 Oh, oh, okay. Good morning. I would like to invite you into a moment of centering silence. And now would you join me in our in-gathering hymn? We are going to sing it through three times. The First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where 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 be a force for good in the world. My name is Dorit Bergen. And on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation. So whoever you are or wherever you happen to be on your life 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 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 people holding teal stoneware coffee mugs. These are members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. Experience guides are available to give a building tour after each service. So if you would like to learn more about the sustainably designed addition to our national landmark meeting house, please meet near the large glass window on the left side of the auditorium. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However, because it is difficult for some people to hear in this lively, acoustical environment, our child haven and our commons are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. And speaking of noise, would you please silence any cell phones or anything else that might go off during the service? I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly and they are on sound, Mark Schultz. Lay minister is Anne Smiley, our greeter, Elizabeth Barrett, our ushers, Edward Sopala, Nancy Webster, John Webster, Patricia Becker. Coffee is being made for you by Jean Hills and Rick DeVita. Our flowers are from Paula Alt and the tour guide is Audrey Lassandeck. Please note the announcements and the red floor inserts in your order of service. They describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today's activities. And there are four special announcements. You may have heard the cabaret is coming back this spring on Friday, April 24th. It is being called an old-fashioned cabaret, but we need a tagline and we are looking to all of you to help come up with a good one. The tagline will help define the event and give it some flair. Stop by the table in the commons and submit your suggestions. If yours is chosen, you will get a special surprise. The Children's Religious Education Program is looking for two inclusion buddies to assist a seven-year-old boy who has autism in one of our 9 a.m. RE classes. The two inclusion buddies would take turns each week, so each would be in the classroom only twice per month. If you are interested, please let Leslie Ross know. She'll be floating around after services in the commons. Please stop by the Farmers Market Table in the commons today after service to buy tickets for the delicious breakfast in two weeks. You can find out more about vendors and the menu at the table today or in your red floors insert. This weekend is your last chance to sign up for Michael Shuler's adult education class, Why Whiteness Matters. It begins today and you can find out more in the red floors insert. Again, welcome. We hope today's spirit, we hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your hearts and stir your spirit. Into this house of light we come, into this place of love and justice, into this circle of family and friends. We rejoice at the familiar faces and welcome the new ones. Let us rediscover here those things of highest worth that our lives may be abundant and full of meaning. We are here to celebrate the miracle and majesty of life, to honor the honorable, to school our hearts in love and to learn to see the beauty that gives life to our community. Let us join together then in song, in story, in compassion and care, so that our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to one another, and true to the vision of what we may become. And if you will rise now in body or spirit to join in our words of chalice lighting, let the lighting of this flame kindle within us a blaze of hope, strengthening us for the path ahead. May it guide our feet to take us where we are needed, our hands to work for justice, our minds to know our interconnectedness and our hearts to loving kindness for all. And before we join together in song, if you'll take a moment to turn and greet your neighbor. Collections, do you collect things? You do, what do you collect? Rock, bouncy balls, toys, woo-hoo, amen brother. Legos, yeah, we have a couple of those at our house. Aluminum cans, and then you recycle them. Very cool. You guys have amazing collections. Yeah, one more. Toy Story? The movie or the little people from the movie? The movie is fun. Well, our story today is about a donkey named Sylvester Duncan. Isn't that a good name for a donkey? Sylvester Duncan. And Sylvester lived with his mother and his father at Acorn Road in Oatsdale. I guess if you're a donkey, everything has to have donkey names like acorns and oats. And Sylvester collected pebbles of unusual shape and color. Now on a rainy Saturday, Sylvester was up on Strawberry Hill and he found quite an extraordinary pebble. It was flaming red, shiny, and perfectly round like a marble. As he was studying this remarkable pebble, a shiver ran through him. Now maybe it was excitement, but maybe it was because the rain was cold. So he said, I wish it would stop raining. And to his great surprise, the rain didn't just stop, it ceased. It stopped completely. The raindrops that were falling from the sky vanished into thin air. The clouds departed, everything was dry, the sun was shining. It was as if the rain had never existed. Now in all his young