 silent so we can be fully present this morning. Now let's get musically present by turning to the words for in gathering him which you find inside your order of service. What must appear to some of you or feel to some of you as if it's the 10 o'clock service here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe nurturing and early environment to explore issues of a social spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg a proud sleep deprived member of this congregation and I'd like to extend a happy hello to those who are watching at home or listening at home and a special welcome to any guests visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society you'll find it's a special place and we invite you to join us for fellowship right after the service out in the commons. And if you are accompanied by a youngster today we welcome youngsters but sometimes they might prefer to enjoy the service from a another spot a private space. We offer a couple options for you one is our child haven in the back corner of the room and then we also offer some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons. This will be a great time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need for the next hour so thanks for taking care of that. And speaking of taking care of each other it would be a shame and shame on me if I would forget to acknowledge the wonderful volunteers who helped make the service run smoothly today. So our appreciation to Mark Schultz who's handling the sound system. To Patty Witte who greeted us so warmly upstairs. And Smiley who is serving today as our lay minister. Thank you Anne. Thank you to Helen Dyer and Doug Hill our ushers. To Sharon Stratish and Gene Hills who are hosting the all important coffee and hospitality hour a little later today. And Betty Evenson who makes sure that the vegetation here up on the stage is vibrant and green. Just a couple announcements here for you before we begin the service. You know that we have been encouraging pledges for our annual campaign. And somebody not I won the 2016 17 annual campaign gift basket. Her name is Kirsten Sieber. Congratulations to Chris Kirsten for pledging and for winning. I didn't win but I did get a heart on my name tag because like Kirsten and many of you I completed the pledge form. And if you haven't had a chance to do that yet please take advantage of extra pledge forms that are available in the Commons after the service. The other announcement is that the magic number today is 68. We keep pushing it back a little bit on you. Cabaret is now scheduled for May 20th. But you'll have a chance to experience a night in Italy on Friday May 20th right here a night in Italy Italian food gourmet food Italian music I don't know what gourmet music but Italian music and while the food and music will be Italian the auction items will be strictly Unitarian in other words Unitarians will be donating the auction items. It's a very important fundraiser for the place we love so well the place called First Unitarian Society and we need your help to make this night in Italy a very special experience for everybody on Friday May 20th only how many days from now 68 they're paying attention already Michael that's good. Today's sermon in fact is a result of a cabaret auction item so cabaret is the kind of thing that keeps on giving even after the evening itself is over. Speaking of things that are beginning or ending we are about to begin our service so please sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service I know it will touch your heart stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts we're glad you're here. Come into this place that is made holy by our very presence. Come in with all of your vulnerabilities and your strengths your fears your anxieties your hopes and your love here you do not need to hide you do not need to pretend you do not need to be anything other than you are or are called to be come into this place where we can touch and be touched heal and be healed forgive and be forgiven come into this place where the ordinary is sanctified life is glorified and compassion is realized come into this place together we make it a holy place I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation that are printed in this morning's program for every disappointment from which we have new growth from every disillusionment after which we have a relighting of hope from every disaster after which we have a resurrection into new life we light this chalice and now in the spirit of that new life please turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting please be seated well the ranks of our young people seem a little thin today but if we do have some young people that would like to come forward for the message for all ages we would invite you to do so I feel like you're like these adults that sit in the back in the supposed Paul of Tarsus said where two or three are gathered so it looks like some of your friends oh you've got you've got a blue heart looks like some of your friends didn't realize that daylight savings time began today and they're probably still at home in bed but here your parents got you up and brought you to church right so today is when daylight savings time begins and so we're gonna have more light at night and less light in the morning at least for a while yeah today is also March the 13th and it's the birthday of someone who was born almost 300 years ago in England and this man's name was Joseph Priestley and Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian minister a long time ago in England which is way across the ocean long long way from here