 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning to have a chance to sing. So please turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you find inside your order of service. I know this service will open. Good morning everybody and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing and mercifully warm environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, intellectually gifted member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special and a very warm welcome to any guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we usually offer a guided tour after every service and if there's a tour guide after the service you'll find him or her over here by the windows and we'll take care of you. If there is no tour guide then that means you can spend more time in the fellowship hour instead of on the tour after the service. This would be a great time to silence all those electronic devices that you just will not need during the service and that goes for those of you watching at home as well. And while you're doing that, let me remind you that if you're accompanied this morning by a youngster and you think that that young person would rather enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer a couple alternatives for you. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and then we have some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you can see and hear the service. But the main reason that you're able to see and hear the service is that it's brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers who make sure that the service runs smoothly including Mark Schultz who's operating the sound system and Smiley who is serving as our lay minister and doing double duty as an usher as well. Jeanine Nussbaum who greeted us with her smile this morning upstairs. Our ushers Ron Cook, Elizabeth Barrett and Patty Becker, Gene Hills and Chip Quaddy are presiding over the all-important coffee and hospitality hour in the kitchen a little bit later and something that you'll appreciate. The flowers that you see up here have been donated by John and Nancy Webster to commemorate their 62nd wedding anniversary. So thank you to John and Nancy and congratulations to you. A couple announcements. First and most importantly, if you recognize this key chain which has the word hope on the pendant, I hope you are ready to claim it because it was found in between the two services. So if it belongs to you then you can claim it actually Eric is going to hold it for me. There you go. See Eric if that's your key. Two other announcements before we continue with the service. One is a survey that is in your order of service. It relates to the WMUU radio station. We're trying to figure out what to do about that station's future and how to make it even more relevant and we want to know how many people are listening to it and suggestions that you might have for WMUU. Some of you probably are aware of it. Some of you are not. The survey is a chance for us to figure out the best things to do for the future of that radio station and how to make it as useful as possible to you. And the second thing for you to look at is also in the red floors bulletin. We are offering as we do every year a dinner complete with delicious food and folk dancing almost as exciting as cabaret this Saturday January 14th at 6.30 in the evening to celebrate our partner church relationship. Proceeds will support the partner church in Romania and our international students who are attending school in the Philippines. So if you're interested in that read the article in the red floors bulletin for more details and connect with Kelly to reserve your spot at this very popular event. We need to know how much food to prepare for that event again at Saturday evening January 14th 6.30 right here. So end of the announcements. All you need to do now is 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. Good morning again. We're glad you're here. We begin our service this morning with the words of the poet David White inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. Even with summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world. All those years listening to those who had nothing to say all those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard all those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything just by listening and the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter lead me to this otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and is Steve Kindles the flame of our faith please join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in your program. We gather as a community of memory and of hope to mark the emergence of a bright new year to this day of hope and promise to a place of peace and beauty to a journey toward truth and justice to a community of acceptance and support we come seeking inspiration and encouragement along our way and now I encourage you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting please be seated and so on this bracing January morning at the beginning of a new year we feel privileged to have with us six children who are beginning or perhaps close to beginning their life journey and in this in this season of expectancy and never-failing hope we join four sets of proud parents in welcoming these children into our lives and into this our spiritual community today we offer these