 Good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Aspreuth Jackson and the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Daniel Carnes and Stephen Gregorius. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, our community and our world. If you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, our programs and activities, please stop by the welcome table right outside in the commons sort of across from the center doors. And we'd like to call your attention to our Because of You event. If you haven't seen it yet, there's little postcards out on that welcome table. It is our volunteer and donor recognition event coming up on Friday evening. The registration deadline is Wednesday, so if you were thinking of attending and haven't had a chance to register yet, please do. And for those connecting with us virtually today, we are so very glad you are with us as well and we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following the service. The Zoom information for that coffee hour can be found on the home page of our website, fussmedicine.org. It will also be on the slide shown after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service and we encourage you to take a moment to learn more about all those upcoming events. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We speak so often of brokenness in religious life. Let us speak today of wholeness. You are welcome here, all of you, every part of you beautiful, just the way you are. Here you do not need to be something more or something less. No holding back, no hiding, no exerting yourself, no trying to do more or be more. You have inherent worth and dignity, nothing to prove here, nothing to prove to me or to the person sitting next to you or to the children or to anyone. You don't have to try and be witty or more quiet or more outgoing. You are beautiful, every part of you beautiful just the way you are. You do not need to change anything about yourself to be welcome here. Your skin, your hair, your belly, your limbs, your face, all beautiful just the way they are. You are extraordinary. Each and every one of you different from each and beautiful in your own beautiful way. Breath taking. Come, let us worship together. And I invite you now to rise in all the ways we do and join in the words of affirmation as we light our chalice. Within the heart of the flower, the fountain of beauty, within the heart of the community, a fire that warms and dances, within the heart of each of us, a spark of the spirit of life. The story that I wanna tell you this morning is from some of the folks who live in the upper, the northeast corner of the nation that used to be called Zaire and is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. And this story is about the most beautiful bird in the world. The time was that everyone knew about this bird and how beautiful it was and how whenever it opened up its wings, the rains came and how they stopped when it closed them again. And because everyone knew about the bird and how beautiful it was and how important it was because everything that lives needs the rain, the people had many different songs about this bird and they had many different dances about this bird and that's the way that it went for a long time, but not forever. Eventually, people started to forget the songs and the dances. They forgot why the bird was important. It started with the people in the middle, the people who were not children anymore and weren't elders yet. It wasn't their fault that they forgot. They had very full and busy and demanding lives and it just sort of happened. The elders didn't forget, at least not all of them, but it is a true thing that over a long enough span of time, every elder will become an ancestor. And so one day there weren't any elders left who remembered about the bird. The children remembered the longest because children teach other children how to be children. So in the games and stories of childhood, wisdom can hide that is lost in every other corner of the world, but even the children forgot. And so, neglected and unappreciated, the bird folded its wings and the rains didn't come for a very long time. Life got very hard. One day in the midst of all of this, a young girl was walking in the forest and she happened to spy in a tree the most beautiful bird she'd ever seen before in her life. She thought how gorgeous it was, but also how hungry it looked because she and every other thing that eats, well, they were all hungry in those days without the rain. So she went home to her mother and she asked her mother for a little bit of extra food. Now her mother knew full well that they didn't have any food to spare because nobody did. But a child can be very determined when they want to be and eventually she convinced her mother to give her just a little bit of food basically to make her go away. And so she took that back into the forest and she offered it to the bird who ate out of her hand. The bird seemed pleased and it spread out its wings for a moment. And that night it rained. The girl said to her parents, it rained because I fed that bird in the forest and they said that's not the way that the world works. But the next day, the girl went to her father this time and asked for a little bit of extra food. Now her father was a tough nut to crack, but nonetheless she wore him down and taking the little bit that he gave to her, she went back into the forest to where