and Joseph Priestley was someone who really is given credit for spreading Unitarianism in England and then also kind of helping it to get started here in the United States he was a very very highly respected man and a lot of important people came to his church where he preached and included in those people were the grandparents of a very famous scientist who was named was Charles Darwin Charles Darwin's grandparents came to the church that Joseph Priestley served now Joseph Priestley was a Unitarian minister but actually he's famous more famous because he was a scientist too he did he wrote a lot of things about religion and Unitarianism but he also wrote a lot about science he studied electricity you know the thing that makes our lights go on and off and because he was so interested in electricity he made friends with a guy here in the United States who was also interested in electricity and his name was Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin became really good friends and they would correspond they would write to each other across the Atlantic Ocean and through Benjamin Franklin he got to know two U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and became friends with them as well and when really late in his life Joseph Priestley got into some really bad trouble in England for his political views well the people in England didn't like him anymore and he thought to himself I can't stay in England so Thomas Jefferson our third president wrote to him and said Joseph why don't you come here and live in the United States and that's exactly what he did but he's basically remembered today as a scientist now when Pete when he was alive Joseph Priestley was alive people didn't get paid for doing science okay there were no professional scientists and so what happened is is that a lot of the people who like to do science and do experiments and explore the natural world well they were actually ministers because back then ministers had a lot of extra time on their hands don't we wish today right a scientist were very very curious people and Joseph Priestley was very very curious about the natural world and how it works why things happen the way they do like what is it that causes the rain to fall or how is it that fish can breathe underwater we know that don't we because they have these things called gills you know to help them breathe underwater yeah and the thing about it is though is that scientists couldn't just go out to the store and buy the equipment that he needed to study all these things so Joseph Priestley if you look up there made his own equipment this is an example of one of the things that he made to help with his scientific experiments now one of the things that had really kind of puzzled people confused them for a long long time was why if you were to do something like this lighting a candle and it's doing just fine so I put a glass over the top of it what's happening to it it went out didn't it and people would see that happen and they couldn't exactly figure out why it was that when a candle is put under a glass like this it didn't keep burning because they didn't know anything about air okay they just thought that air is just this nothing that's all around us right it's the space between things and they didn't understand anything about the fact that air is not empty air is full of what gases different kinds of gases so there's nitrogen in the air 70% of the air around us is nitrogen and there's methane and there's carbon dioxide and then there's also what we breathe and keeps us alive oxygen oxygen and what Joseph Priestly did is he he keep the device he came up with this experiment where he could measure the air in the glass and what he found out is that when a flame was under the glass and burning and then it finally goes out or if you put a little animal under there like a mouse and the mouse dies under it that only 20% of the air is used up in this glass and that 20% is the oxygen that the flame needs to stay alive and that all of us need to stay alive and so he discovered that there's this 20% of the air that's made up of this gas that we all need to live the gas is oxygen now this led to a lot of other discoveries that Joseph Priestly made about air and about gases but then there was one experiment that he performed that he said was the most important experiment he'd ever done and it's the one that made him the absolute happiest and this was an experiment in which he was able to somehow combine carbon dioxide with plain old water in order to make carbonated water which allows us to drink what water and soda pop Coca-Cola 7-up all those good things and if you get older maybe beer so anyway Joseph Priestly was the one who kind of came up with this idea this artificial way of making carbonated water so that we could have soft drinks to drink so the next time for a very very special occasion when your parents give you a little coke or a little 7-up you remember to thank our good friend Joseph Priestly because he's the one that invented this so he spent the last few years of his life here in the United States in a little town in Pennsylvania and while he was there he began speaking at a little chapel a little Unitarian Chapel and it was really one of the first Unitarian churches in the United States so here in the United States he was very important as one of the very earliest Unitarians and also a person that got people really excited about this whole new science the science of chemistry anybody here interested in being a scientist at some point in your life yeah so this is someone you're probably gonna learn about because he's very important in the