 No, no, no, no, no, no. Just be sure. You're moving to the other side. No, no, no, no. I think it's great to move that. Yeah, that's the same. Yeah, that's the same. Yeah, that's the same. Yeah. Yeah. I like it too. Some of this, like the shoulder. Yeah. I dare a child to do the chromatic skills. It's my good hand. Well, that's my favorite. It's good to have one good hand. It's because it's relaxed. Because it's not strong. It's strong head. But it's straight. Cause it's tension. It frees up on me. This is so loose. That's it. You're right. That's the best way out. That's the best way out. That's your hand. All right. All right. This is worse. Like you do this. So, let's talk a little bit about how you're going to solve the problem, how you're going to solve the problem, how you're going to solve the problem. I don't know why I have to get out of this. I don't know why I have to get out of this. So, let's talk a little bit about how you're going to solve the problem, how you're going to solve the problem. So, let's talk a little bit about how you're going to solve the problem. So, let's talk a little bit about how you're going to solve the problem. So, let's talk a little bit about how you're going to solve the problem. Please join me in a few moments of centering silence. Let's remain seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn, number 188, Words Found in Your Order of Service. Good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Madison. In this community, curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, 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 become a force for good in the world. You know me as Carlos Moser, a decades long standing and faithful member of this congregation. On behalf of which, I wish to extend a special welcome to visitors. We consider ourselves a welcoming congregation, so however you identify yourself and wherever you find yourself on your life's journey, we celebrate your presence among us. We encourage newcomers to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. You will find members of our staff and lay ministry on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal colored stoneware coffee mugs if you ask members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. And there are many delights to this building and the previous building, which I hope you will be interested in. If we have someone in the congregation who would be willing to be a tour guide, please let me know and no one seems to wish to take that burden on them. So come again and you can find out more about our building. We welcome children to stay for the service, but if the child needs to talk or move around, we recommend the child haven just behind you on the left or the commons as good places to visit where you can still hear and see the service. And speaking of noise, please now all go into airplane mode so that you will not disturb your neighbors with your electronic devices. Now I take pleasure in acknowledging the following individuals who help our service run smoothly. Hospitality for your drinks after the service are Jean Hills and Sharon Scratish. Three ushers, Dorit Bergen, actually four, and Smiley Paula Alt and Karen Jager. Our greeter this morning was Hannah Pinkerton and on sound we have Mark Schultz. Some announcements. Contemplative gathering for healing and hope. In these times of challenge and difficulty in our lives and in our world, we invite you to join Reverend Kelly and our FUS slave ministers on Tuesday, February 13th from 6 to 645 in the landmark auditorium for a time of quiet candlelighting music and reflection. Find a place to be with others to support and nurture your heart and soul. And on a more active note now I invite Jenna to tell you some more opportunities. FUS Youth Group is hosting a personal care items drive for Briar Patch Youth Services the weekends of February 17th and 18th and February 24th and 25th. Briar Patch provides services to the areas at risk, runaway and homeless youth. It is estimated that every night 300 youth go to bed homeless in Dane County. The following hygiene items are currently needed. Feminine hygiene products, chapstick in the balm, hand sanitizer, new men and women socks, t-shirts, hats, underwear. Look for the collection boxes as you enter the building. Thank you. Again, a very warm welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, deepen your understanding and stir your spirit. It is for the gathering of struggle. It is a house of freedom guarding the dignity and worth of every person. It offers a platform for free voice for declaring both in times of security and danger the full and undivided conflict of opinion. It is a house of truth seeking where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, where mystics can abide in the company of searchers. It is a house of art adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiworks. It is a house of prophecy outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress. This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor. Please rise now in body or in spirit and join with me in our words of chalice lighting. We come together this morning to remind one another to rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives, to resist the headlong tumble into the next moment, until we claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude, taking the time to look into one another's faces and see their communion, the reflection of our own eyes. This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope is hallowed by our presence together. And now take that time to look into one another's eyes and experience that moment of connection. In the order of service, that pack left the station, but this is a great story. It's a story called Let's Be Friends Again. This is a story about my little sister and me. Anybody in here got a little sister? A little brother maybe? Well, usually we got along well together, but sometimes my little sister was a real pest, particularly when I had to babysit. But she was a good listener when I told her bedtime stories. Sometimes I hated having to share things