life, Sylvester had never had a wish come true like that. But he thought that magic must be at work, and he guessed that the magic must be in the remarkable red pebble, which it was. So to make a test, he put the pebble on the ground and he said, I wish it would rain again. Nothing happened. So then he picked the pebble up and he said, I wish it would rain again. And the sky darkened, lightening, thunder claps and the rain came pouring down. What a lucky day, thought Sylvester. From now on, I can have anything I want. My family, my friends, anybody can have anything they want. And he went running back home to tell his family what he had found. Now, as he was crossing Strawberry Hill, thinking of some of the many, many, many things he was going to wish for, he was startled by a mean, hungry lion who was looking right at him from the bushes. Now, if he hadn't been so frightened, maybe he would have wished that the lion would disappear or that the lion would turn into a butterfly or that he was safe at home with his parents. But no, he panicked. And so he said, I wish I were a rock. And he became a rock. Now, the lion came bounding over, sniffed the rock a hundred times, walked around and around it and went away really confused because he said, I saw that little donkey as clear as day. Maybe I need glasses. And there was Sylvester, a rock on Strawberry Hill with the magic pebble lying right next to him and nothing he could do about it. Oh, how I wish I were myself again, he thought, but nothing happened because he had to be touching the pebble and it was over there on the ground. So his thoughts began to race like mad. He was so scared and worried and he realized that the only chance he had of becoming himself again was for somebody to come by, pick up the pebble, put it on top of the rock and say, huh, I wish this rock would turn into a donkey. What are the odds of that happening? One in a billion? So Sylvester fell asleep. What else could he do? Night came with many stars and back at home, his parents were really worried. Sylvester had never stayed out later than dinner before. So they thought, if we stay all up all night long, surely he's gonna come back by morning, but morning came and no Sylvester. So at dawn, they went in, they asked all the neighbors, they asked all the children, nobody had seen Sylvester. So they went to the police. The police couldn't find Sylvester. All the dogs in Oatsdale went looking for him. They sniffed behind every rock and tree and blade of grass. They even sniffed the giant Sylvester rock on Strawberry Hill, but it didn't smell like Sylvester, it smelled like a rock. So after a month of searching the same places over and over again and asking everybody they could, Mr. and Mrs. Duncan didn't know what to do. They decided the worst had to have happened and they'd never see Sylvester again. They tried their usual to be happy to go about their usual ways, but their ways included Sylvester. So they were miserable without him. And the days grew colder and the leaves changed color and then the leaves fell and then the snow came. And then spring came and the leaves were on the trees again and there were flowers and one day in May, Mrs. Duncan said, let's go for a picnic. We'll try to be happy even though we no longer have our dear Sylvester. So they go up to Strawberry Hill and Mrs. Sylvester sits down on this nice looking rock that is really, those poor kids have heard this story over and over again. So Mrs. Duncan sat right down on top of that rock and the warmth of his mother sitting on him wokes Sylvester right up. Mother, father, it's me, it's Sylvester. But he couldn't talk because he was a rock. So Mr. Duncan decided to walk about while Mrs. Duncan set the picnic food out on the rock and Mr. Duncan was walking around and he suddenly looked and he found the red pebble. And he said, what a remarkable pebble Sylvester would have loved this and he took the pebble and he put it right on top of the rock. They said, they sat down to eat and now Sylvester was as wide awake as a donkey that's a rock, could be. He didn't know that this pebble was sitting on top of him and his mother said, I have the strangest feeling that Sylvester is not all that far away. I am, I am, I'm right here, he yelled. And all of a sudden he thought, I wish I were myself again. And poof, in an instant he was. Now you can imagine the scene that followed, the hugs, the kisses, the questions, the answers, the story. Now when they had calmed down a bit and they decided to walk on home, Mr. Duncan took the magic pebble and he put it away, locked away in an iron safe. Because maybe someday they would wanna use that magic pebble but for right now they had everything that they could ever wish for. So I love that story of Sylvester because sometimes I don't know about you but I wish that I had a magic pebble. Don't you, right? Don't you want a magic pebble? And if this one ever works, I will let you know. But all that time I spend wishing and wishing, sometimes I have to look around because everything I need is right in front of me just like Sylvester. So next time you find yourself saying, I wish, I wish, I wish, think about our buddy Sylvester the donkey. We're gonna stay right here together and listen to the choir sing us one more song and then we can head off to class. Happened last night. Nancy, a church member who is famous for her soup and bread, called to say she had vegetables in her fridge that weren't long for this world. She offered to come to church where there was power to make soup for people without. We converged on the church and I gave her my