she'd seen that bird before and she fed it again. While it was eating out of her hand she sang a little, little non-fenced tune that she just made up on the spot and the bird seemed to like that very much. It opened its wings again and it rained again and now she was even more certain than before that this was the reason why it was raining. So the next day she said the same thing she'd said before to her father that the rains were coming because she was feeding that bird in the forest and this time, instead of just shaking his head, the father said, all right, so there's this bird, why don't you show it to me? And he took a little bit of food in one hand. They took his bow in the other and they went into the forest and she showed him where the bird was and he shot it and the bird fell to the earth and then he fell to the earth. And then all the trees in the entire forest fell to the earth. Everyone else who lived in the girl's village fell to the earth and she was alone. She took out an m'bura, which is like a little tiny piano that you play with your thumbs and she just sang that little nonsense tune that she'd come up with before because she didn't have anything else to do and the people in the village stood up again and the trees stood back up again and her father stood back up again and the bird went back to its place on the branch all because she sang that song and the bird stretched out its wings again and the rains came and so they always will so long as people remember the story. I invite you now into a time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains our community here and also supports the work of our outreach offering recipient. This week's offering will be shared with Heartland Farm Sanctuary. Heartland provides high quality specialized care, hope and healing for farm animals who have suffered abuse, neglect and have nowhere else to go. Their camps, field trips and clubs give learners of all ages the opportunity to gain insight into meeting animals' needs for safety, nourishment and relationships with others. So you'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will see the text to give information there as well and there are also baskets at the doors here for those of you in the auditorium. We thank you as always for your generosity and for your faith in this life we create together. 3,510 years ago, Hot Shepshit, one of the very few women to rule Egypt as a pharaoh in her own right. Undertook something momentous that had not been attempted for hundreds of years, a trade mission to the land of punt. It's a little unclear just exactly where the place that the Egyptians called punt was, but most likely it was somewhere on the coast of the Horn of Africa. Not tremendously far from Egypt by modern standards but a monumental undertaking in a place and at a time when just building a ship that could sail on the sea was a spectacularly complex and expensive proposition. The trade mission was apparently successful as it was commemorated in carvings on the walls of Hot Shepshit's funerary temple. And it is in this tableau that we find a striking image nearly unique in all of Egyptian artwork. Nearly all ancient Egyptian art, whether painted or carved or both, is highly idealized. Bodies are represented as slender and youthful. Even the Egyptian royalty whose preserved bodies we now have, their mummies, seem to have chosen to have themselves depicted not as they were in life with potbellies or thinning hair but in keeping with the idealized forms of the beauty standards of the society that they lived in. But a figure from the wall of Hot Shepshit's temple identified as the queen of punt departs from these conventions completely. Where all of the other figures around her are slim and simplified, drawn with relatively few lines, her body is thick and ample. The detail of all the folds of her flesh are shown making her image dramatically more intricate than anyone else's. There is debate about exactly why this is. It has been suggested by some that it's a piece of low-brow political propaganda that the depiction is meant to be an insult from Hot Shepshit to the queen of punt. But we know essentially nothing about the culture of that country. It's questionable how much the ancient Egyptians actually knew about it, other than that there were things there that they couldn't have at home and that they wanted to go and get. So another possible explanation is that this is a relatively faithful representation of an actual person and that this person may have, for all we know, matched the beauty standards for a woman of power and privilege in her place and time. In the modern West, which has such narrow expectations of physical beauty, especially for women, this possibility may be hard to imagine, but please trot. The idea of a society in which, by popular agreement, a body could be beautiful specifically because of its fatness. What a culture or nation or just an individual person holds to be beautiful can vary wildly. We may try to explain some of the more popular standards with concepts of elegance or symmetry or perceived physical health, but always there are exceptions or contrary cases. But it is also an unavoidable truth that for most of the time and space and cultural content accounted for in the current written record of history, the power to steer and control culture to make or sponsor or preserve or censor art and expression has been concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group. And that relatively small group has until very recently in much of the world been made up nearly entirely of men. The film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term to be looked atness, to describe the way in which expectations of physical beauty shape and limit the view of women and their bodies in art and by extension in the living world. Even often within their own selves. I want to talk with you today about the flexibility and the subjective nature of beauty. But before we can dive deeply into that, we first must acknowledge that the power to fully express and realize our own subjective understanding of what is beautiful is not distributed equally in our society indeed it never has been. So as with anything that matters, any consideration of the high ideals and aspirations that we share as a faith and as community, we will always find ourselves having to return to the question of power, of who has more and who has less and how our world might be reshaped in the direction of that beautiful ambition, a place in which all are free and empowered to fully experience the worth and dignity inherent in all of our lives. So not forgetting about power, but acknowledging it and expanding our view, we might say that in considering whether or not a person, an image, a sound, a flavor, or even an idea is beautiful, there is truly no accounting for taste. Yet if beauty sometimes seems arbitrary or irrational or at least inconsistent across all people in all places and times, that does nothing to mar or diminish its magnetic attraction for us. Consider the Song of Songs, a book of the Hebrew Bible which contains a number of lines that might be familiar to some of you, including these. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away with me. For now the winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of singing has come. The Song of the Turtle Dove is heard in our land, the green figs form on the fig tree, the vines in blossom give off fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away with me. The work is not only a celebration of beauty, but an example of the ways in which love and beauty weave together. We have a tendency to love what we find beautiful and to find beautiful that which we love. Much modern biblical scholarship agrees that the Song of Songs was originally not a religious work at all, but written as a piece of courtly love poetry. Yet it has survived for millennia because of its interpretation as an allegory of the love between a single human soul or a nation of souls or the whole of humanity on one side and the divine on the other. Adoring, cherishing, yearning for, reaching out towards each other, each in awe and appreciation of the other's beauty, humankind for the world and its source and the world itself equally infatuated with humanity. In his novel, The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut pauses the larger story to offer an imaginary ecology of the planet Mercury. Mercury, he explains, has a song all its own. There's no atmosphere, so the song exists only in a vibration in the substance of the planet itself. It isn't heard so much as it is felt. Down below the planet's surface, there are caverns that glow with a phosphorescent yellow light, and here live the world's only inhabitants. The creatures are incredibly flat, diamond-shaped things. They cling to the walls listening to the song of Mercury with their bodies and feeding from its vibrations. As the yellow light of the caverns passes through their impossibly thin bodies, it changes from a bright yellow to a vibrant aquamarine. For the benefit of no one in particular, for there is normally no being in those caverns with the capacity of sight, they arrange themselves into complex and beautiful geometric patterns, creating gorgeous displays of light, color, and shape, simply out of instinct. This species is intelligent, but they have no experience of hunger or fear, no need for religion or war. Once humans first encounter them, they call them the harmoniums because they are so naturally harmonious. Their language has only two declarations in it, and the one always elicits the other as a reply in a constant cycle of call and response. One harmonium expresses over and over again, here I am, here I am, here I am, here I am. And the answer comes back, so glad that you are, so glad that you are, so glad that you are, so glad that you are. As Vonnegut observes through the narrative voice, nature is a wonderful thing. Of course here, Vonnegut is simply imagining through a flight of science fiction fantasy, a new example to add to the grand and glorious list of exquisitely beautiful things which may be found in the natural world. From the height of the horse head nebula to the level of a double rainbow in the sky, to two otters holding hands as they float, or the way that trees may interweave their roots in the earth in order to share nutrients and water with each other. But if these all seem like easy and uncontroversial examples of beauty, nature has no shortage of more complicated sensations for us to consider. In some parts of Southeast Asia, especially in tightly enclosed public spaces such as a train or a bus, you may find a distinctive sign mixed in with placards declaring no smoking and no pets. The image in the middle of the universal no sign, the red circle with the diagonal line through it, is the silhouette