 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. Happy Father's Day to all the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers who have joined us today 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, fatherly member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, you will find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we conduct a guided tour after the service today, so just gather over here by the windows and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, this is a perfect time for that familiar and all-important drill to silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need for the next hour. And while you're taking care of that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied by a youngster this morning and you think that youngster would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and then some comfortable seating right outside the doorway in the commons. The service is brought to us by some volunteers whose names you deserve to hear. Operating the sound system is Maureen Friend. Our lay minister today is Anne Smiley. Thank you, Anne. Special thanks to Jeanine Nussbaum for greeting us upstairs as we entered. Thank you to Allison Brooks and Karen Jaeger for serving as ushers today. Special thank you to Jean Hills for providing the all-important hospitality and coffee a little bit later. Joan Heitman for making sure that the greenery that you see around me is vibrant. And Richard Miller for serving as our tour guide. You'll notice the music is very special today. And as you're enjoying it, remember that you could purchase CDs afterwards in the commons. So with that, I'll just invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I heard the nine o'clock and I know that today's service will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts, and deepen your appreciation for music. We're glad you're here. The sultry weather is putting you to sleep. That'll wake you back up. Thank you so much. People sometimes say, what is the sense of our small effort? Well they cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time. We must take one step at a time. Because a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread out in all directions. Each of our thoughts and words and deeds are like that. So no one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless because there's just too much work to be done. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of the chalice. Our words of affirmation are responsive, so if you will join your voices in reading the bolded, italicized sections. We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. We affirm the steady growth of human companionship. We affirm a continuing hope. And now on this fine Father's Day, near the end of June, please turn to your neighbor in exchange with mothers and fathers and children alike a warm greeting. Please be seated. Now it's the time for the message for all ages. So if there are some youngsters who would like to join me in the front of the auditorium, I would welcome your company. I feel like a lovely dad this morning. There we go. Okay, all right, Tom's going to come up. Thank you. Thank you to all ages. The carpet is clean. So sometimes people get kind of sad and discouraged about the world we live in and the problems in it. Maybe not kids your age, but some of us who are older and have been around a while. Because everything seems so kind of big and complicated. We think to ourselves, here are these problems. What can I as one person possibly do to make the world a better place? Now this is a woman named Dorothea Dix. And she's the person I wanted to talk about today. And I imagine that Dorothea felt this way sometimes. It's kind of sad and discouraged about the world. But it never stopped her from doing what she thought she had to do. And Dorothea Dix became one of the best known and most admired women in the 19th century, which was a long, long time ago. And she did some very, very good work, but she would never accept any praise for it and she never would accept any awards for all the work that she did. Because she always said, you know, I loved what I'm doing and so my work is its own reward. And so she kept on working for all the things that she believed in for over 60 years. And she only retired when she was even older than me, 80 years old, a matter of fact. So what did she accomplish? Who was this woman and what did she do? Well Dorothea was born in the year 1802, over 200 years ago. And both her mother and her father were kind of sick when she was growing up. And after a while, they couldn't take care of her. So Dorothea had to go and live with her aunt when she was 12 years old. But she was a very, very smart young woman and by the age of 14, only 14, when most kids are starting to go to high school, Dorothea and one of her friends started their own school and began to teach little kids. And then three years later when she was 17, Dorothea published her first book, which was called Conversations about Common Things. And that book was so popular, written by a 17 year old, that it was over printed 60 times. Lots and lots of copies were printed in this book. Now when she was a couple of years older, at 19, she moved from her aunt's house to Boston, Massachusetts and she began to take some college courses at a very, very famous college called Harvard. And she also started another school where she taught and she discovered something very important, Unitarianism. Now she started going to the Unitarian Church in Boston and the minister of that church at that time was a man named William Ellery Channing. And when William Ellery Channing talked to his congregation, oftentimes he would talk about love and compassion and our need to be really good to people, not just our family members and our neighbors, but people who are having a hard time, people who were poor or people who were suffering from mental emotional illness or people who were in prison. Now Dorothea was very inspired by what she heard from Dr. Channing at that Unitarian Church and so she volunteered to begin teaching a