families our friendship and our support in the opportunities and in the challenges that lie ahead we trust that the commitment to and love for each other is strong in each one of these families and it's our hope that these youngsters will be blessed with secure homes and dependable loving caregivers that they might enjoy the freedom to develop their own personalities and to shape their own unique destinies now our faith tradition unitary universalism holds that every person comes into this world fresh unsullied possessing inherent worth and dignity and so this morning we would acknowledge that these children Ty Lily Rhodes Lucette Lucy and Nathaniel that they are all bonafide human beings with their own special gifts with needs and feelings that matter just as much as any of ours although they have yet to fully unfold these youngsters are already vital active participants in their family's home life full partners in the work and play of living true heirs to all of our dreams and values now dedication does not make these children full-fledged members of First Unitarian Society in our tradition that is a choice that each of them must make for themselves when they attain coming of age 14 or 15 years old this ritual does however affirm these children's special place in our hearts and it also affords them the special kind of emotional security and spiritual opportunity that a Unitarian Universalist community such as this can provide we are glad that moved by a sense of the blessings of parenthood and trust in this congregation that Christie and Mick Adrian and Luke Joel and Sarah Mary and Teresa that these parents have chosen to express their own values and progressive religious faith through this celebration and yet ultimately it is all of us friends and relatives as well as parents who are responsible for the teaching and the nurture of our children and so by presenting them to you here today the members of this faith community their parents acknowledge that their children are more than private treasures they are young souls in whom we all have a stake and for whom we all wish the best on this day of great promise then we not only dedicate these lovely and gifted children but we also dedicate ourselves to them to their interests and to their futures and now I would invite our parents and their children to come forward and line up before the pulpit order of service for the congregational pledge of dedication and if you would please rise and body or in spirit please join me in these words for the gift of childhood whose innocence laughter and curiosity bring hope joy and new understanding into our lives we lift thankful hearts we welcome Lucette Rhodes Lucy Nathaniel tie and Lily into this spiritual community and extend to their parents our love and support in the joys and challenges of caregiving as these children grow we will share with them our insights our values and our dreams that they may enjoy the rich benefits of our religious heritage and please be seated and if we have any other children I would ask you to please rise any other children these children you see before you are young now but they're already part of our community and some are already in our church school classes but in the future you will have a chance to get them to know them better will you befriend these children and do what you can to help them feel comfortable and welcomed at First Unitarian Society if you will say please say we will thank you thank you kids may sit down and so then among us as well are a number of individuals who bear a special close relationship to one or more of these children would you please stand as I call your names accompanying tie and Lily our grandparents Andy and Jerry Bergeson and Ron and Mary Ellen Galoon ties grand godparents anti-Christine and Uncle Mark they are here and Lily's godparents Carrie Ann and Cherry with Rhodes and Lucette our family members Deb Rachel and Joe Hickman Lucy's guests include godparents Julie Baird Katie Eberhardie Christine Doma and Lance Doma are here in spirit they could not make it I believe there's an illness there grandparents Carol and Eric Eberhardie Sue and Steve Allen are here as is her older brother Seth and as well as a number of other aunts and uncles her sponsors Austin Kubersky all the way from Denver and Ryan Ratley are here to witness and help celebrate Nathaniel's dedication grandparents Jackie Ratley Helen and Mark Kubersky and Russell Larson is also with us in spirit in addition there are a goodly number of other aunts uncles and cousins today here with us my friends those of you who are standing do you take upon yourselves the privilege and responsibility to nurture defend and support the freedom and growing spirit of the child to whom you are related will you recognize his or her worth as a person and encourage that child to speak truthfully and from the heart will you share with them the best that is in you the insights values and dreams that give your life meaning finally will you help this youngster to understand not only his or her own rights but also the rights of others if so please say we will please be seated and so now to the parents who have brought their children before us Christy and Mick Adrian and Luke Joel and Sarah Mary and Teresa it is your privilege your obligation to provide an environment both of security and of challenge for your child to grow up in do you commit yourselves