 of Centering Silence. Please remain seated while we sing the in-gathering hymn that is either in your church program or it's 184 in the blue hymnal. Well afternoon it is Love Fall and we welcome you to First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nourishing 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 Pat Coulson and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whatever and whoever you are and wherever you happen to be on your like journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service in the common area of the atrium addition. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. Also this evening is our first potluck dinner of the fall and again we would welcome you to join us at our potluck dinner whether you brought a pot or not because there's always more than enough food. If you are accompanied by a young child please remember that if you need to talk or move about the loja area to my right is a good place to retire with them and at this time we ask you to turn off your beepers cell phones and other electric electronic equipment that might cause a disturbance during the hour. I would like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. A list of our volunteer helpers should probably start with Karen Timberlake who I understand answered the call from the pulpit last Saturday to help coordinate. We volunteers who need to be coordinated of course. So this evening we have as ushers Carol Roem and Carolyn Sanders and many of you met Tammy Huffmeister as you came in and Carol excuse me Chris Carlson is our lay minister and of course all of us will be over to greet the newcomers also in the library. Please note the announcements that are in the red floors which is an insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events of the society and provide more information about today's activities. As I already mentioned today is the potluck and so that's a very special activity for all of us. Again welcome we hope that today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. We continue with the words of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Today the piece of autumn pervades the world. In the radiant noon silent and motionless the wide stillness rests like a tired bird spreading over the deserted fields to all horizons its wings of golden green. Today the thin thread of the river flows without song leaving no mark on its sandy banks. The many distant villages bask in the sun with eyes closed in idle and languid slumber. In the stillness I hear every blade of grass in every speck of dust in every part of my body in the visible and invisible worlds in the planets the sun and the stars the joyous dance of the atoms through the endless time. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And if you will please join in reading the bolded sections we have gathered here in search of insights into life's riddles. Let this be a place not only of searching but of discovery. Let this be a place not only of meeting but of meaningful connection. May we create here a circle of curiosity and love and now in this fine October afternoon I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting. Please be seated and if the children would like to come up and join Kelly and me for the message for all ages more visible. So this is a story called The Three Questions and this story is based on an earlier one that was written by a man named Leo Tolstoy who lived in Russia oh 150 years ago. It's a very very famous story. So there was once a boy and the boy's name was Nikolai and sometimes he just didn't know how to act. I want to be a good person he said to his friends but I don't always know the best way to do that how to be a good person. Well Nikolai's friends they understood and they wanted to help him out. If only I could find the answer to my three questions he said to them then I would always know just the right thing to do and the three questions were when is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one and what is the right thing to do? Nikolai's friends well they thought about the first question and Sonia the heron said to know the best time to do things one must first make plans one must plan ahead. Gogol the monkey who had been rooting around through some leaves to find something good to eat said you will know when to do things if you watch closely and pay attention and Pushkin who was the dog was just dozing off and he rolled over and he said you can't pay attention to everything all by yourself you need to have a pack in order to watch and help you decide when to do things. Well Nikolai thought about his friends answers and then he asked them the second question who is the most important one those who are circling in the heavens said Sonia as she circled up in the sky those who know how to heal the sick said Gogol and he was nursing a bump on his head where a coconut had hit him. Those who make the rules are the most important Pushkin the dog growled. Nikolai thought some more then he asked his friends the third question what is the right thing to do flying said Sonia the heron having fun all the time said Gogol the monkey fighting barked Pushkin the dog. The boy wasn't satisfied with any of those answers he knew that his friends were trying the best they could to answer those questions but none of the answers seem quite right and so then an idea came to Nikolai he thought I know who I'll ask I'll ask Leo the turtle he has lived for a very long time surely he will know the answers to the questions that I'm asking so Nikolai he hiked high up into the mountains where the old turtle lived all by himself and when he arrived he saw Leo digging in his garden the turtle was pretty old and so digging was hard work for him I have a problem Nikolai said to Leo and I came for your help and he repeated to Leo the three questions Leo listened carefully but he only smiled at Nikolai and returned to his digging Nikolai looked at him said you must be tired that's an awful lot of digging and you're old let me help you for a while and so the turtle gratefully gave Nikolai his shovel and thanked him the work was easy for a young boy and he quickly completed the task but just as Nikolai finished the wind began to blow and the rain began to burst from the sky and so they moved over to the turtle's cottage to find shelter but then just as they were going in the door Nikolai heard this cry for help he turned around and rushed down the path and he found a panda a panda bear whose leg had been hurt by a fallen tree and so Nikolai lifted her up very carefully and carried her into Leo's cottage and he put a bamboo splint on her leg and he tucked her into bed and the panda looked up at Nikolai and said but but where is my child Nikolai ran back outside of the cottage and down the path he was pushing against the stiff wind it was drenched with rain he