with her, but she was a great pirate. One day my little sister did a terrible thing. She thought that my pet turtle needed more exercise, so she decided to set it free in the pond. When I saw what she had done, I was madder than I had ever been before. I could have killed her right then and there. But my parents didn't exactly like that idea, and they separated us very quickly. My sister said that she was sorry, but I felt that was not enough. I was very. She even offered to buy me a new turtle with her pocket money, but I didn't want a new one. I wanted my turtle back. My parents didn't say much. They seemed to be on her side. I went to my room and I slammed the door as loud as I could. I thought of many ways to punish my little sister, and if you look at the pictures you see putting her in jail, or wrapping her up in a boa constrictor, I tried to get some sleep, but it didn't work. I began to feel sick. I was convinced I even had a temperature. I was too upset to get out of bed. Meanwhile my sister was singing and dancing in the garden. She seemed to be having the best time of her life. I was the one who was upset, and my little sister didn't seem to care at all. My turtle was gone. How could she forget all about it so easily? I was mad, mad, mad. I punched my pillows a few times as hard as I could. I let go of an awful scream. And then I felt a lot better. I knew what I had to do. I got up and put on my shoes, and then I went outside to where my sister was feeding the dog. I said to her, I'll help you do that. And she smiled. By the way, I said after a little while, the thing about the turtle is okay. I'm not angry anymore. Does that mean we're friends again? Asked my sister. Yes, I said, we're friends again. I was surprised at how easy it was to say that. I asked her, do you want me to come to the pet store with me to buy a new turtle? No, I said, and I smiled. We're going to buy a couple of hamsters. I said one for you and one for me. We can keep them in the old aquarium. My sister took my hand and off we went together. So I want to tell you why I like this story. Something really bad happened for that little guy, didn't it? I mean, he lost his sister, thought she was doing a good thing. And so he was feeling really bad and really angry. And I know that in my life, sometimes when bad things happen, I feel really mad and really angry. And so I really kind of knew what he felt like. But the feelings were really big feels, weren't they? Really, really big feelings. So instead of doing the things that he thought of at the time when he was feeling really angry, he waited and he found other ways to let his feelings out and then he was able to be friends again. And sometimes that's the way this works for me. Sometimes when I'm really, really feeling angry, it's good to find some way to deal with those before I do something that I'll be sorry for. So let's now have a little music and thank you for being here with me. I'm very happy to be here with you, so we'll see you a little bit. I'm not going. I'm actually printed on your order of service. Change, he says, is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. The second reading comes from his book, Transition, Making Sense of Life's Changes. He refers in this work to three stages in a transition. The first is an ending. The second is a neutral zone, and the third is the new beginning. So here he talks about the neutral zone. The neutral zone is the time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when the inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to another. Although such shifts can occur without an ending and although they cannot bear fruit without a new beginning, it is the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place. Looking back, people often say that everything happened back then, even though at that time I didn't know what was going on. Also in retrospect, they will tell you that it was in the neutral zone, though they usually lack a name for it, that they felt not only least sure what was going to happen, but also most who they really were. Or they will tell you that these things, if they have a way of making sense of what they are, feeling and doing during the time, is an in-between time. That is why it is such a misfortune that so few people can make sense out of the lostness and confusion that they encounter when they have passed through those processes that start with disengagement, dismantling and disidentification. Without a key to that state, the resulting disorientation is viewed as no more than confusion. And confused people imagine that they need to be straightened out or fixed. Without such a key, people in transition are like Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole, muttering, it will be no use they are putting their heads down and saying, come up against, dear, I shall only look up and say, who am I then? Tell me, tell me that first, and then if I like that person, I will come up. I will not, I will stay down until I am somebody else. But, oh dear, cried Alice with a sudden burst of tears, I do wish that they would put their heads down. I am so very tired of being all alone here. It is lonely down there, except that there are more people down there than you may realize. Well, in short, after 21 years, the minister at the first, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth, Minnesota, I came here in 7 to be an associate minister. I served here until the spring of 2013 when I retired from settled ministry, and at that time the position I had occupied was eliminated and FUS became a teaching congregation where intern ministers could serve and could benefit from the rich learning environment here at FUS. During my tenure in Duluth, the congregation had navigated the rocky waters of many transitions, many of them related to having a beautiful little building long since made obsolete by the emerging hopes of the congregation. They tried on many spaces, borrowed and rented, had capital fund drives, purchased land, and in 2007, having moved with them to the edge of the promised land, I left them with a hole in the ground and joined