 I don't know much about it. Who would work at 410 or whatever? I guess. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Please join me in a few moments of centering silence. Now please remain seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn found in your order of service, number 108. Good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Madison. In this community, 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 become a force for good in the world. You may know me as Carlos Moser, a decades-long standing and faithful member of this congregation, on behalf of which I wish to extend a special welcome to visitors. We consider ourselves a welcoming congregation, so however you identify yourself and wherever you find yourself on your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. We encourage newcomers to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directed across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. You will find members of our staff and lay ministry on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs, FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. If you'd like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition to our national landmark, the Frank Lloyd Wright Design Meeting House, please meet near the large glass windows on the left and you will have John Powell to guide you. We welcome children to stay for the service, but if the child needs to talk or move around, we recommend the Child Haven, just behind you on the left, or the Commons as good places to visit where you can still hear and see the service. And speaking of noise, please take time right now to consider yourself in airplane mode. Now I take pleasure in acknowledging the following individuals who help our service run very smoothly. For hospitality, Biss Nitschke and Sandra Plisch, our ushers, our Melinda Carr and Marty Hollis, our greeter was Claire Box and on sound, Dan Carnes. Thank you and consider volunteering yourself. You may ask any of these how to do so. I have a few announcements and I will ask Jenna to make a certain announcement right now about some hygiene items. The FUS Youth Group is hosting a personal care items drive for Briar Patch Youth Services, the weekends of February 17th and 18th and February 24th and 25th. Briar Patch provides services to the areas at risk, runaway and homeless youth. It is estimated that every night 300 youth go to bed homeless in Dane County. The following personal hygiene items are currently needed. Feminine hygiene products, chapstick and lip balm, hand sanitizer, new t-shirts, men's and women's socks and scarves, and men and women's underwear. Look for the collection boxes as you enter the building. For questions, please contact Linda M at FUSMadison.org. Thank you. Another announcement. Contemplative gathering for healing and hope. In these times of challenge and difficulty in our own lives and in our world, we invite you to join Reverend Kelly and our FUS Lay Ministers on Tuesday, February 13th, 6 to 645 in the Landmark Auditorium for a time of quiet, candle lighting, music and reflection. Find a place to be with others to support and nurture your heart and soul. Again, a warm welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, deepen your understanding and stir your spirit. Taken by the music and remembering I'm here. This is a house for the in-gathering of nature and it is a house of friendship, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggles. It is a house of freedom guarding the dignity and worth of every person. It offers a platform for the free voice for declaring both in times of security and danger the full and undivided conflict of opinion. It is a house of truth-seeking where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest where mystics can abide in a community of searchers. It is a house of art adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiwork. It is a house of prophecy, outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress. This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor. Please rise now in body or in spirit and join with me in the words of Chalice Lighting. We come together this morning to remind one another to rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives. To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude. Taking the time to look into another's faces and see their communion, the reflection of our own eyes. House of laughter and silence, memory and hope is hallowed by our presence together. And so now turn to one another and look into one another's eyes and offer friendly greetings. Would you like to come? Should I show you the front? Today's story is not the one that was written in the order of service. That backpack got lost. This is a story called Let's Be Friends Again and it's by Hans Wilhelm. This is a story about my little sister and me. Anybody here got a little sister? Okay, so you'll probably really especially appreciate this. Usually we get along well but sometimes my little sister was a real pest, particularly when I had the babysit. But she was a good listener when I told her bedtime stories. Sometimes I hated having to share things with her but she was a great pirate. One day my little sister did a terrible thing. She thought that my pet turtle needed more exercise. So she decided to set it free in the pond. When I saw what she had done, I was madder than I have ever been before. I could have killed her right there and then. But my parents didn't like that idea. And they separated us quickly. My sister said she was sorry but I felt that it was not enough. I was angry. She even offered to buy me a new turtle with her pocket money. But I didn't want a new turtle. I wanted my turtle back. My parents didn't say much. They seemed to be on her side. I went to my room and I slammed the door as loud as I could. I thought of many ways to punish my little sister. There's some ways. Here's some ways I think. Put her in jail I think or wrap her up in a boa