history of science I didn't see him because I'm not old enough to see him he's been gone a long time well thank you for listening and we're going to now sing you out to your classes with our next him please be seated and so we continue with a selection from the historian Frederick Turner the holidays that divide our calendar were meant to remind us of something important something we shouldn't forget the word holiday after all means holy day religious holidays such as Passover and Easter they seek to transmute the memory of ancient suffering into the promise of better times to come at the center of the ritual is sacrifice whereby we acknowledge by some smaller act of voluntary loss the greater gifts that enable all of us to exist at all but from time to time civilization demands the creation of a new holiday a holiday to celebrate a mystery or to call humanity to some new self-awareness and we need a new holiday today because we need to be reminded that the great works of humanity the very best that we can do entail a heavy cost not only to ourselves but to the world we inhabit as a species we cringe at the thought of the price that we pay to live in civilization that we kill animals for food that we raise forests to provide ourselves with shelter that our cars and our factories darken the air both as a society and as individuals we are compelled to commit certain acts that make us ashamed after we have thought about them shame which is nothing other than the discovery of self figures in the foundational myth of nearly every culture on earth self-knowledge is human kind's most distinguishing attribute and our bodies inform us in a way that no other animal knows when we are caught in the ludicrous contradiction of our competing selves the blush hot feeling around the neck and cheeks arisen from the memory of something you did last night or even 20 years ago and yet that hot flush of shame when recognized and when accepted can serve as a prelude to a strange fresh moment of transformation of epiphany both for the individual and for society for this we do require some a ritual that enlarges the essential paradox of our humanity and so I propose the creation of a new festival to be observed on the first Monday of August a month without a national holiday and its name will be blushing Monday and on this day we will recognize our destructive nature and we will celebrate our creativity and our lunacy the mood of the day will be shockingly mixed deadly serious comically manic cynical idealistic horrified and joyful we will accuse ourselves forgive ourselves celebrate the absurd joy of mortal conscious living everyone on blushing Monday has to dress and act in the most embarrassing way that he or she can imagine everyone must say the most embarrassing thing that comes into his head the thing that everybody thinks but nobody says either civilization is worth the cost or humanity is obliged to purge itself from the earth and because we have not chosen the latter option we owe it to the world to give thanks on this particular day for its sacrifices thank you so much meeting house chorus the text to that anthem is known as the prayer of yellow lark and that's one of my favorites and it's wonderful to see that it's set to music and now we say goodbye to any number of our choir members who are preparing for all music Sunday which we will be observing next week and if you're confused about the time change today just be aware of the fact that next week's services are at 10 o'clock in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon so we hope to see many of you for this fantastic presentation of Dona Nobby's Poetry next week well I recently finished reading a fascinating history of the Vanderbilts at one time one of the wealthiest families in the world starting with virtually no assets no capital Cornelius Vanderbilt better known as the Commodore he created a transportation empire in the decades following the Civil War and the Commodore son William he expanded his father's network of railroads and steamship routes and the Vanderbilts social and economic influence helped to define the gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries subsequent generations of this family spent lavishly building a half dozen mansions along New York's Fifth Avenue huge estates in North Carolina Long Island and New Jersey they commissioned the world's largest private yachts they decorated their various homes with medieval tapestries and old masters and the Vanderbilts entertained ceaselessly this in fact became their work this was a requirement of their lofty social station and it was also a competitive contest that they engaged in with their equally wealthy peers now naturally only the right people were invited to these elaborate soirees European nobles powerful politicians and others like themselves who had more money than they knew what to do with in describing those who belonged to this privileged set a reporter observed that its members quote devoted themselves to pleasure regardless of expense having read that comment one wealthy New York socialite corrected the journalist no she said we devote ourselves to expense regardless of pleasure an incident took place once at florham Florence Vanderbilt Twomley's 1200 acre estate in New Jersey and it reveals the ethos of America's privileged elite in this particular era Mrs. Vanderbilt had invited several dozen guests to spend the Labor Day weekend in her 110 room house emerging from breakfast after the weekend Monday morning these visitors were surprised to find their bags all packed and waiting for their owners near the front door surely madam does not