Bessie Smith's mouth, no song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write that we all write are my mother's stories. But the telling of these stories which came from my mother's lips as naturally as breathing was not the only way my mother showed herself as an artist. My mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly country stand of Zinnia's either. She planted ambitious gardens and still does with over 50 different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass and laid out new beds. When she returned from the fields, she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit, uproot and replant roses or prune branches from her taller bushes or trees until night came and it was too dark to see. Because of her creativity with flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms, sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena and on and on. I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant. Her face as she prepares the art that is her gift is a legacy of respect that she leaves to me for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She is handed down respect for the possibilities and the will to grasp them. To this pulpit this morning for me. Because the question of emergence and finding voice for women isn't simply an academic one. This is also my question, a quiet one, not a burning one at this stage of my life. My previous PhD in literature path led to a counseling psychology path and for the past 22 years I've been engaged in a deeper teaching in my own counseling practice. I've been content to be in the quiet enclave where such healing practices occur, eschewing the public domain and bolstered by Emily Dickinson's words in a poem that Michael shared last week in his reflections on the evanescence of fame. Here's the poem. I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell, they'd advertise, you know. How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog to tell one's name the live long June to an admiring bog. This from a poet who wrote almost 1,800 poems in her lifetime of which fewer than a dozen were published. Clearly Emily did not want to be public like a frog. As my literary studies became more focused and I approached the dissertation stage back on that PhD path I became more interested in the question of women's literary engagement and production and the, quote, forces ranged within us and against us, against us and within us in Adrienne Rich's words that invite as well as inhibit finding voice. Focusing on what was then called Minority Women's Literature, black, lesbian, Jewish, Native American I was exploring the narrative of the Künzler Roman, kind of a fancy German word for the novel depicting the development of an artist and how the forces of racism, sexism, classism and how those forces are encoded in the intimate realms of relationships that shape the developing artist and her creative expressions. This morning then I returned to the woman question, I'm not quite sure what that means but in light of Hillary Clinton's emergence as the first woman to be nominated for the highest office of this land and used this historic moment to consider the perils and possibilities for women's continued emergence and finding voice. Young women may not be marking this moment as historically or even personally significant taking the gains made by women in the last 30 years or so for granted but for others of us who came of age in the second wave of the women's movement and before this is a heady moment indeed and against the backdrop of Hillary's emergence are reminders of the work left to do to ensure the inherent worth and dignity of every person in this interdependent web of life. This from a recent article in which a group of female scholars analyzed the New York Times coverage of the presidential primary looking at every article published between March 2015 through January 2016. They found that 80% of the political scientists quoted in those articles were men. The writer of this article herself a female journalist went on to illustrate the deep institutional and attitudinal gender bias shaping that kind of statistic to which she herself acknowledged she routinely succumbs. Another reminder of the work left to do the recent so-called honor killing by the brother of Kwandil Balak a Pakistani woman who had become a social media celebrity she reportedly called herself a one woman army against the repression of women in Pakistan. Two days before her death she said in a Facebook post as women we must stand up for ourselves as women we must stand up for each other. Her brother has said he had no regrets about drugging and strangling his sister whom he accused of dishonoring her family. In Pakistan more than 500 people die in so-called honor killings every year almost all of them women and thus the practice of murdering women accused of violating highly restrictive social rules is widespread and done with impunity by male relatives. The perils and possibility of women emerging and finding voice are exemplified by Kwandil Balak. In her case the perils have become obvious in her death. The possibilities lie in the fact that her brother was arrested that because of her popularity via the social media attitudinal change about the status of women in Pakistani society might have a positive effect on social policy. As we continue to consider the question of women, emergence and finding voice I also want to think like a psychologist and look at what are the impediments for emergence and voice what are the forces ranged within us and against us that keep us silent inhabiting the margins, the private sphere. Bell Hooks in an early book of essays called Talking Back Thinking Feminist Thinking Black writes about her experience growing up black and female in the American South where children were meant to be seen and not heard. She writes, to make yourself heard if you were a child was to invite punishment. And yet she says that what was born in her was the craving to speak to have a voice and not just any voice but one that could be identified as belonging to me to make my voice I had to speak to hear myself talk and talk I did darting in and out of grown folks conversations and dialogues answering questions endlessly asking questions making speeches needless to say the punishments for these acts of speech seemed endless they were intended to silence me the child and more particularly the girl child had I been a boy they might have encouraged me to speak believing that I might someday be called to preach there