constrictor. I tried to get some sleep but it didn't work. I began to feel sick. I was convinced I even had a temperature. I was too upset to get out of bed. Meanwhile, my sister was singing and dancing in the garden. She seemed to be having the best time of her life. I was the one who was upset and my little sister didn't seem to care at all. My turtle was gone. How could you forget all about it so easily? I was mad, mad. I punched my pillows a few times as hard as I could. I let go of an awful scream and then I felt better. Finally, I knew what to do. I got up, I put my shoes on and I went outside to where my sister was feeding the dog. I said to her, I'll help you with that. And she smiled. By the way, I said after a little while the thing about the turtle is okay. I'm not angry anymore. Does that mean we're friends again? Asked my sister. Yes, I said we're friends again. I was surprised how easy it was to say that. Then I asked her, do you want to come to the pet shop with me to buy a new turtle? Nope, I said and I smiled. We're going to buy a couple of hamsters. I said, one for you and one for me. We can keep them in the old aquarium. My sister took my hand and off we went. Now I want to tell you why I like this story. Sometimes in my life I have sad things that happen to me, things that I lose or things that I wish wouldn't go away and I have really, really, really big feels about them. And sometimes they're bigger than the feelings that I can hold and so sometimes I say things that I'm sorry for when I'm really angry. And so the most important thing for me to do is to recognize when I'm having those big feelings and it's okay to feel things, right? I mean everybody has feelings and they're important and we have to let people know how we feel sometimes but sometimes we need to first go to our rooms and really pound the pillows so that we can kind of get back into a place where we can recognize that sometimes the things we do when we're having feelings don't necessarily turn out the way we want them to. So I hope you will have a wonderful day in your RE class and we're going to have a little music and you can go do that. Thank you for being here. I sort of feel as the defining word about transition. I have two excerpts from his writing, one of which is On Your Order of Service. Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. And in the second reading he talks about the middle stage of a transition. Transitions, he says, begin with an ending followed by a fallow time which he calls the neutral zone and then, if we're lucky, we get a new beginning. So he says the neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when the inner reorientation and realignment are occurring. A time when we are making the all but imperceptible shift from one season of life to another. Although such shifts cannot occur without an ending and although they cannot bear fruit without a new beginning, it is the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place. Looking back, people often say that everything happened back then and even though at the time I didn't know what was going on. Also in retrospect, they will tell you that it was the neutral zone, though they often lacked a name for it, that they felt not only least sure what was going to happen, but most who they really were. Or they will tell you these things if they have a way of making sense of what they are feeling and doing during the in-between time. This is why it is such a misfortune that so few people can make sense out of the lostness and confusion that they encounter when they have passed through those processes that start with the disengagement, dismantling and disidentification. Without a key, that state, the resulting disorientation, is viewed as no more than confusion. And confused people imagine that they need to be straightened out or fixed. Without such a key, people in transition are like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole, muttering, it'll be no use they're putting their heads down and saying, come up again, dear. I shall only look up and say, who am I then? Tell me that first and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up. If not, I'll stay down until I'm somebody else. But oh dear, cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, I do wish they would put their heads down. I'm so very tired of being all alone down here. It is lonely down there, except that there are more people down there than you realize. Service. I was extended by this congregation since 2013, who wonder who is Karen Bestiffson anyway. After 21 years as minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth, Minnesota, I came here in the fall of 2007 to be associate minister. I served here until the spring of 2013, when I retired from subtle ministry, and at that time the position of the third minister, which I had held, was eliminated, and FUS became a teaching congregation, where intern ministers could serve and benefit from the rich learning environment here at FUS. During my tenure in Duluth, the congregation navigated the rocky waters of many transitions, many of them related to having a beautiful little building made obsolete by emerging hopes of the congregation. They tried on many spaces, borrowed and rented, had capital, fun drives, purchased land, and in 2007, having moved with them to the edge of the promised land, I left them with a hole in the ground, and joined FUS at the edge of its own giant hole, which came in time to be the space where I now stand. I can only speculate that part of the motivation to bring me here was that I seemed to know a bit about how congregations can manage change and could bring some perspective to the necessarily emotional disruption inherent in the process of transition. In the 20 years that I was in Duluth, the congregation there occupied four different spaces. Together, we shared the pain of leaving the much-beloved, charming little tutor-style building that had been built in 1910 as a unitarian