 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. Now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. A youngster, and you think that young person would rather experience the service from a more private space. We offer a couple options 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. Today's service is brought to us by a wonderful group of people, our volunteers today, who deserve our thanks. Thank you to Tom Boycock for serving as our lay minister. Thank you, Tom. Thanks to Pam McMullen, who greeted us upstairs, and she's also handling the tour guide duties after the service. So double duty for Pam. Thank you. Our ushers today are Anne Ostrom and James Morgan. Thank you to Anne and James. Ms. Nitschke is handling the hospitality and coffee after the service. Our greenery has been watered by CeCe Boliard to make sure that it's vibrant and fun to look at. That's about it. One important announcement, though. Those of you here at the 9 o'clock service will enjoy the music of the cat trio during the service. It has a bonus if you want to stick around during the coffee hour. These musicians will be performing a mini-recycle to stay in that musical mirroring of the service. So right after the service, right here in between services to enjoy the cat trio. I want you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirits, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. See that we just must lay one brick at a time. That we must take one step at a time. Because a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread out in all of that. So no one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. Our words of affirmation this morning are responsive. If you will join your voices in reading the bolded italicized sections. We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. Part of the steady growth of human companionship. I would invite you to turn to your neighbor on this warm June Sunday in exchange with them of friendly grieving. When she was 14 years old, she and a friend of their own began to teach. She published her first, now when she was 19 years old, where she began to take some college courses at a very famous school called Harvard. And she started another school of her own. And she also discovered something new in Boston that she had never heard of before. Unitarianism. And she began to attend a Unitarian church in Boston, and the minister at the time was a guy named William Ellery Channing. And William Ellery Channing and his sermons were always talk about the need for kindness and for compassion and the need to be good to all kinds of people. And so Dorothea was really inspired by these sermons by Dr. Channing. And so she began to volunteer at a prison, a prison for women. And when she was at that prison and she was teaching, she could see the conditions that these women lived in, and that really upset her a lot. And she could also see that there were not just people who had done wrong things or bad things in the prison, but in those days, even people who were mentally or emotionally ill were put in and there wasn't any heat in them. So she spent a year and a half traveling all over Massachusetts and visiting all the different prisons and talking to the people about what they had experienced in those prisons. And she shared what she had learned with the governor of Massachusetts and with all the people that made the laws in Massachusetts, and they began to make some major improvements in those prisons. But Dorothea wasn't satisfied with just working in Massachusetts. So she went to New Jersey and she began studying their prisons. And she told people in New Jersey, you need to build special places for people who have mental and emotional illness to live. They should not be put in prisons with criminals. And because of her efforts, Dorothea's efforts in 18th Hospital for people with mental injuries, and she called it, Dorothea called it her first child. After that, she went to Pennsylvania, she went to the state of New York, she went to Rhode Island, she went to Connecticut, and in all she visited 30 different states in the United States. Wow, that's right. It's a lot of different states telling the people in those states and the governors of those states that they needed to establish these new hospitals for people with mental illness. And then she went to Canada, another country. She went to countries in Europe. She went to the Vatican and she talked to the Pope. And after the Pope had talked with Dorothea, he said that she was a modern Saint Teresa. Shortly after that, Dorothea returned to the United States and a great big war broke out, the Civil War in 1860. And Dorothea Dix was 56 years old at that point. But she wrote to President Lincoln and said, I want to help you create a nurses' corps, a whole bunch of people that will help the sick and the wounded during this war. And so Abraham Lincoln, the President, said that's a pretty good idea. And he put her in charge of the nurses' corps. And she recruited thousands of men and women to be nurses in the Civil War, including Clara Barton, who was a pretty worn out by everything she did. And Dorothea retired from all of her work at the age of 80. She moved into a very small apartment in back of the New Jersey State Hospital, which she had helped establish. It was her first child. And she died six years later. And at her funeral, these words were read. These are very famous words from the Bible. I was hungry and you gave me meat. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I was naked and you came to visit me. And I was in prison. Very few people in our world are ever going to be able to do as much as Dorothea did. Her example, what she did, can inspire all of us to give ourselves to love in more simple ways. We can find for ourselves a child that we can adopt or that we can conceive just like Dorothea found all these children in the hospitals that she helped to start. Loving people, you can love not just people, you can give your love to a forest or to an animal shelter, to a refugee family, or maybe to another little boy or girl who just is a little different and they really need to have a good friend. It doesn't really matter what we do, but for all the gifts that we receive, when did she die? She died at the age of 86 in the year 1900, so over 100 years ago. In any case, the world gives us so many good things and our family gives us so many good things. So we owe the world in return the gift of our love. You have a grandma that's 99, even older than Dorothea. And I bet she did some really good things. Yeah, in year four, you guys are all going to be big real soon though, right? In year five, anybody for six? Alright, there we go. Alright, we're going to sing you guys out now. We've got some great things in store for you at Summer Fun, so have a great day. Whose name was Martin, embarked with Candide for Bordeaux. And both Candide and Martin had seen and they had suffered much. And if a ship had been scheduled to sail from Suriname to Japan by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, they would have had enough to say to each other about moral and physical evil to last for the entire voyage. Monsieur Martin, Candide asked, what is your idea about moral and physical evil? Sir, replied Martin, my priests accuse me of being a Sosinian, but the truth of the matter is that I am a Manichean. You're making fun of me, said Candide. There are no more Manicheans in the world. There's me, said Martin. And I don't know what to do about it, but I cannot think any other way. You must be full of the devil, Candide replied. Well, he takes so much part in the affairs of the world, said Martin, that I might as well be as full of him as anything else. But I must admit, when I cast my eyes over the globe, or rather this globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some maleficent being. I've hardly seen a town that did not desire the ruin of a neighboring town. Never a family that did not want to exterminate some other family. Everywhere the weak loathe the powerful before whom they crawl, and the powerful treat them like flocks of wool and flesh that are up for sale. A million regimented assassins ranging from one end of Europe to the other practiced murder and brigandage with discipline to earn their bread because there is no other honest occupation. And in the towns that seem to enjoy peace where the arts flourish, men are devoured with more envy and cares and anxieties than all the scourges suffered by a town under siege. Secret griefs are even more cruel than public miseries. In a word, Martin said, I have seen so much. I have undergone so much that I am a Manichean. And yet there is some good, Candide protested. That may be, Martin replied, but I do not know of it. And the second selection is from an open letter to colleagues from the retired cultural geographer at UW-Madison Yifu-Tuan. This was published in 2010. A young friend tells me that he has become cynical, a pessimist, which leads me to wonder, what do these words mean? Am I, for example, cynical, a pessimist? If I am, and sometimes I think I am, isn't it because I have extraordinary expectations of myself and of others? In other words, I could be cynical only because at bottom I am an irredeemable optimist. But we are all optimists as children. As children, we all expect perfection in the world. A story by John Updike, in which he tells of his own childhood, gives concrete illustration of what I have in mind here. Updike was a precocious child, very close to his mother. They seemed to know and anticipate each other's immediate needs. Now, young Updike, one day, had finished a sketch. He came up and showed it to his mother, who was reading a book at the time. And rather than putting down her book to admire her child's sketch, the mother looked slightly irritated by the interruption of her reading. Big deal, you say. And yet it was a big deal to the boy. So big that John Updike, grown man, famous author, still remembers vividly that particular incident. Against that one maternal slight, all the attentiveness his mother bestowed upon him just faded into the background. Many of us are like this even as adults. Certainly I am. In the course of an ordinary day, I encounter numerous acts of thoughtfulness, acts of courtesy. Do I feel grateful? Not at all. I take the world's perfection for granted and feel irritated by the slightest departure from it. The waitress's insincere greeting. The driver's failure to yield. My colleague's perfunctory high. If I grow cynical, it is because I do not meet with perfection at every turn. John Updike and I are of the professional middle class. We are spoiled. The poor certainly do not live with such unreal expectations. Yet the poor too are optimists. They are optimistic with regard to the moment, to what the next half hour might bring. Their optimism is, however, based on a deeply pessimistic view of life overall, and it is the outcome in reverse of what we in the middle class experience. In the life of the poor, which is burdened with uncertainty and hardship, it is the small good things that stay in memory. The small good things that lighten the day. And so the poor may feel bitter, but not cynical. Never having been afflicted by middle class illusions of perfection. The estimation, one of the finest portrayals of cynicism that I've run across, appeared in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Inherit the Wind was a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a high school science teacher was prosecuted in Tennessee for teaching the Band Theory of Evolution. Inherit the Wind's cast included a man by the name of E.K. Hornbeck, a reporter covering the trial for his big city newspaper. Hornbeck's sympathies clearly lie with the defendant in this case, and he is alternately amused and appalled by the retrogressive outlook of the local rooms. But while Hornbeck and the defense attorney, Henry Drummond, both subscribe to the Doctrine of Evolution, to the tenets of modern science, the latter, Drummond, is sanguine about humanity and its future, but the journalist, on the other hand, exhibits nothing but contempt. Oh, Henry, he