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Okay, now you two are going to get the visiting cards. Okay, now you two are going to get the visiting cards. Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. Let's turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn so that we can become musically present with each other. You'll find those words in your order of service. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing 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 but very shy member of this congregation, and I'd like to offer a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we offer a guided tour today right after the service. Just gather over here by the windows, and we will take good care of you. Speaking of taking good care of each other, this is the splendid time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need during the next hour, and it goes for you watching at home. And while you're taking care of that, let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, we welcome children to stay for the entire service, but if you think that your child would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some special seating right outside the doorway in the commons, from which you and your youngster can hear and see the service. And one of the reasons we are able to hear and see the service today is that it is brought to us by a wonderful group of people. We call them volunteers, and we want to give them a high-five or a hug and a handshake by announcing their names and expressing our appreciation for these volunteers. David Bryles, thank you for operating the sound system. Tom Boykoff, thank you for being our lay minister today. Corinne Perron, thank you for greeting us this morning, upstairs as we arrived during this gray, drizzly, almost Irish day. Ken Gage, Ann Ostrom and Gail Bliss are the ushers for this unruly crowd, and our coffee is being hosted today after the service by Sandra Plisch and Nancy Kossoff. The foliage up here is tended by Betty Evenson, and John Powell will be our tour guide. There's only one announcement, and that announcement is that we have 47 days until cabaret. The theme this year is an evening in Ireland. So did you know that cabaret is coming? It'll be here real soon. We'll spend a night in Ireland, and we'll dance to some Irish tunes. Well, to hear the rest of the song. Come to cabaret in 47 days, Friday, May 12, when this entire building will be turned into one big Irish party, complete with Irish music. Wonderful food. I didn't say Irish food, because wonderful and Irish food doesn't always go together. We'll have wonderful food. We'll have beverages, including some Irish variations on that theme. And of course, we will have a terrific auction of items and services donated by FUS members. We'd like you to have a chance to be a part of our Irish cabaret on Friday, May 12. We invite you to find out if you've got the right stuff to be part of the Irish cabaret team, and after the service today, you'll have a chance to sign up for that. Also, we invite your auction items to make an evening in Ireland a wonderful success and a lot of fun for FUS. So with that, I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know you'll find that it will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Thank you to our Meeting House course for a rigorous and rousing opening to our service. The words today are by Gordon McKeeman. We summon ourselves from the demands and delights of the daily round, from the dirty dishes and unwaxed floors, from unmoved grass and untrimmed bushes, from all incompletenesses and not yet startednesses, from the unholy and the unresolved. We summon ourselves to attend to our vision, peace and justice, of cleanliness and health, of delight and devotion, of the lovely and the holy, of who we are and what we can do. We summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young. We summon beauty, eloquence, poetry and music to be the bearers of our dreams. We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life. We rejoice in manifold promises and opportunities. I invite you to rise and body or in spirit to join in our chalice lighting printed in your order of service. For every time we make a mistake and we decide to start again, we light this chalice. For every time we are lonely and we let someone be our friend, we light this chalice. For every time we are disappointed and we choose to hope we light this chalice. I invite you to greet your neighbors. It pains me to say we will not have a story for all ages today. I dressed like an Easter egg for the part. But once a month we generally set aside a few minutes at the first part of the hour for the sharing of joys and sorrows. This is a time for members, friends, and visitors to relate to the entire gathered community some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone close to you in recent days or weeks. General announcements, news items, and partisan appeals are discouraged. Anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium with a candle in one of our candelabras and using a microphone provided by our lay minister. Thank you. Share your name if that is comfortable to you and a brief message. Please note that our services are livecast, so listeners are not restricted to those sitting in this room. You may also wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and