to promoting your child's physical emotional and spiritual well-being will you respect as well as protect that child and bestow your love as a free and unmerited gift and do you also reaffirm your commitment to care for and support each other as partners in life and as parents if so please say we will in the act of dedication we use the symbolism of water as a sign of our common heritage there is no suggestion in the Unitarian Universalist dedication ceremony no suggestion of the washing away of inherited sin we believe these children came into the world with all the limitations that are natural to human beings but we believe that they arrived here innocent so water here stands for vitality it is the elixir of life it is the source of all potential and for purposes of today's ceremony a portion of this water has been saved from our annual water communion service to which our members bring water from their travels across the continent and throughout the world so its use here today reminds us of our common bond with all embracing ever-sustaining nature name this child Rhodes Weber we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community Lucette Weber we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community name this child Nathaniel Alexander we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and the love of this community name this child Ty Spencer Bergeson Galoon we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community Lily Ruth Bergeson Galoon we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community. Name this child. Lucy, Aaron, Alan, Eberhardie, we dedicate you in the name of truth, the promise of love, and in the fellowship, one more for the community. May each of you be granted clarity of thought, integrity of speech, and above all, compassionate hearts. As a token of their dedication, we give to each child a rosebud, fragrant symbol of beauty, promise, and love. This rose has no thorns, symbolizing the better world we would give to our children if it were in our power. While we know that the world is not altogether as lovely as this rosebud, we hope that Lucy, Nathaniel, Rhodes, Ty, Lucette, and Lily will learn to recognize the beauty and goodness which does exist and that they will grow in wisdom and compassion, adding their own beauty to the world. Dear ones, as this rose unfolds in natural beauty, so may your life unfold. And we conclude our dedication, celebration with the words from the Unitarian religious educator Sophia Lyon Fawze. For so the children come, and so they have been coming. Always in the same way they come. Born from the seed of man and woman, no angels heralding their beginning. No prophets predict their future courses. No wise men see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind. Yet each night a child is born is a holy night. Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children's cribs feel glory at the sight of new life beginning. They ask where and how will this life end? Or will it ever end? Each night a child is born is a holy night. A time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshiping. We do give to each of our families each one of our children a comfort item, a quilt or a knitted item, all of these made by members of our shawl ministry group here at First Unitarian Society. So we welcome you all into our community and let's give them a round of applause. And so now as our families return to their seats I invite you to turn to our next hymn and children can leave for their classes as we sing together. Please be seated. Dedications are always a sign, a symbol of new beginnings and the two readings also reflect that particular sentiment. The first from Daniel Smith, an article entitled First Time Caller that appeared in The New Yorker in the January 2nd edition. A video began to make viral rounds late last summer. It showed a woman named Heather McGee. She's the president of the Progressive Think Tank Demos and she was responding to a call that came in on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Heather McGee is black. The caller was white and he admitted he was prejudiced against black people because of things he had seen on the news. But he didn't want to be that way. What can I do to change? He asked plainly. You know, to be a better American. McGee was moved and she offered him some advice. Get to know some black people. Read up on African American history. Stop watching the nightly news. Not long after the call, a 58-year-old disabled Navy veteran named Gary Civitello flew to Washington, D.C. from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He had come to spend a little time with Heather McGee. And since then, she has spoken frequently about Gary from North Carolina, presenting him as a symbol of decency and hope and racial reconciliation. The two have developed, they say, a genuine relationship. They've talked on the phone now about a dozen times. Civitello will describe his prejudices and McGee, she suggests ways that he can transcend them, talking to him very much the way that a doctor would talk to a patient, she says. Now, in Washington, they met for a drink at a hotel a block from the White House. Shortly after that initial call to C-SPAN, Civitello actually took McGee's advice. He went to a used bookstore, and he says, so I go up to this young girl at the cash register, this little hippie girl in Asheville, and I