admonishes the attorney at one point. Why don't you wake up? Darwin was wrong. Human beings are still apes. The cynical Hornbeck continues in the same vein on another occasion. Henry, he says, you think man still has a noble destiny. Well, I tell you, he's already started his backward march to the salt-filled and stupid seas from which he came. The character of Henry Drummond, the attorney, is patterned after the legendary 20th century defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, a man that we Unitarians claim is our own. Hornbeck, on the other hand, stands in for the celebrated H. L. Menken, who for many years wrote for the Baltimore Sun. Known for his acerbic wit, Menken once defined a cynic as one who smelling flowers looks around for a coffin. Candide's companion, the scholar Martin, is like Menken, a thoroughgoing cynic. He presents himself as a Manichean because members of that ancient sect believed that Satan, rather than God, was responsible for the physical creation, which serves to explain why our world is so deeply flawed, so filled with evil, and ultimately why our world is ultimately unredeemable. Manicheans believed that we were trapped in a corruptible body with that kernel of light inside us, that spark of the divine yearning for release from its earthly fetters so that it could return to the source of all light and goodness from which it originally came. Like a cynic, a Manichean harbors no hope whatsoever for this physical world. Now, according to Webster's collegiate dictionary, a cynic is someone who is scornfully distrustful of human nature and human motives. A cynic is someone who harbors a sneering disbelief in sincerity and nobility. Now, Henry Drummond, the attorney, is a doubter. Henry is a skeptic, but his faith in humankind and his hope for a better future always remains intact in spite of his skepticism. By contrast, E.K. Hornbeck's world seems utterly bereft of purpose, meaning, and any evidence of human worth and dignity. Cynicism is not the same as pessimism as Yves Vuitton suggested earlier. One can have low expectations of, one can feel uneasy or skeptical about the future without completely writing it off as cynics are wont to do. Now, we owe our word, our English word cynic, in ancient Greeks, in whose language it literally meant dog, canine. And the term was applied originally to a school of philosophy that urged its followers to forsake the customs and the obligations of human society for a radically simple and unencumbered life, a life very much like that enjoyed by the dogs that roamed the city streets in Athens. Diogenes, who lived in the fourth century BCE, was one of the most notable cynics. He begged for a living. He slept at night in a large clay urn of the sort that the Greeks used for human burials. Basically, he lived in a coffin. Diogenes professed indifference to food, clothing, manners, religious practice. And legend has it that on one occasion, the emperor Alexander came to visit the famous Diogenes. And he approached them and said, Diogenes, is there anything that you want from me, the emperor, anything that I can do for you? He was testing the philosopher's commitment to this thoroughgoing asceticism, this austerity. Diogenes looked up the emperor and said, yes, please move, you are blocking the sun. Few ancient cynics lived as humbly as Diogenes. And as Bertrand Russell observes in his commentary on the cynics, these individuals were not without values. They were not without a larger sense of purpose. By detaching themselves from the customs and the mores of society, they hoped to acquire an elevated sense of personal peace and well-being. The cynics, Russell writes, had an ardent passion for virtue. And they sought virtue and moral freedom by liberating themselves to the greatest extent possible from desire. They sound a little bit like Buddhists in that respect. Now those who so label themselves today, cynics, hardly resemble these ancient philosophers who eschewed luxury and cared very little for reputation or social approval. These individuals in the ancient world were not so much disillusioned with the world as frustrated by the claims that it placed upon them. Henry David Thoreau would be a closer modern counterpart than H. L. Mankin who had given up on humankind altogether. Now in light of what transpired in Orlando a week ago, such cynicism might seem understandable, especially if you happen to be part of the LGBTQ community. Proportionate to their numbers, more acts of violence, more hate crimes are committed against this particular group than any other in our country. Even though if you are gay or lesbian you now have the right to marry, even though you enjoy full civil rights, if you are openly gay or trans in this society, you have to fear for your safety on a daily basis. Wouldn't that make you a little cynical? The victims in the Pulse nightclub were mostly of Latino extraction, an ethnic group that many Anglos have been taught to resent as the parties responsible for the decline of their own economic fortunes. If you happen to be gay and Latino, you will probably be saddled with an especially heavy burden of disapproval. Wouldn't that make you a little cynical? And then there's the rest of us who watch with heavy hearts as a now familiar scenario unfolds once again. And so we may wonder to ourselves whether there will ever come a time when our policymakers choose to place a higher value on human life than on the questionable right to own and use a weapon of mass destruction. Columbine, Aurora, Blacksburg, Tucson, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, and now Orlando. Another atrocity is committed. Americans ring their hands. The obligatory moment of silence is observed. Calls for reform are repeated. And then after a couple of weeks, Congress and the media turn their attention to other emerging issues. Maybe E.K. Hornbeck understated the case. Maybe we humans are worse than the apes. Now ironically, many of those who purchase military-style weapons do so because they themselves are deeply cynical. Many of them look to protect