simply return to your seat. I open the floor now to your sharing of these significant matters of our lives. I'm Roxanne and one of my best friends and her family are currently gathering for a hospice vigil for their mother. So I ask for prayers and thoughts for them. I regret that I'm cleaning up the earth with my friend. Good morning. I'm Pamela McMullen. I'm going to light this candle in honor of my father who was Irish and who gave me my musical ability, which I treasure very, very much. He's been gone for 25 years, but he's still very much in my heart. Hi, my name is Gayle Epping Overholt and I have been gone from this community for a long time, a couple, about 15 years. And I'm back with my husband and we are so glad to be back in Madison in this community. And so I look forward to getting to know those of you whose face is not yet familiar. So thank you. I'm Elizabeth. I have a candle of joy for my brother Joe. He had a brain injury a number of years ago. I just visited him in Asheville, North Carolina. He has a professional job helping other people who have brain injuries and now he has a partner and a house and he is so happy. I'm happy for him. He and I have a joy that is spring break. My name is Tori Broker and my joy is that my birthday is tomorrow. Other joys or sorrows to share anyone in the balcony? Let us then take a moment of silence to remember those who are not with us today to honor the joys and sorrows shared here and to hold close to us the cares left unspoken but which still abide in our hearts. Blessed be. If you would please rise in body or in spirit for our next hymn, number four. Please be seated. You will note in your order of service that we are sharing today's outreach offering with the UW-Madison Odyssey Project which offers economically disadvantaged adults the opportunity to begin college studies with the hopes that they will go on to further and finish their studies at a four-year university like UW-Madison. Emily Auerbach is the director and founder of this program and is here with us today and as in the past we welcome today one of Emily's students to read an original composition on the theme of our service. Joining us today is Renee Robinson who will share a poem by Langston Hughes something of her own journey and her own composition. Welcome Renee. Good morning. I counted a privilege as well as a pleasure to be here. In the Odyssey Project we read many poems and stories about persistence and the face of adversity about continuing the struggles of our ancestors and about continuing the struggles of our ancestors. One poem we read is by Langston Hughes from the 1930s called The Negro Mother. Children, I come back today to tell you a story of the long dark way that I had to climb that I had to know in order that the race might live and grow. Look at my face dark as the night yet shining like the sun with loves true light. I am the child they stole from the sand 300 years ago in Africa's land. I am the dark girl who crossed the wide sea carrying in my body the seed of the free. I am the woman who worked in the field bringing the cotton and the corn to yield. I am the one who labored as a slave beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave. Children sold away from me husband sold too. No safety, no love, no respect was I due. 300 years in the deepest south but God put a song and a prayer in my mouth. God put a dream like steel in my soul. Now through my children I'm reaching the goal. Now through my children young and free I realize the blessing denied to me. I couldn't read then I couldn't write. I had nothing back there in the night. Sometimes the valley was filled with tears but I kept trudging on through the lonely years. Sometimes the road was hot with the sun but I had to keep on till my work was done. I had to keep on, no stopping from me. I was the seed of the coming free. I nourished the dream that nothing could smother deep in my breast the Negro mother. I had only hope then but now through you dark ones of today my dreams must come true. All you dark children in the world out there remember my sweat, my pain, my despair. Remember my years heavy with sorrow and make of those years a torch for tomorrow. Make of my past a road to the light out of the darkness, the ignorance, the night. Lift high my banner out of the dust stand like free men supporting my trust. Believe in the right, let none push you back. Remember the whip in the slaver's track. Remember how the strong and struggle and strife still bore you the way and deny you life. But March ever forward breaking down bars look ever upward at the sun and stars. All my dark children made my dreams and my prayers impale you forever up the great stairs for I will be with you till no white brother dares keep down the children of the Negro mother. Now a short story I wrote about me. I was born in Chicago, number 11 of 14 children. At one point in my life we had 10 people in a three bedroom, one bathroom apartment. It was lively, challenging and sometimes disappointing but never a dull moment. It was family, my family. I didn't have a choice in the matter. We were poor. How poor were we? We were so poor that my uncle who worked at the Campbell's soup factory would bring us cans of soup that couldn't be sold because of flaws, dents and bands. The cans didn't have labels but contained numbers which identified the soup. We memorized the numbers because we had to. If you didn't know the numbers you were stuck with the soup no one wanted which in our house was the tomato soup. Survival, that was my life. Not only did I have to survive on the south side of Chicago in the ghetto, the low end as we call it but at home as well. Can you imagine 14 children buying for attention? 