 Please join me for a few moments of centering silence. And now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn, number 1058, and the words appear in your order of service. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore virtual, 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 be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Greer and on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation, so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give building tours after each service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house, please meet up front near the large glass window on your left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However, because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this very lively acoustical environment, our child haven back in that corner and the commons outside the auditorium are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would also be an excellent time to turn off all devices that might disrupt the service or cause a disturbance during the hour, especially cell phone ringers. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. At this service, David Bryles is handling our sound. Tom Boykoff is serving as our lay minister. Patty Whitty was our greeter. Our ushers are Dorit Bergen and Biss Nitschke. And we have Sandy Plisch back in the kitchen on hospitality making coffee and lemonade. We generally have a tour guide also available and as far as I know John Powell is going to be here and he'll be the one who will meet you after the service. Please note the announcements in the red floors. Oh, I'm sorry. Insert in your order of service. This tells about things that are going on at the society today and in upcoming days and provides more information you may want to know. So take a look at this please. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. The old ones stood up in the morning light and spoke to those who had come back to the river. Now we have come again to this place. It is a good thing. My life apart from you is not as strong. Yes, I have danced and I have told the stories at my own fire and I have sung to all the directions. But when I am with you my friends, I know better who it is in me that sings. And if you will rise now in body or spirit to join together in the words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this chalice for all who are here and all who are not. For all who have ever walked through our doors for those who may yet find this spiritual home and for those we can't even yet imagine. For each of us and for us all may this flame burn warm and bright. And before we join together in song if you'll take a moment to turn and greet your neighbor with a sorrow so heavy that you need the help of this community to carry it. Or if you woke with a joy so great that it simply must be shared. Now is that time. The sharing of joys and sorrows is our time in the spirit of acceptance and support to share with one another some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of a loved one in recent days or weeks. This is not a time for general announcements or political opinion. As you share please remember that our listeners are not limited to the people in this room as our service is broadcast over the web. So for the next few minutes anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium light a candle using the microphone that our lay minister Tom has with him briefly share with us your message. You may also come forward to wordlessly light a candle and return to your seat. If you're unable to come forward for any reason raise your hand Tom will bring the microphone to you. I now open the floor for the sharing of our sorrows and our joys. David and I are thrilled to have witnessed the wedding of our youngest son Will last weekend and are very excited about this phase of our parenting career which has now moved on to grandparenting. My name is Mary Weatherwax and I just returned from a week in Branson, Missouri with my sister and I didn't realize it until she said it but it's the first vacation that she's been on since her husband died and since she went through her chemo with cancer and all that good stuff and she said it was good. So it's a good time. Julie Swanson and I will add to the joy in the room. I have two joys. I just got back from seeing my older son, Nate Nestler, graduate from his year in AmeriCorps. So he is back and while I was out in California I was able to participate in Labyrinth summer school where I got to learn how to facilitate Labyrinth walks and design and construct them. So I am really excited to share what I've learned. Hi, my name is Jamie and you're fire. I have two joys, I guess. One is that my husband and I celebrated our anniversary on Friday and 11 years. And my other joy is that after almost a decade of career upheaval and turmoil I started a new job a couple weeks ago and it's going very well and my spirit feels settled. So it's a very good thing. My name is artist Wood and I bring greetings from the UU church in Savannah, Georgia. Somebody said, oh how cool. And I said, not this time of year. It's wonderful to be here and I hope it's appropriate to say that it's a joy to know that Frank Lloyd Wright was Unitarian because he lifts my spirits every place I see his work. Good morning, I'm Beauvais Lyons. I'm visiting family from Knoxville, Tennessee and bring greetings from Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. Seven years ago a gunman came into our church and killed two members of our congregation and a number of others. And I like this candle in opposition to guns and gun violence in our society. Thank you all for sharing and a special thank you to our visiting UUs who summer travels brought them here to Madison and we are very glad that you're with us this morning. Tom, if you will light one final candle for all the joys and all the sorrows that are too tender to share but that live in the fullness of our hearts. And now while our children go off to summer fun if we will rise in body or spirit to join in our next hymn number 10-07. These