ran into the forest and there he found the panda's baby shivering on the ground the baby was cold and wet but she was still alive so Nikolai carried the little panda back into the cottage dried him off and laid him in his mother's arms Leo the turtle smiled when he saw what the boy had done and then the next morning when they got up the mother panda thanked Nikolai and at that moment the three friends Sanya, Gogal and Pushkin arrived to make sure that everybody had gotten through that storm okay and Nikolai well he felt a great sense of peace within himself he knew he had these wonderful friends and he had saved the pandas but you know he was also disappointed because he still did not have an answer to those three questions and so he asked Leo the turtle one more time Leo looked at the boy and said Nikolai you already have the answer to your questions I do said Nikolai of course said Leo now yesterday if you had not stayed to help me dig my garden you would not have heard the pandas cries for help in the storm and you could not have saved them and therefore the most important time was the time you spent with me digging in the garden and the most important person at the moment was me and the most important thing you had to do was the digging and then later when you found those injured pandas the most important time was the time that you spent mending the panda's leg and saving her child the most important ones were the panda and her baby and the most important thing was to take care of them and make sure that they were all right so here's the thing Nikolai said Leo there's only one important time and that time is right now the most important one is the one that you are with and the most important thing to do is to do good to the person who is standing right beside you for these my boy are the answers that are the most important to the most important questions in the world and that's why all of us have been put on this world in the first place so that's the story of the three questions and I hope you remember them and can ask them of yourself sometime and think about those answers so we're going to have you stay right here because we're going to have a choral anthem that you can listen to so we continue with a selection from the great physicist Albert Einstein from an essay entitled the world as I see it the fairest thing that we can experience is the mysterious it is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science he who knows it not can no longer wonder no longer feel amazement he is as good as dead as a snuffed out candle it was the experience of mystery even if mixed with fear that engendered religion a knowledge of the existence of something that we simply cannot penetrate of the manifestations of the most profound reason and the most radiant beauty which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms it is this knowledge this emotion that constitutes the truly religious aptitude and so in this sense and in this sense alone I am a deeply religious man I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or who has a will of the type of which we ourselves are conscious an individual who should survive his physical death that too is beyond my comprehension nor do I wish it otherwise such notions are for the fears and the absurd egoism of feeble souls enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend just a portion be it ever so tiny of that reason which manifests itself in the natural world and the second reading comes from a book entitled ecclesiasticus which basically translates from latin as the book of the church it's also called the wisdom of the son of cirac and you're not going to find ecclesiasticus in either standard versions of the bible it's only found in the bibles that the catholic church uses because this is a deuterocanonical book ecclesiasticus is not to be confused with the book ecclesiasties my son if thou wilt thou shalt be taught and if thou wilt apply thy mind thy shalt be prudent if thou love to hear thou shalt receive understanding and if thy bow their ear thou shalt be wise stand in the assembly of the elders and cleave unto him that is wise be willing to listen to every godly discourse and let not the parables of understanding escape thee and if thou seest a man of understanding get thee betimes to him and let thy foot wear the steps to his door bear except no man against thine own soul and let reverence for no man cause thee to fall let the counsel of thy own heart stand for there is no man more faithful unto it than you for a man's mind is sometimes want to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit high above in the high tower now i invite you to turn in your hymnals once more to number 293 of star of truth please be seated so those of you who read our monthly newsletter and i suspect that applies to only a few of you probably learned from your reading that i am not a birthright unitarian universalism i was not born into this tradition my earliest experience of church was in the modest disciples of christ congregation to which my paternal grandmother and great grandmother belonged the disciples of christ if you know anything about them are a warm and a welcoming people communion is celebrated every sunday and no one not even doubters and disbelievers is excluded i don't recall any mentions of fire and brimstone in my childhood and the prevailing message seemed to be what a friend we have in jesus all in all the first christian church was not a bad place to hang out for a couple of hours every week but ultimately it was just too conventionally churchy for my father and so we began to attend a small lay-led unitarian fellowship that had recently taken up residence in a country chapel not all that far from the farm on which we lived it was as i said in my newsletter a place where questions were welcomed and rational explanations readily provided william ellery chanting early 19th century unitarianism's most prestigious minister and theologian chanting once wrote that the multitude do actually receive religion on authority on the word of others but a faith so received seems to me to be of very little worth the precious the living the effectual part of a poor man's faith is that of which he sees the reasonableness the excellence that which approves itself to his intelligence to his conscience to his heart those parts of his belief which he takes on blind trust do him little or no good whatsoever now in one important respect william ellery chanting differed from those who frequented our little unitarian universalist fellowship in the early 1960s chanting was a convicted christian who did trust that the bible was divinely revealed but chanting was also convinced that human beings possess what god given reason reason which must be used to resolve scriptures inconsistencies and to shed light on its varying claims it is each person's