expect us to leave today one guest asked the butler this is Labor Day this is a federal holiday all businesses and offices are closed today the butler bowed slightly and left to convey this concern to the lady of the house returning shortly he announced to the gathered guests begging your pardon Mrs. Vanderbilt says to tell you that she has never heard of Labor Day this was of course an earlier era and with the stock market crash of 1929 and the widespread pain caused by the Great Depression such posturing came to be seen as callous and utterly inappropriate overt displays of wealth and privilege had become in fact a cause for shame but not so much today for we are living in what some observers have described as a new gilded age one in which the conspicuous display of wealth and the use of great substance to tilt the political playing field have once again become common practice shortly after the recession of 2008 hundreds of millions of dollars were withdrawn from the nation's Treasury withdrawn to bail out some of the nation's largest financial institutions including the prime instigators of the mortgage meltdown and out of those taxpayer funds top executives in these very firms claimed huge bonuses for their work feathering their own nests at the expense of the recently foreclosed Jennifer Jacquet teaches environmental studies at New York University and she argues that shame can become for us an extra legal weapon in the fight against corporate greed and malfeasance even if no specific legal statute has been violated egregious instances like these of exploitation and influence peddling can be called out and Jaquette would target repeat offenders who seem to have scant regard for the public's well-being or for the health of the environment if shaming can benefit the community she says why not use it in ways that the community finds acceptable and that shaming can provide a powerful incentive to modify behavior was attested in the state of California when that state threatened to publish the names of its top tax delinquents on a website before that threat could be carried out by state officials California had received more than 400 million dollars in back taxes the communist witch hunts that shook the nation in the early 1950s afford another example during those years as we all know Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy gained a nationwide reputation by lodging basically unfounded accusations against functionaries in the State Department the Pentagon and other government agencies and for a time McCarthy was the most feared man in Washington if not in the United States but eventually he carried that crusade just a step or two too far and so at a nationally televised Senate hearing on June 9th 1954 an army defense attorney named Joseph Nye Welch rebuked the inquisitor have you know decency sir at long last have you left no sense of decency this episode succeeded in drawing a curtain of shame around Joseph McCarthy Wisconsin's junior senator and he left those hearings disgraced with much diminished power and with his departure a dark page in American history was finally turned over examples like these highlight the difference between a society in which shame can serve a constructive purpose and where it cannot the Vanderbilt's lived in an era in which the very wealthy lived lavishly and spent shamelessly often paying their employees less than a living wage and eventually and in keeping with changing social and cultural norms behaviors like this that one excite once excited admiration they had become a source of resentment and disapproval and sure enough America's wealthy learned to live less ostentatiously at least for a time similarly Joe McCarthy playing to the public sphere of the Soviet Union initially he enjoyed widespread support for his anti-communism efforts but eventually eventually those fears began to dissipate and McCarthy came to be seen as a persecutor rather than a savior public shaming hastened that man's downfall but what about today is shame still a part of our national conversation and does it to any degree deter public officials from acting inappropriately in ways that offend community standards or democratic values well not so much corporate leaders of stupendous wealth receive tax breaks and subsidies worth tens of billions of dollars while at the same time they promote policies that push middle and low-income Americans even lower on the economic ladder one is tempted to ask members of that plutocracy have you no shame have you at last no decency and when it comes to shamelessness what are we to make of Donald Trump whose scurrilous attacks on entire categories of human beings have become red meat for a large segment of disaffected Americans mr. Trump for whom shamelessness seems to have become a criterion of strong leadership has even incited his supporters to acts of physical violence in recent weeks does contemporary society need a renewed sense of shame Robert Karen is a psychotherapist who practices and teaches in New York City and he says that compared to other cultures he's familiar with we give shame rather short shrift people hear our strange about shame Karen's Asian students tell him you're strange about it so amitya etzioni a well-known spokesman for communitarianism has called for a revival of shame he says it can become an effective means of altering behavior and promoting the common good and so etzioni advocates publishing the names of men who solicit prostitutes of placing identifying labels on the license plates of those convicted of DWI of requiring serious troublemakers to wear special identifiable clothing like any tool etzioni