say, I found a couple of black studies books, and I say, I'm practicing to not be prejudiced. And she's at the register, and she says, that's probably a pretty good thing. Now, a week before the election, McGee visited Civitello in North Carolina, and she brought with her two more books to give him, Just Mercy and the New Jim Crow. Civitello's reading, he says, has transformed him. My fears, my anxieties, they still linger, but I'm starting now to see some root causes. You see, I was just assuming that black people were being lazy, or that they just didn't care, or that they were being irresponsible in society. But no, now I'm finding out, they can't get loans at banks. They gotta go to pawn shops. Myself, I inherited my house. Civitello has employed a number of different methods to realign his thinking. He avoids TV shows that focus on inner city crime, or the traffic in minority stereotypes. He's begun taking iPhone pictures of the many Confederate flags that fly near his hometown. I really wasn't aware of them before, he says. And he has developed a system to transform his social interactions. Using a scale of one to 10, one being awful and 10 being just great, he grades his expectation of how friendly a black person will be toward him in an interaction. The expectation, then he grades the reality. His main laboratory is the VA hospital in Asheville. So he says, at first I was giving people threes. These are your pre-judgments, McGee remarks. But then Gary says, I have a little conversation with these folks. I'll say something like, wow, the traffic really got bad out this way. And they'll say, yeah, it really did. How long you lived around here? And then all of a sudden, I'm having a laugh with them, and I'm scoring them at eight and nine. This is not a system I recommended, McGee says. This is Gary's system. And McGee then mentioned that Martin Luther King, Jr. finished writing his I Have a Dream speech in the very hotel where they were holding this conversation. Yeah, I read that, Civitello says. He finished it here, walked right over to the Lincoln Memorial. He could have sat somewhere around here. He could have come down this staircase. Who knows? It's a real privilege to be here. I have to thank you for that, Heather McGee. Absolutely, Gary. Absolutely. The second selection from the Irish poet, John O'Donohue, for a new beginning. In out of the way places of the heart where your thoughts never think to wander, this beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time, it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you, noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispers. Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, wondering if you are always gonna be this way. And then the delight, the delight when your courage kindles and out you step onto new ground, your eyes young again with energy and dream the path of plentitude opening before you. Though your destiny is not yet clear, you can trust the promise of this opening. Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life's desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure. Hold nothing back. Learn to find ease in risk. Soon you will be home in a new rhythm for your soul senses the world that awaits you. Music to soothe the savage breast as the saying goes. Thank you. Despite its diminutive size, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas is one of the most recognizable faith communities in the United States. It is known primarily for its fierce antipathy toward gays and lesbians. Activists from that congregation have demonstrated at numerous gay rights events, and perhaps most notoriously at the funerals for fallen American soldiers. I had a chance to observe one of their protests several years ago when Madison's Covenant Presbyterian Church gathered to celebrate the ordination of Scott Anderson. Now Scott had received his ordination decades earlier, but he forfeited it when he was outed as a gay man. By 2011, however, the Presbyterian Church of America had changed its policy toward gay and lesbian clergy, and now Scott, the executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Scott asked to be reinstated. He thus became the first openly gay person to be welcomed into that denomination's clergy ranks. Enter the Westboro Baptist Church, whose leaders found this to be utterly intolerable. And so on October 8th, 2011, 20 or so of their congregants drove here to Madison and brandishing signs, promising fire and brimstone damnation for homosexuals and their alleys, they positioned themselves across Seago Road from Covenant Presbyterian Church. A hundred counter protesters, many wearing our own denominations, standing on the side of love t-shirts, we were already guarding the space in front of the sanctuary. We raised our voices in song, overpowering the taunts directed at us by the Westboro crowd. So adamant, so impassioned did these fundamentalist activists seem that I could hardly imagine any of them ever recanting their beliefs. But then I happened upon the story of Megan Phelps Roper. She's the granddaughter of the Reverend Fred Phelps, the militant founder of the Westboro Church. It's not clear to me whether she was among that contingent that traveled to Madison in 2011, but by 2014, Phelps Roper, at one time the Church's social media and demonstration coordinator, by 2014, she had repudiated the Westboro Gospel. Her decision