FUS at the edge of its own giant hole in the ground, which came in time to be the space that we are occupying right now. I can only speculate that part of the motivation to bring me here at that time was that I seemed to know a bit about how congregations can manage change and could bring some perspective to the process of transition. In the 20 years that I was in Duluth, the congregation occupied four different spaces. Together we shared the pain of leaving the much beloved charming little tutor-style building that had been built as a unitarian church in 1910, limited only by no parking lot and sufficient meeting space, insufficient office and RE space and sanctuary that was bursting at the seams. We tried out first a church share with an Episcopal church, then the auditorium of the YWCA, that was a church in a box, we set up and took down the space every week. A Methodist church that was left by a merger of two churches, and finally to the beautiful new building constructed after my departure about the same time as this addition to the Frank Lloyd Wright Meeting House. And here's what I know. In every move, the easy part was physical. Stuff got moved. Himnals and chairs and tables and RE supplies, computers and desks and paper, adaptations were made to accommodate new coffee service and name tags, Sunday services resumed. And it was the experience of transition, the emotional and psychological aspects of the change that permeated the culture. I had had the good fortune of discovering the work of William Bridges in the early 1980s when I was in the midst of a cluster of my own personal transitions and found it to be a frame that made sense of so much of what I was feeling then as well as what was happening as the congregation went through each new move. Here in a nutshell is that frame. The first frame, the first phase of a transition is an ending. At the very least, it involves a loss of the familiar. We have a list of culturally recognized endings, death, divorce, emptiness, retirement, graduations of all kinds, and they contend that the emphasis in most of these recognitions is upon how to get on with what's next. Next, much of what we understand as grief is associated with death, crying at memorial services, the acceptance and encouragement of ritual, that ritual of grief is known to be acceptable, and weren't it even. Most of us understand that grieving following a death takes time, takes many forms, is not even finite perhaps. In the poem, Joy, Carl Sandberg admonishes us to keep away from the little deaths. I would say, in contrast, to embrace them. Not to have and to hold, but to acknowledge and let go. How hard it is to embrace the idea that it is okay to feel sad. Even as our little boy in the story today needed to know that it was okay to feel angry, to openly admit discomfort about the prospect of something new, to share the vulnerability that we feel when facing ambiguity. This is especially hard for leaders. So often this awkwardness or discomfort is seen as whining or complaining. And sometimes I suppose it is. But we learned from the many transitions in Duluth to help one another deal with our losses. To distinguish between passing frustration and paralyzing grief. The challenge in a community is that each person has his or her own style of dealing with transition and comes into the process at a different point. For one who had for decades adapted to the lack of parking by coming early or planning for a three-block hike, the idea that parking would be a factor that would lead to moving to a new space seemed outrageous. For those who resisted coming for years because they could not find a parking place, the idea of the move seemed completely self-evident. When the distant parkers mourned the loss of the pretty and intimate worship space, the newcomers looked forward to both better parking and more spacious worship. Some folks left at each of the changes, unwilling to or unable to hold the tension of what Joan Broschenko calls the no longer, not yet. They were there for what had always been, not for what could be. Many stayed and the ones came drawn by the excitement generated by the possibility of newness itself that is fully present in that second phase of the transition, the in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn't fully operational. Bridges, as we heard earlier, calls this the neutral zone. It's when the critical psychological realignment and repatterning takes place. This phase, acknowledged or not, is critical in the healthy move towards new beginnings, which is the final stage in the transition process. The neutral zone is what I have come to understand and actually refer to sometimes as the Krabby Fades. This is where the structures and patterns that we have come to rely on, that comfort and sustain us, that require little thinking or analysis or engagement begin to require just that. This happens to us in settings mundane as well as grand. This week, for example, I have been house-sitting for the jewelers. I am happy for these commodious accommodations and all such new surroundings require adaptation. It is a change. Things are not where they are at home. This is to be expected. My rational being made a study of the spaces the first day and I found what I needed to make dinner, identified a workspace, figured out the garage door. But in the night, when I got up to use the bathroom, it was an entirely the wrong place. I figured it out, of course, but I found myself to be disproportionately frustrated and angry. I missed my husband, I missed my own bed, 11 days away from home started to feel like a terrible idea. I went back to bed and then went to sleep and in the morning returned to sanity, welcomed the day, forgave the architect who had in fact positioned the bathroom in exactly the right place. So what, am I losing my grip? Not at all. What I recognized here was that neutral zone kind of feeling. They are real feelings. They are important reminders about my own vulnerability and the necessary unease that accompanies change. When changes come institutionally the disorientation and reactions tend to be more communal and