was no calling for talking girls no legitimized rewarded speech overt and covert punishments externally then leading to shame and fear internally are the forces from within and without that prohibit voice that make women's emergence and finding voice the struggle it can be for so many so now I want to look at several idiosyncratically chosen texts by and about women to illustrate the difficult and daring movement out of silence and into speech a movement that bell hooks names as quote a gesture of defiance that heals that makes new life and new growth possible it is that act of speech of talking back that is no mere gesture of empty words that is the expression of our movement from object to subject the liberated voice my thoughts first turned toward the autobiographical novel of Harriet Jacobs called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl which was published in 1861 in this merging of the genres of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel Jacobs under the pseudonym of Linda Brent describes her life from early childhood where she was born into slavery she describes the relative ease of her early life where she was taught to read and write and so by her mother's mistress an extraordinary circumstance really for a slave child and then the difficulties after that mistress dies and she's placed in a new household with a five-year-old mistress whose father treats Linda as mere property as Linda approaches puberty he mounts increasing pressure to exploit her sexually Jacobs writes he told me that I was made for his use made to obey his command in everything that I was nothing but a slave whose will must and should surrender to his the war of my life had begun and though one of God's most powerless creatures I resolved never to be conquered alas for me in the narrative and in her life Linda Harriet was not conquered by her master instead in an act of resistance she takes a white lover Mr. Sands bears two children whom her master subsequently claimed as his slaves eventually Linda escapes and for seven long years hides in a crawl space in her grandmother's house evading capture and finally through a network of friends and abolitionists she makes her way to New York in a letter to the abolitionist Amy Post Harriet Jacobs wrote God gave me a soul that burned for freedom and a heart nerve with determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of liberty triumphing over fear determined in her pursuit of liberty Harriet Jacobs sought her freedom and then in that freedom risked even more by documenting her experience of exploitation and abuse in her autobiographical novel whose subtitle is an authentic historical narrative describing the horrors of slavery as experienced by black women a contemporary of Harriet Jacobs with an entirely different life experience is Julia Ward Howe whom we Unitarians claim as one of our foremothers widely known mostly for her penning the words to the battle hymn of the Republic a recent biography of Julia Ward Howe by the esteemed feminist scholar Elaine Showalter reveals a profound tension between her public and private selves mostly due to her marriage to Dr. Samuel Ridley Howe referred to as Chev short for Chevalier he'd been awarded the title by the King of Greece for his six year participation in the Greek War for Independence a resume of Julia Ward Howe would illuminate an intellectual literary and industrious life of a woman born into privilege her father, a wealthy New York banker she knew six languages she published six books she traveled all over the world she was an ardent abolitionist and later in life an ardent advocate for women's suffrage she founded and led the American Women's Suffrage Association as well as the New England Women's Club among others she was the first woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters behind the resume in the life lived revealed by Showalter's narrative was a woman who struggled significantly within the restrictions of her husband's deeply patriarchal views of a woman's place which was in the home and involved in maternity and not in the public sphere or in literary production she also struggled for her own internalization of those societal and gender norms as we'll see later Julia Ward Howe was referred to from childhood on as the diva she was spirited, musical and vibrantly intellectual her family supported her intellectual and literary pursuits she was privately tutored and studied mathematics philosophy, music and history after the death of her mother in childbirth however her father's grief turned him toward Calvinism and the sense of freedom and joy that had pervaded Julia's early childhood was transformed by the age of 12 Julia began to note the differences between the education and expectations of and for her brothers versus her and expressed frustration and longing in this quote from an earlier biography she says I made rhymes and even dreamed of speeches and orations often wishing that I had been a boy in view of the limitations on a girl's aspirations after the death of her father in 1839 Julia's morning took the form of a retrenchment in Calvinist theology much like her father's did after the death of his wife showalter notes with significance a turning point in Julia's life when after her older brother's sudden death from typhoid fever and at the urging of her first significant female friend who was also her brother's fiance she studied her way out of the mental agonies which Calvinism can engender and became a Unitarian showalter comments that this was a first and very decisive time that Julia's intellectual studies led her to action and to autonomy so Julia and Chev then Chev who was a Harvard trained physician and established a lifelong career as a liberator of the blind from institutionalization who was an educator of the blind and deaf they met in 1841 and were married in 1843 there were signs in the courtship of the difficulty to come as Chev many years Julia's senior would switch from flirtatious to patronizing and corrective in his letters to Julia for her part Julia's letter announcing their engagement revealed what I call a full throated embrace of a fairytale fantasy in her role in it she wrote the Chevalier says truly I am captive of his bow and spear true devotion has won me from the world and from myself the past is already fading from my sight already I begin to live with him in the future which shall be as calmly bright as love can make it I am perfectly happy to sacrifice to one so noble and so earnest the day dreams of my youth he