argues shame can be abused but that does not make it wrong in principle but if not wrong in principle it is in fact often wrong in practice and whatever benefits it might confer we are probably right to be suspicious of this powerful and potentially disabling emotion but let's step back for a moment now and just ask ourselves what what what is it we're talking about here what is this shame how is it triggered what should we do about it well we can be begin answering that question by drawing a necessary distinction between shame and guilt the two terms are often used interchangeably but they are not at all the same thing according to Robert Bly we experience guilt when we have done something wrong recognize the need to atone for it shame on the other hand is the conviction often unwarranted that as a person you are an utterly inadequate being on this planet Barbara Flanagan agrees with that assessment guilt is an internal reaction to a moral transgression it is linked to doing something wrong and it presumes a measure of personal agency responsibility shame she says lacks that moral dimension it is the experience of feeling bad about oneself but not for having transgressed a person experiences shame not for what he or she does but for what he or she is one's very identity as a worthy person is called into question and exposed for everyone to see so unlike Jennifer jacket and amitya et suyoni houston universities brunet brown has serious reservations about the utility of shame it is often she says a cause for destructive behaviors and if shame once served a beneficent social purpose it no longer does according to brown an individual's negative behaviors can often be traced right back to unacknowledged shame it is she says highly correlated with conditions like addiction depression violence and aggression so when we think again about those fervent supporters of Donald Trump this kind of rings true because surveys indicate that many of Trump's followers have lost significant social and economic ground in recent times they may have slipped from the middle class to the lower class this is the same demographic that now leads the country in substance abuse and in suicide feeling inadequate and ashamed of their own ability to capture the American dream these are folks who need to find a scapegoat a person can respond to shame in one of several ways brunet brown says you can move away from it stuff it down keep it a deep dark secret you can move toward it which may mean ingratiating yourselves to others becoming an overcompensating people pleaser or you can move against shame by attacking those thought to be responsible for it shaming and hurting them in turn and this is the message that mr. Trump seems to be delivering when he promises I am going to make you great again I'm gonna make America great and again the unspoken subtext is only I can remove that painful shame living with active conscious shame can be very very distressing especially because one really doesn't know exactly what to do about it how to dispel it by fessing up to a moral transgression at atoning for it one can assuage the guilty conscience but since shame has to do with one's identity not with a particular wrongdoing what can you do with that other than disappear so think of the expressions that we use when we are ambushed by shame I could crawl into a hole I could sink through the floor I could just die so in this age of social media and of the internet this is important to keep in mind because there have been too many stories of impressionable teens and young adults who were driven to suicide or more rarely to acts of violence because embarrassing information about them was posted online exposed to the whole world these young people did not know how to live with themselves they certainly did not want to show their face in public anymore once you have been shamed on the internet Laura Kipnis writes you are shamed for life despite the various services that claim to be able to scrub search engines of the victims names that's very tragic kind of thing to happen to a person so is there anything that we can do to immunize people from this kind of shame to a certain extent yes and the formative years are so very important children who are raised by parents children who are exposed to teachers who help them to feel secure in themselves are much better able to deal with guilt and shame when they become adults it is so so easy to shame a person when he or she already possesses from childhood a sense of their own inadequacy their own unworthiness Francis Weller is a psychotherapist who recalls one morning when his young son came into the kitchen bursting with enthusiasm and yelling daddy daddy Weller was startled he was preparing breakfast and he snapped at his son stop that quit that at which point his son ran tearfully back into his own room Weller knew immediately that his behavior on that occasion was utterly inappropriate so he immediately went in to apologize you wanted something from me he said to his son and I didn't give it to you did I and his son responded I didn't think you wanted to be my daddy anymore that's how fast the rupture can occur Weller says and I thought to myself afterwards what would have happened if I kept on making breakfast if I had not gone in there my son would probably have been left with this thought that I just didn't want to be his father and beyond that that it was his fault humiliation Alice Miller notes was once a commonly used pedagogical strategy that teachers employed to erase what they called a child's self conceit and humiliation and shaming are still employed perhaps not as consciously not