themselves not from common criminals so much as from an institution, the federal government, that they believe to be power-hungry and determined to roll back their rights. One candidate for president recently suggested that Obama himself may be in league with ISIS, enabling its terrorist activities. Is it any wonder with thinking like this that thousands have lined up to purchase AR-15s? Americans in general have become increasingly cynical about our nation's institutions and especially its governing bodies. But in some segments of our population, this cynicism has become disproportionate. And today I believe that it threatens to undermine our civil order. Cynicism is fed by events, events that cause us over time to lose confidence in humankind and in our future. But each of us has also created a master narrative through which such events are filtered. And so if you happen to believe, as Martin did, that planet Earth is Satan's playground, you will probably interpret people's behavior very differently than if you are convinced that God designed this creation and designed it to be very, very good. The psychologist Martin Seligman calls this our explanatory style, the manner in which we explain to ourselves why events like Orlando happen. And the choice isn't necessarily a stark one between cynicism on the one hand and Panglossian optimism on the other. The 18th century British philosopher David Hume was a thoroughgoing skeptic. He was known for his biting critiques of religion and political systems and social customs. But Hume, the philosopher, was remarkably clear-eyed about the world that he lived in. And he reached his conclusions about humankind and history after rigorous empirical investigation. Hume was admirably free of prejudice, his perceptions uncontaminated by any particular or personal master narrative. And so as a result, Hume could easily recognize, looking around, that there is benevolence in the world. Benevolence manifested in our families and our friendships and the social clubs to which he belonged. But at the same time, he was acutely aware of the human capacity for cruelty and self-centeredness. Hume was skeptical, but he was also hopeful, which is a strategy that we need to adopt when cynicism rises up in us, drop the narrative, set aside the preconceptions, adopt the pose of an empirical investigator. The alternative to cynicism isn't necessarily positivity, because as Barbara Ehrenreich says, positive thinking can be just as delusional as negative thinking. The alternative to both, she says, is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things as they really are, as uncolored as possible by our feelings and our fantasies, to understand that the world is indeed full of danger and full of possibility. This is not easy, Ehrenreich acknowledges, because we've become so deeply invested in those master narratives, which are then reinforced by the people around us and with whom we choose to consort. And then our expectations, our expectations of others and of ourselves also play an important role here. And this may be affected by the degree of entitlement that any one of us enjoys. My late colleague, Forest Church, served the upscale also Unitarian Church in Manhattan for many years. It was a congregation, the one that he served, that was full of successful, urbane, wealthy and near-wealthy individuals. It was, of course, in Manhattan. Although the perspective of most of his parishioners were balanced and healthy, there were more than a few, he said, who had succumbed to what Forest Church called the Sin of Cynical Sheik. They had adopted a dim view of the world, and these people routinely dismissed all idealism as naive and destined for defeat. Forest Church would probably have concurred with Yifu Tuan and his analysis of cynicism, that it is often a luxury enjoyed by comfortable people who tend to discount that comfort because they harbor these illusions of perfection. Or, as my colleague put it, Cynical Sheik can serve as a tombstone for wishful thinkers whose disappointments have led to hopelessness. Rebecca Solnit offered similar thoughts in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. Solnit's beef was with who she called naïve cynics. Naïve cynics uphold unrealistic standards, and again, these are people with perfectionist tendencies who will accept nothing less than the best. And so when an individual or an institution comes up short, they dismiss it completely as inadequate with its efforts having no redeeming value whatsoever. Scratch a cynic, and underneath you are going to discover a disillusioned idealist. Such an attitude is, Solnit warns, profoundly disempowering. It bleeds the sense of possibility, the sense of responsibility right out of it. And so she offers the example of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We know that that was a protest against the so-called 1% in the financial industry, a movement that spread from Manhattan to cities across the country, including Madison. And when that movement petered out after a year or two, many cynically dismissed Occupy Wall Street as misguided, inconsequential. Hey, it failed in its audacious attempt to overhaul the entire economic system, therefore it didn't work. But it was, of course, both cynical and naive to think that it could ever have accomplished that lofty goal. If we step outside of ourselves, if we put aside our exaggerated expectations, if we adopt a more empirical approach, we might just revise our assessment of Occupy Wall Street. The fruits of OWS's summit says are too many to count. People who are involved in many American cities with those local encampments, they tell me that their thriving offshoots of OWS are still making a difference in those communities. And Occupy, she says, helped bring politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio, Elizabeth Warren right into the mainstream of our political process. But cynicism tempts us to turn away from the always imperfect. It refuses to acknowledge small victories, incremental gains, qualified success, sullinet rights, unsettles those