14 children wanting to be loved. 14 children striving to be better than the next. It wasn't all good but neither was it all bad. We were taught principles, morals and Christianity. We were required to excel in school. You would think that such an upbringing would produce upstanding and productive individuals and it did for ten of us. Unfortunately, I was one of the four who didn't quite meet the challenge. I was persistent at taking the wrong path and making poor decisions. I had my oldest son at 16 and was forced to attend a high school for pregnant girls. I married at 17 and had my second son at 18. It was a blessing to have a husband who was also the father of my children where I come from. That was a unique happening in itself. But unfortunately with that came physical abuse. I could go on and on about the many ups and downs due to the poor decisions I made over those 30 years but I want to talk about the good news. I made it out of that situation and relocated to Madison, Wisconsin. I got a job. I got an apartment. Then a used car. I joined a church that made me feel at home and there I heard about the UW Odyssey project. One of the best decisions I have ever made. Uh oh, on the page. Odyssey is for people just like me. Those who wanted to do better but couldn't for whatever reason. Having made so many poor decisions in my life I feel I'm somewhat of an expert in understanding how easy it is for people to mess up to make mistakes and to choose the wrong path. But Odyssey gives you the feeling like the little red engine we read about in elementary school. I think I can. I think I can. It releases the wow factor as in he did that. She did what? Really? They left Britain to do the same thing in America? I didn't know that. Then it begins. The desire to know more. The desire to understand. The drive and tenacity to do better. And to critically think, analyze and understand what you are reading. And what's so fantastic about Odyssey? It's generational. I tell people that all the time. Not only does it change the lives of parents. It changes the lives of their children. Which will change the lives of their children, etc. Odyssey is a mind-opening experience. Before Odyssey, if someone had asked me to write a poem or told me that I would be analyzing Socrates, my favorite, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, I promise you I would have rolled my eyes up, down, and sideways. But there I was at my Odyssey graduation earning six UW Madison credits and reading the following poem that I wrote about the value of lifelong learning. The poem was titled My Journey. My journey started about eight months ago. How I would fare, I really didn't know. Now, reading and writing, I thought it would be but from six to nine, that I didn't see. The professors were there for all to meet outlining history, humanities, and philosophy. I was scared, but I didn't know why. Maybe it was the 30 years that had quickly gone by so. Getting acclimated was a little rough at first but soon thereafter to read books I would thirst. See, prior to Odyssey, I didn't read all the info I got was from the TV but things have now changed. Mainly the screen, from the TV to the computer I am now a Google Queen. My journey, my journey, who would have thought would be the beginning of me being taught, being taught the importance of opening my mind instead of sitting around and wasting my time. So, thank you Odyssey for choosing me. I have found knowledge, my greatest discovery. Welcome to the real world, my father would say. He said this repeatedly as I was growing up. The inherent sarcasm and its underlying suggestion that my life would be filled with disappointment was not exactly what I wanted to hear in my pre and post-cubescent years. Ultimately though I found it to be true in some ways I had been sheltered from life's hardships. A childhood of relative privilege had not prepared me for what I would see or come to understand as an adult. Suffering I learned is common as mud and reality won't match our expectations all the time. Reality will knock us down sometimes. Some disappointment is an inevitable part of life and our determination will be tested as Shakespeare posed to us in Act III of Hamlet as the Danish prince considers ending his life to be or not to be that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing them end. Perhaps you or someone you know has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, survived experience of violence, personal tragedy or catastrophe. I was going to read a list of them to you starting with fire and flood but the longer the list got the more depressing it became. Perhaps you can identify as having been widowed, divorced, unemployed, disabled, mentally ill, formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless, an immigrant or refugee. Starting again often is not optional for many people but is made necessary by such experiences. Perhaps you have not had to face such hardships and misfortune. Perhaps you've been able to choose when and where and how to manage life's more