will make life more beautiful to me than any dream well her perfect happiness and her sacrifice of self gave way to increasing despair as Julia struggled within the confines of this marriage and her adaptation to her role as a mother as articulated in a role to her sister Louisa she writes dearest weavy what is this problem are we meant to change so utterly are our hearts to fade and die out with our early bloom and in giving life to others do we lose our vitality and sink into dimness nothingness and living death I have come to him have left my poetry my music my religion show Walter painstakingly documents the tension in the marriage that results from Chev's complete lack of support for Julia's literary pursuits three years into the marriage Julia writes again to her sister Louisa my voice is still frozen to silence my poetry chained down by an icy band of indifference I begin at last to believe that I am no poet and never was one saved in my imagination despite this expression of despair and foreclosure Julia did continue to write and in 1853 her first book of poetry Passion Flowers was published to significant notice this publication was the provocation of a significant rupture in the relationship between Julia and Chev because Chev was furious about the book and responded as though publicly humiliated divorce was contemplated but Julia was unwilling to choose the loss and dislocation from her children that would have been the inevitable consequence one of the significant points of interest for me in the reading of show Walter's biography is her discussion of a manuscript found amid the boxes of Julia's papers in the Houghton library at Harvard the manuscript is of a novel begun by Julia between 1846 and 1848 which was never finished nor published and which is a Quince Le Romand the story of an artist development in it Lawrence the protagonist is born with both male and female sexual organs but is raised as a boy by his parents in the imagining of this narrative we see Julia seeking a way out of the confines and the confining strictures of gender women artists in show Walter's words is quote not only a divided soul but also a monster doomed to solitude and sorrow feminist literary scholar Joanne Fry suggests in her book Living Stories Telling Lives that women writers choose what she calls fantastic narrative modes as a way to free themselves from the power of current gender-based assumptions that serve to stifle imagination and voice we can see that Julia sought freedom for her intellectual pursuits for her literary voice and its expression of freedom that was hard won in her historical moment in general and within her marriage to Shev in particular and that that pursuit was not without personal peril and cost perhaps nothing could be more stifling of imagination or voice than time served in prison time served in solitary confinement a recent play I had the privilege to attend called Mariposa and the Saint from solitary confinement a play through letters is a contemporary work by Sarah Fonseca a tribal woman and mother of two who is in isolated confinement in a prison in California and Julia Steel Allen an activist organizer and playwright against seemingly impossible odds the two corresponded back and forth beginning in 2012 slowly developing a narrative revealing the rigors and realities for Mariposa in prison in the collaborative drafting of the play Julia provided a channel for Sarah's expression of a self that survives despite the terrible isolation degradation and deprivation of prison life the play featured two characters Mariposa and a masked anonymous guard whose presence was both ubiquitous and ominous a symbol of the forces ranged against her the monologues of the character of Mariposa revealed the forces ranged within her fear anger despair at her condition loss of self and loss of sense of connection to anything larger at one point in the play breaking the fourth wall Mariposa played by Julia Steel Allen herself at the behest of Sarah Fonseca turns to the audience and asks a question I have for the normal if you were suddenly ripped from your life with no access to the world nothing to help you what would you mourn what would you ache for you can answer Bell Hooks then reminds us that speaking out is not a simple gesture of freedom in a culture of domination finding a voice is an essential part of liberation struggle when we end our silence when we speak in a liberated voice our words connect us with anyone anywhere who lives in silence may all of us then find our way to voice to the fullest expression of who we are challenging the forces ranged within us and against us and within us so that we may all be free blessed be an amen please be generous this morning in your giving to First Unitarian Society for our programs and its possibility and there's a change of program I will not be doing parents testimony although beautiful song this is a serah or else unpositioned call of raving I think quite appropriate those find a place where they can be received, celebrated and honored we didn't have any entries in the book I want to just remind everyone that at the little table outside of the double doors is the book for such notices so please remember and add in if you desire may we silently in the spirit of empathy and hope hold in our hearts in our hands the unspoken joys and concerns of this community because of this time shared may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded I don't have a program what's next ah let's sing together hymn number 1026 if every woman in the world please rise Helen Herschel 1750 to 1848 astronomer sister of William and others a woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman in the snow among the clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles in her 98 years to discover eight comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses galaxies of women there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind an eye virile, precise and absolutely certain from the mad webs of Uranusborg and countering the nova every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us taiko whispering at last let me not seem to have lived in vain what we see we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive heartbeat heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body the radio impulse pouring in from torus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so involuted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me and has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind oh god