responsibility thoughtfully to examine the text and reach his or her own conclusions as to its significance by contrast the good unitarians of my early experience pretty much dispensed with the bible entirely i cannot recall hearing it cited except to point out the absurdity in the many ways in which its assertions were antithetical to reason the adults i knew were for the most part died in the wool no-nonsense humanists who insisted in the immortal words of dragnet's sergeant joe friday just give me the facts ma'am only the facts unfortunately unitarian universalism has in more recent times adopted a more moderate position with respect to sacred scriptures including the bible we now are able to quote approvingly as i did a few moments ago those passages that contain inspiration and wisdom for daily living without inferring divine authorship without according the good book some kind of ultimate authority over our lives and that being said like our forebears like william ellery chanting we still place a great emphasis on the power of human reason and so we certainly do not agree with nor do we subscribe to the view that it's expressed in the book of proverbs whose author admonishes us to trust in the lord with all our heart and not to rely on our personal insight and the great protestant reformer martin luther's equally dismissive appraisal strikes us as utterly inappropriate as religious beings reason is the greatest enemy that faith has luther scoffed it never comes to the aid of spiritual things but more frequently than not he continues struggles against the divine word treating with contempt all that emanates from god and so whoever wants to be a christian should tear out the eyes of his reason the fourth of our seven unitarian universalist principles stand in stark contrast to martin luther's point of view as followers of a progressive faith we are invited according to the fourth principle to participate in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning a free and responsible search for truth and meaning free free that implies unfettered by creeds dogmas ideologies or authoritative prescriptions search means that the truth is not all in that there is always more for us to learn and that revelation whatever its source is continuous responsible suggests that we must each apply ourselves to the task of examining and testing the truth claims of any sacred scripture of preachers of teachers and political pundits that's the fourth principle the fifth source from which we you use draw inspiration adds greater specificity to that fourth principle in keeping with humanist teachings it said we must rely on reason the scientific method lest we succumb to the idolatries of the mind and the spirit now it could certainly be argued that if anything our world today suffers from a dearth of reason at a time when many influential opinion leaders maintain positions completely at odds with scientific findings and common sense one begins to wonder whether as a society we have slipped in back into some pre-adolescent habit of magical thinking 97 percent of the scientific community agrees that anthropogenic climate change is real and that it's a growing problem there is a virtual consensus among experts in the life sciences on the broad outlines of evolutionary theory the vast majority of social scientists are convinced that systematic racial bias has contributed significantly to america's achievement gap policymakers in other countries have reasonably concluded that easy access to high caliber pistols and assault weapons make mass killings far more likely and yet substantial numbers of americans remain unconvinced and appear to have abandoned the rationalism that is in the words of charles watz the faculty of judgment which discriminates infers deduces enabling us to premise future possibilities from past experience and to to distinguish truth from error now the word reason has on occasion been used to describe something rather different from this a human faculty superior to the merely rational and so ralph waldo emerson and his transcendentalist colleagues contrasted capital r reason with a lesser mental attribute that emerson called understanding understanding employs an empirical methodology it utilizes hard data and systematic analysis to reach its conclusions but emerson reason with a capital r that was more akin to intuition the sage of concord was interested in absolute rather than tentative provisional truths the truths that are the stock and trade of understanding of science and its related disciplines but today emerson's interpretation and definition of reason really only serves to muddy the waters because it bears so little resemblance to the word as we typically define it today near synonyms that we use are thoughtful sagacious discerning discriminating sensible astute erudite logical rational the enlightenment think old tear extolled reason at quote the best weapon we have for fending off the trials of life and dealing with its problems it partakes of common sense and it seeks results that are useful and pragmatic and so that's the sense that I use the term reason to pretty much interchangeably with but if rationality and reason thought is so important and if it is so demonstrably effective why isn't it more consistently practiced why are its findings not more widely accepted a couple of possible explanations one has to do with the provisionality of rational and in particular scientific thought provisionality refers to the state of our knowledge at any given time and it is a concept this idea that our knowledge exists in a particular and definite state of time that many people find rather distressing opinion polls reveal widespread and deep support for science education in our schools and generally speaking science is seen as a very positive force in our society but at the same time at the same time the methodology of science is poorly understood in our society because many folks seem to expect science to reach conclusions that are equivalent to divine revelations the last word on the subject and when provisionality kicks in tentative answers to people's questions then those expectations of the ultimate truth are not met people become cynical they become disillusioned and ignoring probability they conclude that any theory at all creationism for for instance is just as good as any other and the second and related reason for eschewing the dictates of reason has to do with the manner in which our brains index and categorize information according to psychologists roger shank and robert abelson reasoning is not really straightforward process rather it is always conditioned by the stories we tell ourselves stories and storytelling are fundamental to human knowledge these scholars argue if a set of facts if a rational proposition doesn't align with the stories that we tell ourselves it bounces