own big bag of vegetables that had seen better days. She sorted through them all discarding bits that were already gone over to the slimy side. She chopped what was left, taking care to leave out the peppers as one of the expected guests was allergic. The sugar peas glowed like jewels on her cutting board. She moved calmly, not cussing at all unlike me when I'm cooking. She knew which vegetables to put into the soup first, which ones needed extra sauteing so that they'd be soft enough and which had to wait until right near the end to go in so they'd hold up. My first singing teacher used to tell me all the notes should come out at about the same level of intensity and volume and it looked to me like Nancy was doing that with the vegetables. She was singing that soup. I went into the office to work and be warm. Nancy had also brought three loaves of wheat bread and a couple of loaves of cinnamon raisin and every time I emerged from that office, the building smelled better and better. The bread came out of the oven a little before folks were supposed to get there and she offered me the heel of one hot with butter. Church members with no power began to arrive. The ones with small children looked the most stressed. The little ones didn't understand why they couldn't watch videos or have their food warmed up. Reports came in of folks with power giving shelter to those without. People were checking on one another the best they could with so many phones not working and hardly any cell service. It seemed that everyone wanted to know, needed to connect in any way they could. We decided the cold wasn't as bad as the lack of light that we missed showers less than we missed reading. So we traded techniques for reading by flashlight. Others with power had brought food so we had plenty. We decided that since we seemed to get one of these ice storms every three years or so, we would just make it common knowledge that on the first full day without power we would have a soup supper at the church. It is warm to gather with members of your community and endure a hardship together. It is nourishing to see people forming the desire to care for one another and then acting upon it. This whole community is like a good soup with ingredients brought by everyone. Lots of colors, flavors and textures that can feed a body and soul. It makes my soul sing. And if you will rise in body or spirit now for some singing of our own with him, number 131. Earlier had opened the door to questions about his mental fitness. If re-elected, Reagan would become the oldest sitting president in US history. He was 73 at the time. Reagan's performance at this final debate is frequently cited as a churning point in the election when Reagan's popular support solidified contributing to the largest electoral landslide in history. How did Reagan demonstrate that he was still in command of all his faculties? Did he display his erudition on the current issues of the day? Did he play to his own strengths by vigorously attacking Mondale on issues like foreign policy or the tax code? No, it was Reagan's comedic timing that allowed him to carry the day. Reagan delivered a series of prefabricated one liners with ease, regained his momentum and never looked back. The most notable zinger came when the moderator asked him if age was a concern in the election. Reagan famously replied, I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience. Mondale, who was 56 at the time, later commented that he knew at that very moment that he had lost. That night, nearly 70 million Americans watched the debate and came away convinced that Reagan was still on top. Any fears people had that the president had slipped were relieved. But how we as a nation reach this conclusion on that night is surprising. Reagan himself didn't change our minds about him. It took a few hundred people in the audience to change our minds. It was their laughter coming over the airwaves that changed how we viewed Reagan. Social psychologist Steve Fine asked people who had not seen the debate to watch a recording of it in one of two ways. Some individuals saw clips of the debate and the audience's reaction as it was played on live television, while others saw the debate without being able to hear the audience's reactions. In both cases, viewers heard the president deliver the same lines. Viewers who heard the audience's laughter rated Reagan as having outperformed Mondale. However, those who did not hear the laughing responded quite differently. These viewers indicated a decisive victory for Vice President Mondale. In other words, we didn't think Reagan was funny because Reagan was funny. We thought Reagan was funny because a small group of strangers in the audience thought Reagan was funny. We were influenced by innocent social cues. Now imagine watching that debate yourself. Maybe you did. Would you think audience laughter could influence your evaluation of the candidates? Would you be influenced by those graphs shown on the bottom of the screen during today's debates to indicate how a handful of people are responding to the candidates moment by moment? Would it sway your vote? Most of us, I suspect, would say no. The notion that our decision about who should be the president of our nation could be altered by the responses of a few people in the audience violates our theory of human nature, our sense of who we are. We like to think of ourselves in that American ideal. We are independent-minded and immune to the influences of others, yet we would be wrong. Every day, others influence us in countless ways that we do not recognize or appreciate. If