required a whole lot of soul searching. It was not easy. It was a process that began with a series of online conversations with a man who had read her Facebook posts and now wanted to gently but firmly challenge her assertions, seeking to convince her correspondent of the error of his ways, Phelps Roper persevered. She kept up with the conversation, but ultimately he proved to be the more persuasive. Phelps Roper swung back and forth for a time. Some day she was convinced that everything she'd been taught since childhood was bogus, was wrong. On other days she felt that God was just testing her and she had to stand firm. You literally feel like you're going insane, she confided. In the end her doubts won out. She said, I could no longer do the things that we were being asked to do. I could no longer say the things that we were being asked to say. Now since then, Megan Phelps Joiner and her sister Grace, who has also left the church, they have spoken to a number of different audiences about their conversion, as it were. And they've also made a very real effort to engage with the very people that they had once disparaged and condemned. As undeniable as the truth she had been taught seemed before, now those truths seem to her to be just as impossible to believe. One notices certain parallels between Megan's story and that of the former racist, Gary Civitello. They both risked entering into dialogue with someone whose outlook was 180 degrees removed from their own. They were both willing to listen and to continue listening, even when it caused them mental and emotional distress. And then what did they do? They embarked on some serious relational work. Gary took Heather McGee's advice, began entering into casual conversations with people of color. Soon he realized that so many of his earlier assumptions were simply unfounded. For her part, Megan tells of the time that she and her sister were invited to make a presentation in Montreal, Canada. Walking down the downtown street after their presentation, they just happened to pass a gay nightclub and they made the snap decision to go in. Megan remembers it felt so illicit. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe we are in here. But they started talking to some of the patrons and by the intermission the two women were out of their seats and dancing on the stage. Wherever we went, she says, people wanted to help us despite all the hurt that we had caused them. She was incredulous about this, the generosity of the people that she encountered. Undoubtedly there was something stirring deep within these individuals, even before they began consciously to entertain alternatives. Now Megan had already witnessed other people deserting the Westboro Church. And she had watched as a group of LGBTQ activists bought a house across the street, painted it in rainbow colors and dubbed it the equality house. The mission to spread a message of tolerance and to support former Westboro members as they seek to transition. So at some point in time, there was simply more cognitive dissonance here than Megan could possibly handle. And so she began to shift. Now the Indian spiritual teacher Eknaath Eswaran, he once compared this process, the process that people like Megan and Gary go through, to the unclogging of a fountain. He says, we all possess this reservoir of courage and compassion and goodwill. These are not qualities that we need to acquire. They're qualities we simply need to bring to the surface. And thus he says, if we work to remove all the impediments that have built up over all those years of conditioning to dislodge the old resentments and the fears and the selfish desires, then our life will become like a fountain of living waters. But often that fountain is just so clogged with rubbish that hardly a drop can get through. And this kind of a blockage can occur in societies as well as among individuals. So consider our own country's antipathetic relationship with Cuba these last 65 years. That has included the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition, territorial invasions, blockades, economic sanctions, travel restrictions, and decades of mutual recrimination. Suspicion, mistrust, stubbornness have served to keep our two societies deeply divided from one another. The fountain was dry. But then that changed. As with Gary and Megan, it didn't happen overnight. A number of important developments preceded the breakthrough. As John Lee Anderson recounts in the October issue of The New Yorker, the process began actually with the 2012 summit of the Americas. The summit of the Americas is a gathering of the Western Hemisphere's top leaders. And a number of people spoke during that gathering and those who came from nations that were sympathetic to Cuba used their time to lambast the United States for its imperialistic policies. They really took us to task. Sitting with our delegation was Barack Obama. I can imagine past presidents simply getting up and walking out of the room. Barack Obama sat and he listened. And when it was his term finally to address the delegates, he surprised them by saying, you know, we'd like to move US-Cuban relationship into a new direction, a new path. The next year, many of the same leaders gathered in South Africa for the funeral of Nelson Mandela. There was a chance encounter between the new president of Cuba, Raul Castro and Barack Obama. They passed each