mundane transitions, moving a household, changing schools or jobs, starting or ending a relationship. Along the way every one of us makes our share of mistakes. We have fallen short of our ideals. We have done bad things for good reasons and good things for bad reasons. We have hurt someone we know and love. We have had a friend or loved one die or leave us. Perhaps our bodies won't do what they once did and yet regardless of whatever experiences we have faced somehow here we are together. Each time we have known disappointment or loss we have survived, picked up the pieces, learned what we could, asked for forgiveness when we needed to and started again. While last week's service dealt more with loss and saying goodbye, this week's deals more with discovery and saying hello, developing resilience and being open to new opportunities. I don't know that the adage is true that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger but there's something to be said for resilience. Karen Rivich and Andrew Chateau in their book The Resilience Factor identify four fundamental uses for resilience. Overcoming the obstacles of early childhood, steering our way through everyday adversity, surviving a life altering event as a child and reaching out in a spirit of exploration. I think all four of them are relevant to today's discussion. Resilience is one of the first things we teach our children, isn't it? When they fall down we teach them the essence of the song by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again. Well it's easier to do this when we know that rewards or opportunities lie ahead of us which is one of the effects I think of the UW Odyssey project. Today we receive with deep gratitude Renee's powerful, beautiful contribution. The good news of someone who has overcome some of life's struggles and started again who turned a corner and found new hope and new life. Thank you Renee. It's a pleasure to have you, a privilege to have you here with us. As I prepared for this service I came to appreciate how the Odyssey project honors and empowers adults who have shown tremendous resilience in their lives. Bad things happen to good people. Trying to understand how evil can exist in the world if God is all loving and all powerful trying to understand this is called theodicy. Many in our society, particularly Unitarian Universalists, atheists, agnostics, humanists, other religious liberals and those identifying as none of the above, many in our society no longer see the theodicy problem as relevant and simply do not worry about it. That's a sermon for another day. But I had to wonder how theodicy had why bad things happen to good people might be connected to theodicy, the ancient epic Greek poem by Homer and the UW's Odyssey project. I had to wonder if the word theodicy was rolling around in the back of the minds of the project's organizers as they considered the long journeys and changes of fortune that people face. As Renee pointed out in her reading we often don't have a choice about what life puts in front of us. It can be a long hard climb and at the same time she reminded us that it's easy to mess up, to make mistakes or poor choices or choose the wrong path. What do we do when our hearts are broken or we've been deeply wounded in some way? How do we respond to life's hardships? Experience has taught me that we may respond in any number of ways. We may curl inward into a seething bundle of rage. We may feel doomed, stuck, impotent, and immobilized. We may lash out in anger and frankly further complicate our lives. We may dissolve into sorrow. Weep in pain and grief feel all the feels. We may seek solitude and the wisdom to be found in the natural world. We may reach out to those we know for comfort and perspective. All of these are natural responses. With time and good fortune, our wounds may heal. We may come to understand our heartbreak or woundedness in a greater context from a new perspective. Our vision might expand so that we may see both life's sorrows and its joys and know that we are more than just our moments of pain. Even as such experiences might help define who we are, we come to see them as finite moments or periods in our lives. We give those experiences meaning. And having done so, perhaps we come to a better understanding of life. Perhaps we even dare to love or trust again. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, Life based on a big love of the world is full and rich. I've employed this phrase when I have known hardship, when I've been knocked down. One of the ways I have learned to pick myself back up and help recover that big love toward the world is to remind myself with great irony that my life is still full and rich. You may see me walking down the hall chanting it to myself, full and rich, full and rich, full and rich. Anybody else been there? I have come to understand my father's view of the world. But I've also come to know that simply being alive is a miracle and a blessing. Some source of all has breathed life into our being. The challenge of living a fuller, richer life it seems to me is to accept and integrate our losses and still keep our minds and hearts open to possibility. Sometimes we can, sometimes we must start again. But starting again can be difficult, even harder than when things end. Unitarian Universalist minister Lynn Unger says, here's the thing about endings. You don't really