thoughts today from my mother is in her late 70s. Because of cluck and good genes she is strong. She hikes, snorkels, kayaks, shovels snow. Her back is straight, her stride is long and sure. She called the other day to share a series of incidents that transpired on a recent vacation. She told me not once, not twice but three times some nice young person at an airport asked me if I needed a wheelchair. They saw me as a little old lady. I guess I am a little old lady. A woman who goes to church with me, a lady blessed with naturally curly and once red hair. Hair so forgiving it would look adorable if the dog chewed on it. Is in the habit of cutting her own hair. Several months ago just to see how the other half lives she decided to go to a salon. She was sitting in the half trance of the beauty parlor when she noticed the floor was covered with this snow white hair. She said, I thought, oh for heaven's sake don't they even bother to sweep up between customers? Then I realized all that white hair was mine. Recently I was in Asheville, North Carolina with a couple of girlfriends to enjoy the fall colors. I asked Betty, the eldest of our group at 77 if she started to feel old yet. She said, no other than the aches and pains I just feel like me. There is it would seem some sort of essential me-ness. I don't know that this me is ageless, changeless or infinite. I know that in many fundamental ways my behavior, my outlook, even my thoughts have changed. As slings and arrows have hit home I've morphed into a more compassionate version of me. On a gut level, I feel that the bit of me-ness has remained unchanged. That it was pure and perfect to begin with and has remained pure and perfect despite the rigors of life. I am at the mid-century mark and have not yet had Boy Scouts offer to help me across the street, but it won't be long before these lads begin to look at me with merit badges dancing in their eyes. But inside, I'm 39. I suffer a mild schism when what the outside world perceives no longer jives with this image that I've decided expresses my inside and they see old or stuffy instead of me. Despite all those, don't judge a book by its cover lessons that I know. I fall into this myself. When I see an old person, I see an old person. Not an old person, if you can hear the difference. This rift between body and self speaks of a basic devaluation of the me inside. We've become accustomed to put the value on the packaging and not the gift. When the package begins to look weathered, corners bent, ribbons untied, most of us lose interest in opening the gift. Does this explain our love affair with changing our outer appearance? We know we still exist. We're still us. So when the world ceases to see us, value us, we strive to regain that outward form that once made us so visible. We admire strength, agility, quickness, beauty. We find these attributes so seductive that we condemn those who don't have them to the ranks of the unseen. We look away from the man in the wheelchair, the woman missing a limb, the child who yells out uncontrollably. Yet I think like the velveteen rabbit as we get older, perhaps shabbier, we become more real. Seeing the white hair on the salon floor, seeing the disconnect in the eyes of others, the wheelchairs offered, the experience discounted as obsolete, we understand more clearly what is real in ourselves and others. I vow to try and see others, to see an old person, a famous person, a quadriplegic person, a powerful person, a developmentally disabled person. And I will hope, regardless of how my outside changes, someone somewhere will always be able to see me. It's always exciting when we see you wheeling in that harp. I didn't tune it. Did you know I'm in charge of tuning the harp? She was practicing this morning and a string broke and so for a moment there we thought we were going to have to do our row, row, row your boat rendition for the special music. I'm glad she fixed it. Our reflections today begin with some of my favorite words, once upon a time. Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a new world. So they organized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, swimming, flying, and climbing. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects. To ensure that the students were progressing satisfactorily, standardized achievement tests were administered to all. Here's what happened. The ducks were excellent in swimming. In fact, the ducks were better than their teacher. But some of the ducks made only passing grades and flying and all of them were surprisingly poor in running. Since they were so slow in running, they had to stay after school for running practice and they had to drop swimming in order to practice running during swimming class time. This was kept up until all the ducks' webbed feet were very sore and the ducks were so tired that soon they were only average in swimming. But average was okay, so nobody worried about that except for the ducks. Now in running, the rabbits started at the top of the class but they did very poorly in swimming. Also, the rabbits insisted on hopping everywhere and the teachers were concerned about their hyperactivity. So they made the rabbits walk everywhere instead of running and the rabbits had to come in early every day for special swimming class. Many of the younger rabbits developed severe fur problems because they were having to spend so much time in the pool. Now the squirrels were excellent in climbing and running. In fact, the squirrels were the best students at climbing the tree. They wanted to fly by first climbing the tree, spreading their paws and gliding to the ground. But in flying class, their teacher made them start on the ground instead of at the tree top and the squirrels were not mastering the course material. So every day the squirrels had therapy, flying therapy. The therapist would take them into the gym and make them do front paw exercises to strengthen their muscles so they could learn to fly the right way. The squirrels paws hurt so much from this over exertion that some of them got only a C in climbing. Some