other. Barack Obama stuck out his hand and shook hands with Raul Castro. The first handshake between two leaders of our countries since 1959, the gesture was not premeditated, Obama remembered. It was a purely human response. Now, Obama's domestic opponents were scandalized by this display of affection for a Cuban dictator. But it opened the door just wide enough for productive negotiations to begin and we've seen what's happened since. Obama's takeaway was this. He said, if people think he sees me, he really sees me, then if they disagree with you, they are still going to be open to having a conversation. And that proved to be the case. Now this is a story that is still unfolding and a new administration may very well decide to return to the status quo ante, reversing the progress in US-Cuban relations that has been made so far because that old Cold War rubbish that some politicians still cling to could very well plug up the fountain of hope and promise once more. Too many people in our society are still incapable of suspending their black and white view of the world long enough to have those open honest conversations. Those whom they have placed in the category of the opposition, they become simply untouchable and that's all they need to know about them. That's all they want to know about them. The task of breaking down barriers like these is immense and it's made even harder when powerful forces conspire to keep so many of us enthralled. Instead of appealing to the better angels of our nature's opinion leaders, too often simply want to raise hackles and reinforce some of our worst instincts. As the acclaimed novelist Zady Smith recently told an audience upon accepting Germany's Weltliterature Prize, she said, individual citizens, we are all internally plural. We have within us the full range of behavioral possibilities. We are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or others suppressed depending at least in part on who's doing the conducting. At this moment, she says all over the world, the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. The internet is also proving to be something of a mixed blessing in this regard. To be sure, it provides us with unlimited access to information, plethora of sources that we can turn to, an incredibly wide spectrum of viewpoints as represented and as Megan Phelps-Roper discovered, you can enter into these illuminating conversations with people who are completely unlike yourself. But on the other hand, studies have shown that most internet users gravitate towards sites that serve to confirm and to strengthen their biases. And indeed, Google, Amazon, other content providers, they aid and abet this behavior by nudging us toward books and sites that reflect the online preferences that we have previously expressed. And so you have to make a concerted effort to break out of that information-opinion bubble that we inadvertently create around us. That bubble can take many forms. Richard Miles is all too aware of that phenomenon. Richard Miles was wrongfully convicted of a serious crime and he spent 15 years in a Texas prison. Finally, he was exonerated. After he left prison, he founded the organization Freedom for All. And it's an organization that is designed to assist communities that are badly affected by mass incarceration. Now, Miles remembers that for most of his 15 years in prison, he spent his time, for the most part, just dwelling on his victimhood, his sense of being victimized. Because he had been wrongfully convicted. At 19, he had been a regular churchgoer. He had been a passable student. He had dreams and aspirations. All he could think about was his victimhood. But then at a certain point in time, he recognized this is futile. What is this doing for me? What is this going to do in terms of my future? And so he decided that instead of being a victim, he was going to become a benefactor. Being incarcerated, he said, yes, that is a real problem. But the larger problem lies in here. We have all been in prison, he says. We imprison ourselves in bad relationships. We imprison ourselves in economic hardships. We lock our own selves up over and over again. And the only difference he says between my prison and yours is that in my case, someone else held the key to my release. Ruben Carter is a former boxing champion. He was convicted of a triple murder. He would agree with that assessment. In his late 20s, Carter received three life sentences from a New Jersey court. Repeated attempts to overturn his questionable conviction, they all failed. But in spite of that, Ruben Carter gained his freedom. The bitter, angry man that entered prison, he says, was not the one who came out. After yet one more unsuccessful appeal, Carter threw up his hands, said, I'm just not getting out. Then he had a vision, a vision that he would not be freed by the law, that he would be freed by a miracle. And with that, he undertook a disciplined study of spirituality, philosophy, and religion. And after a while, he had, as he put it, awakened to a higher level of reality. And when his convictions were ultimately overturned, Carter, like Richard Miles, became a benefactor. He founded the International Association in defense of the wrongly convicted. In 2003, in an interview, Carter was asked, how do you wanna be remembered? And Carter replied, he said, I've been a lot of things. I've been a fighter, I've been a soldier, I've