have to do anything about them. If you've lost a friendship or a job or a marriage or even a beloved stuffed animal you'll probably feel sad and likely angry and possibly guilty or regretful. But if something has truly ended there's nothing you can do about it except learn to live with the loss. But beginnings are a heck of a lot of work. It's not easy to walk into a room full of people you don't know. When you start a new job you have to learn a whole new set of policies and principles and purposes and procedures. When you start a new grade in school you not only have to learn the classroom rules and meet new people and figure out just what your teacher expects you're also facing a whole bundle of new things to learn from multiplication to writing paragraphs from cursive to algebra. Endings may be hard because of how they feel but beginnings are where the real work begins. Unger suggests that anytime you take on something new you're basically committing an act of faith. You walk up to the open door of a new relationship a new skill, a new job or hobby or idea without knowing where it will take us. But you know that you're going to have to put some work in before you have any idea what your new beginning will grow into. And the best part, she says is that as long as we can maintain a beginner's view we get the special sense of excitement that comes with exploring the unknown. To be a beginner is to be filled with a sense of possibility with a feeling of new worlds unfolding in front of you. As I understand the Odyssey Project this is one of its greatest gifts that by learning new things, developing new skills and coming to know themselves better Odyssey students experience this sense of possibility of worlds unfolding before them. They find the courage and the will to embrace the unknown and to change the patterns of life that have defined them. They have listened to the still small voice within and have discovered Degadankan sin fry. Their thoughts are free and their thoughts give them power. Rene and hundreds of other Odyssey students are proof that some of us do make it out of bad situations that with the mind-opening experience of education comes empowerment, feeling like the little engine that could with the compounded benefit of affecting not just one life but generations. Unitarian Universalism's guiding principles celebrate the inherent worth and dignity of these students and the free and responsible search for truth and meaning that has made such a difference in their lives. I imagine the experiences of Odyssey students being like those expressed in today's songs bringing their spirits to the sea, feeling a light within, an inner flame burn away their tears, awakening and a rising from bended knee, feeling once lost but not found, but now found. Unitarian Universalist minister and author Robert Fogum is known for a story he wrote in which the neighborhood children are out playing hide and seek but there's always one child who hides too well and just as the others are about to give up searching, Fogum shouts, Get found, kid! Fogum prefers the game of sardines. Has anybody here played sardines? Yes. In which one person hides and all the rest join him or her until everyone is packed in like sardines. This simple game illustrates the Universalist theology that in the end all are found, that God provides salvation to all. Fogum says he thinks God is a sardine player and that God can be found in the same way everybody gets found in sardines by the sound of laughter of those heaped together in the end. I love that image for spiritual practice. Finding God by the laughter of those heaped together at the end. Well, we came together today to this community of fellow seekers as Gordon McKeeman said in our opening words to summon the power of tradition and the exhilaration of newness, the wisdom of the ages and the knowing of the very young. We would open our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts to the amplest dimensions of life and we rejoice in manifold promises and possibilities. In the days ahead, every time we make a mistake and decide to start again, each time we are lonely and we let someone be our friend, every time we are disappointed and we choose to hope, let us harken back to the songs and stories we've heard today and the time we've spent together. Let us go forth with our minds and hearts open to the amplest dimensions of life and live in faith that new worlds will unfold before us. May we walk in peace united. May we live in love enlightened and know that we are one. O source of all, help us to grow. May it be so. May it be so. As I mentioned earlier, today's outreach offering will be shared with UW Odyssey Project. More information is available in the commons after the service. Please be generous. If you would, please rise in body or in spirit for our closing hymn, number 277, for our closing words and our post loop. Our closing words come to us from Melissa Carville Zemer, Associate Executive Director of the UU Ministers Association. Let us give thanks for the will to survive and for the grit of survivors. Let us give thanks for the determination to thrive and ask a blessing upon all those taking risks to find their way. Let us praise persistence and perseverance in the name of love and let us praise the power that will not stop calling us toward transformation for the sake of us all here on this earth.