of the squirrels failed climbing altogether. Now the eagles, they were definitely the problem children. In climbing class, the eagles beat all of the others to the top of the tree but they insisted on using their own way to get there. They were quite stubborn about it. The eagle said that it was clearly the goal that mattered that it was quite right for eagles to get to the tree top by flying. They were diagnosed as having oppositional defiant disorder and a strict behavior modification plan was developed. Now we can imagine this story ending in either of two ways. Perhaps in animal school they still make squirrel children try to learn to fly by flapping their paws and they punish eagles for being defiant about their right to be themselves. Or we can believe that they learn to enjoy the beauty of the individual and they created a school that honored each animal for being themselves. Each squirrel is a perfectly wonderful squirrel. Each rabbit a lovely rabbit whether or not they choose to hop, skip, roll or walk. Each eagle allowed to be an eagle and each duck encouraged to swim and swim to their hearts content. Now this fable was written by George Rivas who was the assistant superintendent of the Cincinnati Public Schools back in the 1940s. We can suspect 75 years later that he was concerned about the direction of public education when he wrote it and that he was trying to suggest another path. A path in which we recognize that when we try to make everyone the same nobody is happy. Yet when we recognize the beauty of each individual and find ways so that each person's talents and gifts are allowed to shine then we all prosper. Now on this day 25 years ago, July 26, 1990 President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. As he did so he said these words, Every man, woman and child with a disability can now pass through one's closed doors into a bright new era of equality, independence and freedom. The ADA banned discrimination based on disability and was intended to ensure equal opportunity in employment as well as government services and public accommodations, commercial facilities and public transportation. This anniversary is a time for us to examine this issue in light of living out our commitment to our first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of all people. This anniversary is a reminder to us that this is an issue of human dignity, human rights and relationship. It's about welcome, hospitality, the full inclusion of everyone and the dignity of everyone. Our first principle is a proclamation of the preciousness of the human being, of each and every one of us as we are. This principle says you are good enough. You contain within who you are all that is necessary to love and grow deep and to heal your own wounds and the wounds of the world. Then there is our seventh principle, respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are apart. This principle grounds the first and radicalizes it by proclaiming that we can heal and be healed because we are all of us, each and every precious one of us and every other living thing in the cosmos, united in a web of relationship that is deeply and utterly true. In between these two poles, our precious individuality and our intimate connection lies the magic, the opportunity, the potential for healing, growth, for change. Our radical interconnectedness is powerful, magical, because it tells us that no one and nothing exists in isolation. We are woven out of each other, created by one another, live and move and have our being because of one another. We can see this in some of the ways the ADA has ended up helping all of us, regardless of ability. There are many stories. You probably have some of your own, but here's one. A simple one from the Dijkman Street subway station in Inwood, Manhattan. At this subway station, there's an elevator that was just added in November of 2013 to ensure wheelchair users access to the platform. On most days, the elevator is in constant use, the doors opening with a ding as people use it instead of climbing the nearby stairs. Dustin Jones, who is himself in a wheelchair and a frequent user of this elevator, notes that besides himself, he rarely sees another person with a disability ride the elevator. It's all walking people, he says. I see mothers getting on, holding the hand of a young child, pushing a baby in a stroller while carrying bags. This is one of those stations where it would be really tricky to navigate a small child, a small baby with the stroller and the bags if all you had to use were the stairs. But this elevator is always used, he said. Elderly people, people with vertigo, balance problems, knee problems, hip problems, whatever problems, they use the elevator. Sid Walinsky, co-founder of Disability Rights Advocate said, this elevator is one of the many gifts from the disability community and the ADA to the non-disabled people of New York. One simple story that highlights both our radical interconnection and also that when we think we are doing good for one, we are often doing good for all. Yet there are still struggles. 41% of those with disabilities and are of working age are employed, compared to 79% of those without a disability. Those who are employed earn on average 37% less than their able-bodied counterparts. President Obama raised these issues in his address on the anniversary saying, in some cases it is a lack of access to skills training. In some cases it is an employer that can't see all these candidates have to offer, whatever the reason we've got to do better. I believe he touched on a crucial piece of this struggle for the rights of all and he may not even have realized that he was saying something that I would look at as profound. That employers cannot see all these candidates have to offer. Seeing each other, seeing ourselves, seeing all of us sensing that essential me-ness that Nevada Barr spoke of, seeing that is the magic. Much of this is a matter of attitude. A decision to see and affirm what a value joy and holiness resides in each of us. When Robert Murphy, a professor of