off it is not deemed to be incredible so in his book brilliant blunders mario livio shows how even towering figures of science like charles darwin and linus pauling and albert einstein these people made great errors in reasoning because as he said they were held captive by their entrenched intuitions and refused to accept new ideas until they were faced with overwhelming evidence in short these great scientists said to themselves this is my story and i'm sticking to it and in their insightful book animal spirits economist george ackerloff and robert schiller discussed the role that stories play in determining our economic behavior the economy does rather well they observe when public confidence is high and confidence builds in a culture with the circulation of inspirational stories stories about successful startups people getting rich off their investments and within the marketplace stories like these spread like viruses and they may be schiller and ackerloff right as contagious as any disease markets become overheated markets become depressed not because the players are making carefully considered choices but because rather there is a change in the contagion rate of certain stories certain ways of thinking so the person is probably as consistently rational as he or she might imagine and that when we consider the role that our emotions play in the process the picture becomes even more problematic i suspect that we have all been in situations where distress or excitement or panic swept in took possession and our minds froze as daniel goalman points out in order to think clearly we need to have a handle on our emotions according to goalman studies have shown that the kind of intelligence associated with iq our linguistic and logical mathematical problem solving ability that accounts for only 20 percent of the factors that produce life success your iq you're in the men's club 20 percent of your life success is dependent on that other variables that have a bearing on our success could include your race your social class being in the right place at the right time dumb luck but it also includes knowing how to manage your feelings the latter is critical emotional intelligence goalman writes matters immensely for our personal destiny and that includes the ability to motivate oneself to persist in the face of frustration to control impulse and delay gratification to regulate one's mood to empathize with others and to remain hopeful in short emotional intelligence is the ability as kelly crocker noted last week to listen with the heart as well as with the head so the point is we can always be strictly rational even if we want to be even if we aspire to be creatures of pure reason this is not only inevitable but it may in certain respects be a good thing for instance in her book transformative experience the philosopher la paul disputes the notion that we can make big decisions in our life whether or not to have a child or to enter into a particular profession on the basis of reason alone because it's almost impossible for any of us to extrapolate extrapolate what life is going to be like as a parent or as a unitary universalist minister for that matter and so you should not feel fool yourself paul says you have no idea when you're making those decisions what you're getting into so don't worry yourself trying to figure it all out she says the best way to approach a big life decision is to just move courageously into the unknown open yourself to new experiences and be eager to discover who it is you will become now for those of us who value it so highly we need to be cognizant of reasons limits and we need to be aware of its pitfalls because something seems to us to be reasonable doesn't necessarily make it right so for instance our education system has become increasingly reliant on mooks mooc massive online open courses and massive open online courses may make sense from a practical and economic standpoint but then we have to ask ourselves how much intangible benefit is lost when that physical link between teachers and students is broken what does that do ultimately to the educational experience we're still trying to find that out and then there's this thing called cost benefit analysis whose aim is to rationalize the choices that institutions make solely on the basis of monetary value and thus the notion that an old growth forest or an historic building or an orphan drug that any of these things might possess intrinsic value and therefore merit extra consideration according to cost benefit analysis that would be nonsensical too often the philosopher robert solomon complains in our market driven society the real test of rationality is maximizing one's own interests rationality is the ability to get whatever it is you want a unitary universalism as i mentioned earlier has historically regarded reason as the primary tool for ethical and spiritual investigation and there have been times in our history when we seem to think it was the only tool that we needed in our toolbox now today we recognize it's but one of several means that we may use to gain insight and to grow in wisdom the first of our six sources references something other than reason direct experience of the transcending mystery that mystical feeling that albert schweitzer or that albert einstein also extolled and then the sixth source cites wisdom from the earth-centered traditions which as david abrams writes requires that we regain our carnal sensorial empathy with the living world that sustains us and finally the words and deeds of profits and social reformers are commended to us in the second source history making figures who buck the odds out of a sense of moral necessity these profits and social reformers were not reasonable men and women for as george bernard Shaw said the reasonable individual adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men history and increasingly science do confirm that important as it may be reason is but one of several human faculties that contribute to a well-tempered and fulfilling life and left to itself rational discursive thought may very well inhibit other equally important human powers such as empathy and imagination the ancients as daniel gorman writes gave every aspect of human nature its due and so should we bless it be and amen and at this time we will receive the offering and i invite you to share in it generously a portion of which will be given to the fair share csa coalition whose work is described in your program this evening we close with these words from wall Ralph wall person in ups is the soul of the whole the wise silence the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related the eternal one and when it breaks through our intellect it is genius and when it breaks through our will it is virtue and when it flows through our affection it is love bless please be seated for the post