as rigorously as a classroom management tool when surveyed 85% of respondents as adults can remember one or more painful incidents in childhood and 90% of those people can remember the specific teacher administrator or coach who caused them shame much of this shaming is not meant to hurt students Brené Brown says but it does and we need to look for alternatives to using it now there are antidotes that are available to us of more mature years and Brené Brown recommended something that she calls rumbling the employment of mindfulness in pursuit of greater insight into the causes of our shame she says that those who are troubled by shame tend to ruminate a lot you know what's like to ruminate you turn these thoughts and feelings over and over in your mind without ever gaining a real sense of closure rumbling is different from ruminating its purpose Brown says is to get to the truth of the story what do I need to understand about myself what is the fictional part of the narrative and where is that coming from and when we do this kind of internal processing we may discover with Robert Karen that not all shame is the same so there is for instance what he calls class shame the shame that adheres to skin color social status sexual orientation or disability it is a divisive kind of shame used to stigmatize an entire class of individuals and it is all too visible in our political conversations today class shame and then there's what he calls narcissistic shame which leaves its possessor feeling utterly unlovable wholly inadequate and burdened with a curse as in a radical as original sin class based and narcissistic shame are both highly toxic and neither performs a useful service either to the individual or to the society we live in but in his typology Robert Karen also includes something called existential shame which he says arises when you see yourself as you really are and then use that knowledge to begin a process of rehabilitation good example writing in the New York Times recently Sally Sattel and Scott Lillian felt argue that this existential shame can assist addicts in their recovery if those addicts retain some measure of confidence that this habit that they have acquired is under their control if on the other hand the individual believes that their addiction is a disease over which they have no volitional power then that shame can become narcissistic this indelible stain and a potential cause for even deeper despair so whether or not shame possesses redeeming values well we get mixed messages the jury is still out some observers will tell us that it is an emotion just like any other and that like guilt it has the potential to play a useful role under certain circumstances if it has gotten a bad rap Jennifer Jeket says it's because the norm being enforced is a bad one and just because shame is uncomfortable is no reason for us to banish it completely others however others look forward to the eventual disappearance of shame from our emotional repertory they celebrate the de-shaming of sex as do I the decline of shame the shaming power of institutional religion as do I there are better and more humane ways of altering people's behavior better ways of maintaining a just society then by using the blunt instrument of shame these people insist but personally shame I think as human beings we're stuck with it and that being the case we would all do well to learn more about it about its etiology we would do well to learn about its potency and if necessary we need to learn how to apply it very judiciously very sparingly and always in the spirit of justice and with gracious goodwill may it be so our offering today will be shared with the League of Women Voters and they are doing yeoman service in this run-up to our national elections in registering people to vote if you are not registered to vote or if you have moved recently and need to re-register there is a table out in the commons that is staffed by the League of Women Voters and they will assist you in that process today please be generous so that they can continue this work in the larger community we gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken and maybe even shameful selves we carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past and we seek here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared we would pause now to remember fondly Sally Hansen a longtime member of the society with her husband Lee who died this past week her obituary was in this morning's paper Sally spent a long time struggling with dementia and she was very lucky to have an extraordinarily committed and caring husband Lee who kept her at home as long as he possibly could and then was able to place her in a very supportive environment so we miss her but we also recognize that she was in a very difficult situation in her life and our best thoughts to Lee and to the rest of their family today in addition to that sorrow just mentioned we would acknowledge any others that were unspoken today that remain among us and we hold those with equal concern in our hearts let us now sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope and so by virtue of our brief time together today may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded please turn now to our closing hymn number 323 break not the circle and now with gladness for our accomplishments with forgiveness for our all-too- frequent mistakes and misapprehensions with perseverance in life's adventure we go forth we push on onward with respect for our yesterday's onward with praise for today onward with hopefulness for tomorrow blessed be and go in peace please be seated for the postlude