of a rough oval or circle with very jagged edges. This is a no durian sign. Eating durian can sometimes be a finable offense even in places where eating and drinking is allowed because the smell of durian is probably the most divisive scent among all fruits eaten by humans anywhere on earth. Descriptions of the smell often make comparisons to skunk, cream cheese, body odor, rotting onions, and turpentine. Yet among those who have actually eaten the custard-like interior of the fruit, which I confess I have not, there are many loyal champions of its distinctive flavor. There wouldn't have to be rules against it if there weren't a large number of people in the parts of the world where the fruit is grown who would like to be able to go about their day in public enjoying the taste of this notoriously smelly fruit. Now because we're talking in part today about the subjectivity of beauty, it's being as is so often said in the eye of the beholder, there's an obscure but I promise relevant point of interest that I have to relate. As some of you know, I've been a fan of dungeons and dragons ever since I was first taught to play the game as a tween at a Unitarian Universalist summer camp. And a lot of the creatures and monsters associated with D&D are familiar from legend and folklore, elves, goblins, trolls, dragons obviously, but there are some that are truly unique to that system of collective storytelling. And one of the most recognizable of these is the beholder. You might almost be able to guess at its appearance from the name alone. The creature is an enormous floating sphere with a great big single eye right on the front of it. Mouthful of unruly teeth hanging at the bottom of the ball and then a whole bunch more eyes stuck on stalks sticking off the top of the head. I considered putting an image of this up on the screen but I decided people don't come to church to have their sleep disturbed at night so you're welcome. Now the fact that it's made up mostly of eyes isn't the only thing about the beholder that is well matched to its name because beholders are universally devoted to beauty. Devoted might be an understatement. Violently obsessed with beauty might be more accurate. You see each and every beholder has an inherent sense that it is the best and the most beautiful exemplar of its species, that its stalks are arranged in just the right way, that its eyes are precisely the right combination of colors, that the wrinkles of its skin flex and bend in the perfect places. Every beholder understands itself to be the most beautiful thing in the universe. And for this reason it cannot tolerate the existence of any other living thing even and especially other beholders. This seems to me to point to something true. That it is possible to adore a beautiful thing to an excess which is destructive to our own health or the health and well-being of others. And that possibly the easiest thing to adore in this destructive way is our own self. Yet if there is a love for beauty which can exceed the good, that still does not mean that appreciation for beautiful things is an impediment to right thought or right action or even that it is not actually essential to both of those things. The tradition says that when the Buddha attained full enlightenment it was at the very end of night as he looked up and beheld the morning star. Zen priest Kurt Spellmeyer points out that Siddhartha had almost certainly seen this same star many times before but now he was seeing it in a new way for the first time. The beauty of it changed not because of some difference in the star but because of a difference in the one beholding the star. The Buddha is said to have said that the dharma, the teaching he was driven to share, is beautiful at the beginning, beautiful in the middle and beautiful at the end. The perspective of a practitioner necessarily changes profoundly over time if they come to understand and appreciate the impermanence of all things and gradually dissolve their attachments to the same. But the Buddha's affirmation about the presence of beauty on each step towards enlightenment and the connection between his own moment of total realization and an observation of the natural world seems to me to make clear that the emptying of the self which is called for in deep Buddhist practice doesn't mean a renunciation of beauty, only an evolution of it. Practicing nonattachment does not mean no longer experiencing the beautiful. Here is Kurt Spellmeyer's explanation of this. The world we take for granted with its gardens and flowers arises through an artistry not our own from a place deeper than thought. And we participate in that artistry when we recognize the visible as part of an invisible whole. There, form and emptiness, as Zen tradition says, are like the matching halves of a broken coin joined together at last. If this is not the same as the eternal debate about whether a joke can be funny after you explain it or whether a thing can be beautiful after you interrogate its beauty, then I think the questions are at least related. The famous and notorious theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once spoke in an interview about how exploring the why, underlying the perceptible world, magnified his sense of awe and his appreciation for beauty. Here's what he said. I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, look how beautiful it is. And I'll agree. Then he says, as an artist, I can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take it all apart and it becomes a dull thing, taking issue with his friend's premise, Feynman explained. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter, there's also beauty at smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate, it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question, does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower, it only adds. I don't understand how it's subtracted. Scientific inquiry has, in fact, taught us that some insects, bees, for example, can see a range of light that is not visible to us. You or I, and a bee, might be drawn to the same daffodil as an example, but what we would see, and what the bee would see, in examining the same flower, would be considerably different. And this is just one of an inordinate number of ways in which it is possible for different people to find the same thing beautiful for entirely different reasons, as the great weaver of words, Annie Dillard, so famously said, "'We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, "'to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.'" Together, we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach, but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature, so the creation need not play to an empty house. If I do not yet fully understand the function of witnessing the morning star in the Buddha's moment of enlightenment, I try to forgive myself this limitation. As I am profoundly aware, every moment of every hour that I have not yet attained enlightenment, but there is a holiness that I find in our shared human capacity to appreciate the beautiful, each from our own perspective, each to our own particular taste. And it is that expressed very well by Dillard's words, to notice each thing so that each thing gets noticed. Or to frame it more in terms of Kurt Vonnegut's words from earlier, to truly recognize the beauty in anything, an object, an event, another person, even our own selves, is to begin a reciprocal dialogue that nurtures and supports all involved. Here I am, here I am, here I am, here I am. So glad that you are, so glad that you are, so glad that you are, so glad that you are. Each week we bring ourselves to this time and this place carrying with us all the concerns and the joys of recent days. We share these here in a spirit of acceptance and support knowing they are held in love. We light a candle of love and support for Karen Jaeger, who has entered into hospice in Missoula, Montana. We hold Karen and Jim and their family in love as they walk these days together. And we light a candle for Bruce Herbolt, pastor of the South Park UCC Congregation in Rapid City, South Dakota, my dear colleague and friend. Bruce passed away tragically at the end of March after just completing his 40th year of ministry and beginning to think about retirement. Bruce had a gentle soul, a warm smile and a laugh that brought out the best in all of us. He was a gift and he's deeply missed. We send our love to his wife, Levan, their four children and families and to all the members of the South Park Congregation who were blessed to have him for 36 years. We light a candle in acknowledgement of Yom HaShoah, the day for the remembrance of the Holocaust observed this past week. May the memory of the past renew our determination to oppose genocide anywhere against anyone ever again. And we light a candle of strength and support for Susan Vile, who is undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Susan welcomes prayers for her and her husband, Dennis Burkey, as they go on this journey. And we light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and their struggle. Together we yearn for peace for them and for all people and an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. And if you will join me now in a moment of prayer with these words from Mason Bolton. Spirit of all that lives and moves within and between us, good morning. Some mornings it is hard to hear the good in that phrase. There are days we miss the good because of people suffer, because too many people suffer, because war, because hunger, because some mornings it is just hard to rise, to wake, to be a self. May we pause here. May we have a deliberate interruption, a ceasing, a ceasing of the noises in our heads, a halting to the ache in the collective heart of this world. When we were young, this seemed possible. When we were young, how hope seemed to truly spring eternal. We want to think of butterflies, about the cracked edges of tree bark pressing like a holy mother into palms. We want to speak of the joy of children's laughter, about the smiles of those we love. We want to think of joy, of mornings that are good and evenings that are good and sunrises and afternoons and moments of life that cause us to sigh, to smile, to say, ah, this is good. May we breathe here now, breathe for yourself, for each other. Let us breathe in when others cannot, when we can do nothing else. Let us stretch ourselves open to embrace our friends, extend ourselves outward to anyone willing to meet us, and even those we think may not be willing. May we hold each other for this moment, for this blink of human existence. Blessed be and amen. The courage to sing your part. The world is too broken to be healed by only one set of hands. May you have the courage to use your gifts. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.