anthropology, was paralyzed by a tumor on his spine, he reexamined his attitude about the word disabled. Listen to his own words from his book, The Body Silent. I was badly damaged, yet just as alive as ever, and I had to make the best of it with my remaining capabilities. It then occurred to me that this is the universal human condition. We all have to muddle through life with our limitations, and while I had certain physical handicaps, I retained many of my strengths. My brain was the only part of the central cortex that still worked well, but that is also where I made my living. Disability is an amorphous and relativistic term. Some people are unable to do what I do because they lack the mental equipment, but in this sense they are disabled and I am not. Everybody is disabled in one way or another, and even though my growing paralysis will one day end my active participation in the affairs of the world, I can still look back and watch them unfold. This is the universal human condition. We all have to muddle through life within our own limitations. There it is again, the universality of being human, the connectedness of us all, the realization that I as a rabbit cannot swim like a duck, but I can run and hop with the best of them. When we can see with those eyes the eyes that see our limitations and our strengths and can hold them both in tension, hold them both in love, we have creative eyes, eyes that can see, eyes that can transform, eyes that can make change. What keeps us? What keeps you? From seeing ourselves and one another with new eyes. You, you, Karen Holden answers that question with this prayer. The hardest part is people. So, Lord, help me face them without rancor or disappointment. Help me see the pain behind their actions rather than the malice, the suffering rather than the rage. And in myself, as I struggle with the vice of my own desire, give me strength to quiet my heart, to quicken my empathy, to act in gratitude rather than need. Remind me that each time I close my heart to another, I add to the darkness. Help me always follow kindness. We are designed in some ways to close our hearts. We try to keep ourselves safe. What we believe to be safe by keeping ourselves separate, focusing only on our own worries, our own concerns, the concerns of our small circle of loved ones. We get stuck in the internal piece of that first principle, not really trusting who we are, questioning our own worth and dignity. Whether or not we are and can ever really be enough. We spend a lot of our day comparing ourselves to others, judging ourselves, worrying about what's coming next, defending against what we're afraid of, chasing the next thing that will make us happy, fulfilled, and whole. When we're in this place, we have lost the larger sense of both the first and the seventh principles. The reality that says, yes, you are enough, yes, you have limitations, but you are inherently worthy, inherently good, inherently beautiful, and you are a part of a larger belonging. What do you believe about yourself? Are you whole and beautiful? Are you flawed and broken? Are you both? Because how you answer that question will impact in large part how you are able to see others, support others, work for the rights of others. Can you recognize that you are beautiful and broken, that we all are, that what is needed is not competition, not comparison, not judgment, but hearts of compassion, hearts willing to be broken open, healed, and broken again? Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron once said, there is a teaching that says behind all heartening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there is always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear, there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is unethical, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and hold us at any time. We cannot look into the heart of another. But if we could, I bet we would try to do better, try harder to understand the unique challenges each of us faces. I think we would treat each other more gently with compassion, patience, acceptance, and care. For now what we can do is look into the eyes, our own, and those around us. Looking in the mirror, we need to see both ourselves and each other clearly. It is a dynamic relationship between the awareness of ourselves, our perceptions of others, and others' perceptions of us. When we see ourselves clearly, we develop a form of selflessness. But it isn't really selflessness at all. It's our ego stepping aside to make room for the world. When we see ourselves in the world, we are drawn into it with love and acceptance. Jack Cornfield talks about the heart that's expansive enough to hold all things. Wouldn't we all want a heart that big that leaves nothing and no one out, not out of fear, or envy, or misunderstanding? What we can do now is listen enough to the stories of each other to be transformed by what we hear. See ourselves with the eyes of compassion and see those around us with a new, clearer vision. May we recommit ourselves this day, this anniversary, to living into the magic of the first and the seventh principles, seeing the beauty, the joy, and the pain that lives in us all. Live into that magic so we can continue to work to create a world that is accessible, welcoming, whole, and holy for all. May we be courageous enough to make it so. And I now invite you into the giving and the receiving of the morning's offering. As you will see in your order of service, your gift today goes toward the continued work of this community, and we thank you for your generosity. And if you will rise now in body or spirit to join in our closing hymn that each one of us has to offer. Trust that the gifts offered in love will be received in the spirit of love. Trust that the good we are contributing to is bigger than any one of us. Trust that we will be blessed with a love and amazing grace. Know that you are somebody. And trust that even when we fall short, the good that we do matters. It and you matter greatly. Blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the post food.