this is true, why would our brains be built to be unknowingly influenced by people we don't even know? This story of Reagan and Mondale comes to us from the neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman from his recent book, Social, in which he cites more than 1,000 studies on how 250 million years of evolution have produced major differences in the brain that distinguish us from our ancestors. Being socially connected, he tells us, is our brain's lifelong passion. It has been baked into our operating system for millions of years. The human brain grew rapidly in early evolution, not so that we could use tools or expand our thinking, but because of this primal need to connect. Human babies, as we all know, are not fully developed and self-sufficient at birth. They rely on caregivers longer than any other species. Human brains evolved to seek out human contact to survive. Each of us is here today because someone had such an urge to connect with us that they answered our cries and cared for us as we grew. These highly connected brains are what distinguish us from the other 2 million species on Earth. What we are being told now is that more important to our growth, more crucial to our survival than food, shelter, or water is social connection. In a sense, evolution has made bets at each step of the way that the best way to make us more successful as a species is to make us more social. The human brain is one of the most complex biological systems on Earth, consisting of 100 billion neurons capable of processing 70,000 thoughts a day. That's almost 3,000 thoughts that you're gonna have while you're sitting right here in this room. When we connect with one another, our brain releases a hormone that I am sure you know called oxytocin. This hormone decreases fear and anxiety and creates empathy, trust, and cooperation. It reinforces our urge to connect. The brain also releases oxytocin when we hug for longer than six seconds. Now I'm not going to ask you to do that, but I am going to ask you to take a moment now to turn to someone around you, preferably someone you didn't walk in here with and share with them a highlight from your week. Anything. I know it's different, but go. But you know, okay. Wait, Heather, I don't wanna miss it, so we'll have, no. I wish you could have seen it from up here. I wish I had the video camera and put you up here on the Jumbotron. Because immediately, the smiles, some of you got up and moved to find someone that you didn't know. Did you feel that oxytocin rush? It feels great. That rush is part of the reason that we come together here week after week. Here in this community, you are seen. You are valued. We are very glad that you are here. Human beings cannot exist in isolation. We all know that real sense of physical pain, that ache of being invisible, of not being seen. No one wants that hurt. We have evolved so that separation and isolation are painful. One of the worst things you can do to another person is make them feel disconnected or alone. This is why solitary confinement is such a heinous punishment. It goes against the very fiber of our being. Kendall Gibbons wrote that we come together in communities like this because we are creatures who are fundamentally physiologically incomplete. As much as our individuality defines us, we also need other people to make our limbic circuits function the way evolution has built us. To the core of our chemistry and our neural networks, we are a social species. Our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual well-being depends on our connections, both to the world of nature and to our fellow humans. Spirituality is about keeping alive that connective tissue that makes us who we are and enables us to imagine what we might become. Some of that work we do alone because solitude can feed our spirits. Some of the work comes in those private moments of inspiration, but more of it happens in the company of other seekers, those who share the path. We do it by grappling with deep questions and big ideas. We do it simply by sitting next to each other, by sharing our joys and sorrows and bowls of soup, by lifting our hearts in praise of the amazing earth and our astonishing lives, by making music with our blended voices. Technology is accelerating our connections at ever-increasing rates, and since our brains and bodies get a thrill at connecting, we grasp this technology and run with it. Yet one can question if these new technologies, texting, tweeting, Facebook, help us connect deeply or only broadly. Is there a correlation between the overall divided state of America and the way we interact with one another on an everyday basis? It seems our communication, though faster, more open and further reaching than ever, is in some ways more divisive and shallower than ever. There's also the fact that we have this tendency to look at situations in isolation. Even though we are wired to connect, we can still put things in lovely, separate boxes, dividing ourselves from one another. We can even make ourselves believe that we are so different from the other species that we are independent from them and from nature itself. Albert Einstein said it beautifully, a human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, but he experiences himself as something separate from the rest, a kind of delusion of his own consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our own personal desires and to the affection of only those nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from that prison. This delusion of separateness has consequences we could never predict. An