who are locked into fixed positions, people whose world lack any gray tones that must always be perceived in black and white colors in win-and-loss-lose terms. Cynicism discourages people from engaging in problem-solving, from imagining that they might possess some personal agency. But realists like David Hume and Rebecca Solnit, they have managed to step outside of themselves and thus they can recognize that some outcomes are going to be positive, some are going to be negative, some are going to be mixed, and some are going to be in progress. The trick is to view the world through a lens of possibility, free from these naive expectations of perfectability. History can serve as an important teacher here. Unfortunately, Americans too quickly lose track of their own past. A couple of years ago, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, now Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Reich was hearing a lot of discouraging comments from students who were preparing to embark on their careers. And many of these students, 21, 22 years old, were admitting to him that they felt fearful, that they felt helpless to affect positive change, particularly in the face of opposition from these powerful multinational corporations from deep-pocketed special interests. How can we fight people with those kind of resources? And Reich was moved to respond to the concerns of these students. He said, you have no right, you have no chance if you assume that you have no chance. Synthesis, he says, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Easy for you to say, Reich's students pushed back at him, things were different, things were easier when you graduated from college. Well, you just don't know, your history, Reich responded. And he shared a few of the challenges his generation faced in 1968 when he was finishing his undergraduate degree. That year, as some of the older among us remember, saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. They saw race rides in dozens of cities. They saw 500,000 Americans bogged down in Southeast Asia. They saw rivers clogged with industrial waste. Cities smothered with smog. It was a year in which an avowed racist, George Wallace, carried five southern states in the general election. It all seemed pretty hopeless back then at Reich Road. And I assumed that America was going to help. He goes on. It would have seemed beyond imagination in 1968 that a black man, a child of interracial parents would become president of the United States. Or that the Cuyahoga River, which used to catch fire regularly, would come to support 44 species of fish. Today we find widening inequality, climate change, the corruption of our democracy by big money, all of these problems and more. Which is to say, I understand the cynicism of you young people. It looks pretty hopeless. Believe me, it's really not. Not if you pitch in. Not if you pitch in. But first, like Robert Reich, you need to believe. What we do begins with what we believe we can do, Rebecca Solnit writes, echoing the philosopher William James, who's made much the same point 120 years ago. In the end, we will only accomplish that, which we believe we can accomplish. And if you happen to be a cynic, that probably means very little. Late last week I listened to a TED talk by Maya Birdsong, an African American social reformer who has spent 30 years working in impoverished communities. Everywhere I go, she said, I encounter people in these communities who are broke, but they are not broken. Perhaps, as Yifou Toine suggested, these are folk who have been spared our middle class illusions of perfection. And so they rejoice in small but meaningful victories, partial achievements. And although Birdsong's poor friends know that individually they don't have a whole lot of power, they have learned in their communities from experience that when they combine their strength and their talent, they can indeed be unstoppable. And perhaps we can be too, if we refuse to succumb to the sad but seductive song of cynicism. Blessed be. And now we invite you to participate in today's offering, and your gifts will help to support the fine institution in which we all have a stake. Please be generous. Through this time and this place, we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. John and Nancy Woods write in our Cures of the Congregation book that John's sister, Caroly, lost her husband Jimmy Henley on May 15, 2016, just over a month ago. And so our thoughts go with John and Nancy and with their family at this time of loss. In addition to the one just mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys and sorrows that remain among us, but as a community, we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Please join me in the spirit of meditation. Here in the sanctuary of our dreams, wisdom, and beauty, we come to grow. We come to be healed. To stretch mind and heart, to be challenged and renewed, to be supported in our ongoing quest for meaning and love to help build a world with more justice and more mercy in it. In the face of cynicism and brutality around and within us, we seek to align ourselves with a living community of faith that would affirm life rather than deny it, that would rather think and act than remain passive and inert. Here we invite the spirit of our own humanity to be present with and around us, to give us the nerve and the grace, the toughness and the sensitivity to enable us to serve without fear the cause of justice and to grow with hope and conviction into our full and glorious humanity. May it be so. Now I invite you to rise once more in body and spirit as we sing together our closing hymn. These words from the Ojibwa Indian tradition. Grandfather, look at our brokenness. We know that of all creation, only the human family has strayed from the sacred way. We know that we are the ones who are divided. We are the ones who must come back together to walk in the sacred way. Grandfather, sacred one, teach us to love, to have compassion and honor that we may heal the earth and heal one another. Please be seated for the post.