been an inmate. But if I had to decide tomorrow what to put on my epitaph, it would be this. He was just enough. He was just enough to overcome everything that was thrown at him. He was just enough not to ever give up on himself. He was just enough to have the courage of his convictions. He was just enough to perform a miracle, to regain his humanity in a place of living death. He was just enough. Ruben Carter, Richard Miles, Gary Civitello, Megan Phelps Roper, they all had this in common. They were unhappy with what they had become. They were tired of wallowing in unhealthy feelings, mired in a rut of negative thinking. Harry Schenck is the head of the Innocence Project, and he says that for many ex-prisoners, this is the crux of the problem. The individual either stays stuck or they transcend and they move into a more life-affirming mental and emotional space. And if they remain stuck, the chances are they're gonna die. So what's the takeaway here? To affect deep, meaningful change, a major shift in orientation, there needs to be two things. There needs to be both a letting go of all the old rubbish and an opening up to new experience. Zen Buddhist teachers often describe the enlightenment process as one of unlearning, emptying ourselves of all the notions that prevent us from achieving a clear, uncontaminated view of reality. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard echoed that insight when he compared the pursuit of truth to swimming. To swim, hey, you gotta take your clothes off first, right? As a truth seeker, you need to undress in a more inward sense. You need to divest yourselves of prejudices, assumptions, and self-centeredness. And this emptying project is enabled when we open ourselves to the unfamiliar and even the uncomfortable. When Hannah Black, a multiracial artist, teacher, and writer, when in the course of a lecture she was giving to a college class, she made an unkind comment about transgendered people, after she made that comment, she heard from her students. They were angry, they let her have it. Now Black could have, hey, she's the professor, right? She could have justified her statement about transgendered people. Instead, she controlled her reactivity, she swallowed her pride, and she freely conceded that what she had said was both misguided and hurtful. And later she said, I am grateful for the people that called me out, that yelled at me. I did not regard this experience as an attack from the thought police. To the contrary, she said, my realization about the complicated untruths of gender was one of the most intellectually liberating experiences of my entire life. It released me, she said, into a new, gentler conception of my own sexuality and of the sexuality of others. It brought new people into my life and gave me a greater and sometimes scarier sense of human possibility. As this new year begins, let us be just that honest with ourselves. We all have some work to do at both the personal and the societal level. We are living at a time when the deep story, the deep story that many of our fellow citizens are telling themselves is a story of resentment and anger and bitterness. And for our part, we need to develop to develop peaceful and powerful strategies for dealing with that deep story lest we become a more polarized society than we already are. And as individuals, this is, of course, an ideal time to take stock, to take inventory, for there is undoubtedly some rubbish blocking the release of our own living waters. Let us be about that business so that we too may be granted a greater sense of life's possibility. Blessed be and amen. And in this new year, the first recipient of our outreach offering is the Madison Urban League, doing fantastic work in our community. I invite you to participate with gratitude and generosity. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. We would pause now to acknowledge Carol McGuire, sending her healing thoughts. She underwent hip surgery last week and thoughts of goodwill and hope also with Helen Burns, 96 years old, long time member of FUS, who was in the hospital last week and has now been relocated from her apartment at Oakwood Village to the care facility, Hebron. And good luck and bon voyage to our lay minister, Anne Smiley, sitting back there, who is leaving in two days for not Indiana, but India to celebrate her son's wedding. So congratulations to Anne and to their family. We did have some dedications today, as you know. We congratulate all those parents and at least one gentleman I believe wanted to share a little music with us in celebration of his niece and nephew's dedication. Would you like to share with us just a little of your music or do you want to wait until later? Just a verse or two. And so in addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us as a community. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. And now I would invite you to turn to our final hymn, the upbeat hymn number 151. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. One more piece of poetry for your edification, this from Lucille Clifton. I am running into the new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair. Like strong fingers, like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was 16 and 26 and 36 and yes, 36. And now I am running into a new year and I beg what I love and what I leave behind to forgive me. Blessed be and amen.