example from nature can help us see the consequences of putting problems into isolation. Take the current complex crisis with the honeybees. Their recent disappearance is the perfect example of how everything is connected. There are many theories of what is happening to the honeybees, one of them being that we began shipping them from farm to farm thousands at a time and instead of feeding them a natural diet with a variety of foods, we isolated the cheapest and easiest thing to feed them corn syrup. Einstein predicted that if the honeybees were to disappear completely, humanity would be gone in four years. No more honeybees, no more food being pollinated, no more humans. So if one change in our over connected world can have such far reaching consequences, how do we use the power of all these connections to turn things around? Every decision we make impacts everything around us, family, community, world. As we are becoming more connected, that impact is only becoming faster and stronger. But with connection comes responsibility. Since the consequences of human actions are faster and more global than ever, how can the human species use this connectedness to our advantage and take the next leap in human evolution? Ken Collier said many years ago, let us begin with the idea of community. Unitarian Universalists spend so much time and energy on that first principle, worrying about and praising the autonomy of the individual, that we forget that individuals standing alone have about as much strength as a bunch of stones lying on the ground. It is only when a Mason picks up these stones and builds a wall that they become powerful. And that is how it is with communities. Alone we are beautiful, amazing. Together we have power. Can knowing that we are social beings help us rethink how we live and work and be? Does it matter to know that we are social? Let's just look at one example in education. Now in the classroom, being social is usually seen as a problem, the enemy of learning. The kids who can't stop talking to a nearby friend about what they're learning are usually the ones who are asked to stop and sit at that table over there all alone. But what research has shown is that learning in order to teach someone else helps you learn better than if you are learning for a test. Studies have proven that if you are socially motivated to learn, the social brain can do the learning and does it better than the analytical network that typically activates when you are learning for memorization. This idea of learning for teaching was actually implemented as a national standard in France. After the French Revolution, there was a massive teacher shortage. Children were recruited to teach other children and it was wildly successful. But when France recovered and got back on its feet, they went back to teaching for the test and test scores and student motivation plummeted. Maybe our first step is to stop, recognize the importance of social in our lives and think about where we want to be headed and how we can make this work. We have spun ourselves into a giant connected web of problems. Yet we know that we have been in crises before and we have found ways to shift perspective, see the bigger picture and re-prioritize. Crisis forces us to reach out, connect, look for resources and ideas outside of ourselves, collaborate and cooperate in new ways in order to build capacity for change. As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to both savor and save this world and we can do this together. What we need is here, in us, in one another, the connections between us. So the takeaway for today is this, connect, only connect, get more social, buck the system and think interdependently. Ask what the effects of your actions are. Connect not only broadly, but deeply. Work cooperatively. Who shares your hopes and dreams and passion because through working with others, your dreams and desires and actions will only be greater with more impact. There are no isolated parts in our overly connected world. We need to harness the power and the energy of our collected thoughts, ideas and actions. Our survival and the survival of all the other species and our planet is dependent upon our connecting with one another. The answer lies in our interdependence. We know this. Our faith declares it. So may we stop and may we grow ever more deeply, ever more fully, ever more genuinely human, connected, interdependent, healed and at peace. Today's outreach offering will be shared with Planned Parenthood. Usually our offering recipients receive two weeks of collections. Last week was a snow day. So Planned Parenthood is only receiving this weekend's collections. So we ask you to be generous and we thank you. The premier of this mother-daughter duo. We join together each week, a community who gathers with joys and sorrows written on our hearts. We come together to find strength and common purpose, turning our minds and hearts toward one another, seeking to bring into our circle of concern all who need our love and support. This week we remember all the silent concerns and celebrations that rest in the hearts of all of us here. May we remember that we are part of a web of life that makes us one with all humanity, one with all the universe. May we be grateful for the miracle of life that we share and the hope that gives us the power to care, to remember and to love. And if you will rise now and body your spirit for our closing hymn, number 1064. And I say there is something in our hearts and its manifestation here among us is love. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.