church of all things, limited by no parking lot, insufficient meeting space, office and RE space, and a sanctuary that was bursting at the seams. We tried out, at first, a church share with an Episcopal church, then the auditorium of the YWCA, a church in a box that we set up every Sunday for five years, a Methodist church left by a merger, and finally to a beautiful new building constructed after my departure, and at the same time as this addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright Meeting House. And here is what I know. In every move, the easy part was physical. Stuff got moved. Himmels and chairs and tables and RE supplies and computers and desks and papers, adaptations were made to accommodate the new coffee service and name tags. Sunday services resumed. And it was the experience of transition, the emotional psychological aspects of the changes that permeated the culture. I had the good fortune of discovering the work of William Ridges in the early 1980s and when I was in the midst of a cluster of my own personal transitions and found it to be a frame that made sense of much of what I was feeling then and certainly what I was experiencing from members of the congregation in Duluth at each time we made another transition. The first phase of a transition is an ending and many of you are familiar with this and I review it and every time I learn something new. At the very least, it involves the loss of the familiar. We have a list of culturally recognized endings, death, divorce, empty nest, retirement, graduations of all kind, and I contend the emphasis in most of these is the recognition upon how to get on with it. What's next? What's next? Much of what we understand as grief is associated with death. Crying at memorial services, the accepted and encouraged ritual of grief is known to be acceptable, warranted even. Most of us understand that grieving following a death takes time, takes many forms, is not even finite perhaps. In the poem Joy, Carlos Sandberg admonishes us to keep away from the little deaths. I would say in contrast, sorry Sandberg, I would say in contrast to embrace them, not to have and to hold, but to acknowledge and let go. How hard it is to embrace the idea that it is okay to feel sad. It is okay to feel angry when your little sister lets your turtle go. To openly admit discomfort and the prospect of something new. To share the vulnerability that we feel when facing ambiguity. This is especially hard for leaders. So often this awkwardness or discomfort is seen as whining or complaining. And of course, sometimes it is, but we learn from the many transitions in Duluth to help one another to deal with our losses. To distinguish between passing frustration and paralyzing grief. The challenge in a community is that each person has his or her own style of dealing with transition and come to the process in a different point. For one who had for decades adapted to the lack of parking by coming early or planning for a three-block hike, the idea that parking would be a problem or a factor that would be part of a decision to move to a different space seemed outrageous. For those who had resisted coming for years because they couldn't find a parking spot, the idea of a move seemed completely self-evident. While the distant parkers mourned the loss of the pretty and intimate worship space, the newcomers looked forward both to better parking and more spacious sanctuary. Some folks left unwilling or unable to hold the tension of what Joan Broschenko calls the no longer not yet. They were there for what had always been, excuse me, they were there for what had always been, not for what could be. Many stayed. New ones came drawn by the excitement generated by the possibility of newness itself that is fully present in that second stage of the transition, the in-between time. When the old is gone, but the new isn't fully operational. Bridges, as you have heard, cause this the neutral zone. It's when the critical psychological realignment and repatterning take place. This phase, acknowledged or not, is critical in the healthy movement toward new beginnings, which is the final stage in the process. The neutral zone is what I have come to call the crabby phase. This is where the structures and patterns that we have come to rely on that comfort and sustain us, that require little thinking or analysis or even engagement begin to require just that. This happens to us in settings mundane as well as grand. This week I have been house sitting for the Shuler's. I am happy for these commodious accommodations and all such new surroundings require adaptation to change. It is change. Things are not where they are at home. This is to be expected. My rational being made a study of the spaces the first day and I found what I needed to make dinner, identified a workspace, figured out the garage door. But in the night when I got up to use the bathroom, it was entirely in the wrong place. I figured it out, of course, but I found myself to be disproportionately frustrated and angry. I missed my husband. I missed my own bed. Eleven days away from home started to feel like a terrible idea. But I managed to go back to sleep and in the morning returned to sanity, welcomed the day, forgave the architect who had in fact positioned the bathroom in an entirely appropriate place. So what? Am I losing my grip? Was this really a terrible idea? Not at all. What I recognized there was that neutral zone kind of feeling. They are real feelings. They are important reminders about my own vulnerability and the necessary unease that accompanies change. When change happens institutionally, the disorientation and reactions tend to be more communal and public. If we are not careful, we begin to create a narrative that would suggest that someone really ought to move the damn bathroom. With nowhere to take my anxious reactivity in the middle of the night, I found the familiar comfort of sleep and the feelings past. Had I shared those feelings with an