public. If we are not careful, we begin to create a narrative that would suggest that someone really ought to move the darn bathroom. With nowhere to take my anxious reactivity in the middle of the night I found the familiar comfort of sleep and the feelings past. And I shared those feelings with an also anxious other or others anxious not even about the bathroom but about the location of the vacuum cleaner or the operation of the washing machine. I can imagine a full on reorganization of the household before breakfast. It's what we do when we combine our anxiety. Anxiety often begets reactivity. This is where Bridges reminds us not to confuse a reaction to an ending with a new beginning which is that third stage in the process. The neutral zone is that time when we get to act or create or question without permanent consequences. When we get to examine ourselves for signs of apathy or complacency where we get to miss what has been lost and live in a space that is at once uncomfortable and filled with possibility and challenge. It is a place at best it is a place at best where we hold ourselves and one another in a place of deeper community. Creating a culture of curiosity in place of judgment of discernment in a place of certainty of vulnerability and trust of being informed and engaged in the process of transformation. During the past decade of FUS history there has been a good deal of significant change. In the ten years prior to my start here that started by tenure here a careful discernment process culminated in a major capital campaign and a completed plan calling for significant renovation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Meeting House and the construction of the atrium auditorium. When I arrived the previous edition a previous edition of the meeting house had been demolished. What are now new offices along the loge were under construction and the space in front of the meeting house was filled with portable structures that house temporary offices and classrooms. In the fall the staff moved into the new office space and there was much shuffling and accommodation in this time of no longer, not yet. By the fall of 2008 the construction was completed and the move into the new space happened. Over the next few years there were multiple staff changes a new governance model was adopted but I think it could be said that there was in all of that as we neutral zoned our way along a sense of the new beginning that has become in modern parlance the new normal. There has been amidst all of this change a high degree of equanimity and stability. In large part this has been due to the long and stable leadership of Michael Schuler, senior minister and Dan Broner, director of music. Those ministries are now coming to a close with well earned retirements. These transitions have in some ways upped the ante from other transitions of recent past. There has been fair warning there has been planning and conversations and decisions about temporary structures. There are task forces of wise and thoughtful folks who are tending to the shape that will hold the emerging future. There will be endings. You already know that. There will be endings that for some of you will trigger old losses. The grief will be complicated because it will be both personal and institutional. Michael Schuler is a wise and gracious human being whose presence in the life of this congregation has been a continuing gift for three decades. Moreover, he has been a grounding and consistent presence in this pulpit, a respected public presence in Madison, a comforting pastor and a spiritual leader. These are things that you will see in the future and continuing ministry. You have opportunities to celebrate his ministry, to say goodbye. There will be an ending. And knowing that this ending is the first stage in the process of transition has the potential for making what follows richer and more meaningful. Martin Luther King Jr. said one of the greatest liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake during periods of great social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolution. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. Bridges puts it in a slightly different way when he says Odysseus failed to see and treat the problem why life was presenting as a significant signal and a gift rather than a difficulty to be overcome are not at the edge of an abyss but at the threshold of a neutral sound. You are the keepers of a legacy that is bigger than Frank Lloyd Wright or Max Gabler or Michael Shuler or really any of those you would hold as heroes or saviors. You and they together are part of something larger and more life affirming than you can even imagine. I offer this invitation to you. In the time ahead may you face the challenges and one another with curiosity and trust to keep informed about the governance of FUS to engage and participate in the rituals of ending. To engage the interim and ministerial search process with open minds and open hearts to stay informed and respond when asked to support the ministry of Kelly Crocker and the rest of the FUS staff through your gifts of time and talent and treasure and hold one another gently in the places of grief and crabbiness the continuing narrative of this wonderful community be informed by your better angels. We will continue our service now with the receiving of gifts it is through our gifts that we support the work of this beloved community. It's canceled because of snow and also concerned for their dear friend and former colleague who is beginning chemo for stage 3 and sorrows that we're holding in our hearts today as we join in a time of silence and experience the gift of being together through our inter connections may our joys be expanded and our burdens lightened. Now let us join together in our closing hymn number 34 though I may speak with bravest to fight be seated for our closing words and our closed loop we receive fragments of holiness of eternity brief moments of insight let us gather them into the precious up for the precious gifts that they are given by their grace move boldly into the unknown go in peace