also anxious other or others, anxious not even about the bathroom, but about the location of the vacuum cleaner or the operation of the washing machine, I can imagine a full-on reorganization of the household before breakfast. Anxiety begets reactivity. This is where Bridges reminds us not to confuse a reaction to an ending with a new beginning, which is the third stage in the transition process. The central zone is that time when we get to react or create or question without permanent consequences. Part of what I loved about that story about the child losing the turtle is that he really was angry and he recognized his anger, but he didn't get to kill his sister. When he was set aside, he went into his room and he had the feelings, but once the feelings had passed, he was in a different place. So neutral zone is where we get to act or create or question without permanent consequences. When we get to examine ourselves for signs of apathy or complacency, we get to miss what has been lost and live in a space that is at once uncomfortable and also filled with possibility and challenge. It is a place where at best we hold ourselves and one another in a place of deeper community, creating a culture of curiosity in place of judgment, of discernment in place of certainty, of vulnerability and trust, of being informed and engaged in the process of transformation. The past decade of FUS history reveals a good deal of significant change. In the ten years prior to the start of my tenure here, a careful discernment process culminated in a major capital campaign and completed plan calling for significant renovation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Meeting House and the construction of this lovely space. When I arrived, a previous edition of the Meeting House had been demolished and what are now offices along the loja were under construction and the space in front of the Meeting House was filled with portable structures that housed temporary offices and classrooms. Transition indeed. In the fall, the staff moved into the new office space and there was much shuffling and accommodation in this time of no longer. By the fall of 2008, the construction was complete and the move into this new building happened. Over the next year, there were multiple staff changes, a new governance model was adopted, but I think it could be said that there was in all of that a sense of the possibility of new beginning that has become in modern parlance the new normal. There has been, amidst all of this change, a high degree of equanimity and stability. In large part, this has been due to the long and stable leadership of Michael Schuler, Senior Minister and Dan Broner, Director of Music. Those ministries are now coming to a close with well-earned retirement. These transitions have in some way upped the ante from other transitions of the recent past. There has been fair warning, there has been planning and conversations and decisions about temporary structures. There are task forces of wise and thoughtful folks who are tending to the shape that will hold the emerging future. There will be endings, you already know that. They may be endings that trigger for some of you old losses. The grief will be complicated because it will be both personal and institutional. Michael Schuler is a wise and gracious human being whose presence in the life of this congregation has been a continuing gift for three decades. Moreover, he has been a grounding and consistent presence in this pulpit, a respected public presence in Madison, a comforting pastor and a spiritual leader. These are things that you will seek in the future in continuing ministry. You will have opportunities to celebrate his ministry to say goodbye. There will be an ending. Knowing that this is the first stage in the process of transition has the potential for making what follows richer and more meaningful. Martin Luther King Jr. said, one of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through periods of great social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. Bridges puts it this way. Odysseus failed to see and treat the problem life was presenting as a signal and a gift rather than a difficulty to be overcome. You are not at the stage of standing on the abyss, but at the threshold of the neutral zone. You are the keepers of the legacy that is bigger than Frank Lloyd Wright or Max Gabler or Michael Shuler or really any of those that you hold as heroes or saviors. You and they are part of something larger and more affirming than you can even imagine. I offer an invitation to you to face the time ahead with curiosity and trust. To keep informed about the governance of FUS, to engage and to participate in the rituals of ending, to engage the interim and ministerial search process with open minds and open hearts, to stay informed and respond when asked, to support the ministry of Kelly Crocker and the rest of the FUS staff through your gifts of time and talent and treasure and to hold one another gently in the places of grief and crabbiness that the continuing narrative of this wonderful community be informed by your better angels. We continue our service now with the receiving of gifts through our gifts that we support the work of this beloved community. The transitions of especially celebrate a happy birthday to Carlos Moser, whose birthday was previous apparently belated, whose noon musical was canceled because of snow and the writer of this extends that regret. We know that there are many here who are carrying those kinds of joys and sorrows in your heart and let us take a moment to hold one another. In this time together may our joys be expanded and our burdens lightened. Please rise in body or in spirit and share in hymn number 34 though I may speak with bravest fire. Be seated for our closing words at our postlet. Gifts of holiness, glimpses of eternity, let us gather them up for the precious gifts they are, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown. Go in peace.