Sunday school class at a local women's prison. But the more she was at that prison teaching, the more upset she got about the conditions that were in that prison. And she just didn't like the way that the inmates were being treated. And she also noticed that not just people who had broken the law were in that prison, but also people who just had something wrong with them that mentally or emotionally, they just were not quite like other people. And she saw that everybody in that prison, whether they had broken the law or whether they were mentally ill, suffered the same way. There was no heat, there was no light, there was no furniture in those small cells and some of the inmates were chained to the wall with collars, iron collars that were around their necks. And Dorothea knew that she had to do something to change all of that. And so she spent a year and a half traveling all around Massachusetts, visiting all the various prisons and talking to people who had been put into those prisons for no reason other than that they were mentally or emotionally ill. And then she went to the governor and she went to the legislature of Massachusetts and she said, you people need to do something about this. This just isn't right. And you know what? Dorothea was very convincing and they listened to her and there were some reforms in those prisons. But she wasn't satisfied with that. She said the same thing is happening in other states. So she went to New Jersey and she went to New York and she went to Connecticut and she went to 30 different states in all, visiting prisons, talking to governors and legislators. And eventually she made some very important changes. In fact, in New Jersey, they established a hospital, the first of its kind, just for people with mental and emotional illness in 1848. And Dorothea called that hospital her first child. Dorothea was not even content to do good work in the United States. After she had gone to 30 states, she went to Canada. And then she went to Europe with the same message, trying to correct the same bad conditions in their prisons. She was able to talk to the Pope in Rome. And after talking to Dorothea, the Pope said, I believe that this Unitarian woman is a 19th century Saint Teresa. So after that, she came back to the United States. But then something really bad happened in our country. A big war broke out called the Civil War. And so Dorothea knew that she had to do something to help during the Civil War. So she wrote to President Lincoln and said, Mr. Lincoln, I am prepared to create a core of nurses who can help the ill and the wounded as a result of the Civil War. And President Lincoln took her up on that offer and she became the superintendent of the entire US Nursing Corps during the Civil War. And she recruited thousands of men and women to serve as nurses, including a very important universalist woman by the name of Clara Barton, who became the co-founder of the American Red Cross. So she did a tremendous amount of good work. But she was worn out and she retired at the age of 80. And she went to live in a small little apartment in back of the New Jersey State Hospital, the first of her children. And she stayed there for six years until she died. And then after she died, there was a funeral service attended by thousands of people, and these words were said at her funeral service. They're very famous words. I was hungry and you gave me meat. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came and you comforted me. So there's very few people in our world that accomplished as much as this Unitarian woman, Dorothea Dix. But her example can inspire us to give ourselves to love in smaller and more modest ways. Because we can all find a child somewhere that we can conceive or we can adopt, just as Dorothea did the many hospitals that she established. And our child could be a forest that we helped to replant trees in. It could be an animal shelter. It could be helping a refugee family. It could just simply be befriending a little boy or girl who's a little different and who actually needs someone to be a good friend of them. It doesn't really matter very much what we do, but for all the gifts that we receive in this rich and abundant world, we owe in return the gift of our own love. So thank you for listening and coming forward so I wasn't lonely up here. And now we're going to invite our children to go to our summer fund program and you know, you guys can go too if you'd like. And we're going to sing you out with our next hymn. Please be seated. We continue with a selection from that 18th century classic by the French writer Voltaire, the book Candide. How many people have read Candide back in your college years? How many people remember what Candide's about? Well, this is a little piece of Candide. 1759. The old scholar whose name was Martin embarked with Candide for Bordeaux. Now both Candide and Martin had seen and suffered much. And if that ship had been scheduled to sail from Suriname to Japan by way of the Cape of Good Hope, they would have had enough to say about moral and physical evil to last the entire voyage. Monsieur Martin, Candide asked, what is your idea about moral and physical evil? Sir, replied Martin, my priests accused me of being a Sosinian. But the truth of the matter is, I am a Manichean. You are making fun of me, said Candide. There are no more Manicheans in the world. There's me, said Martin, and I don't know what to do about it, but I cannot think any other way. You must be full of the devil, said Candide. He takes so much in the affairs of the world, said Martin, that I might as well be full of him, just like everything else. But I must admit that when I cast my eyes over the globe, or rather this globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some maleficent being. You see, I've hardly seen any town that did not desire the ruin of its neighboring towns, never a family that did not wish to exterminate some other family. There, as I observe, the weak loathe the powerful before whom they crawl, and the powerful treat them like flocks of wool and flesh that are up for sale. A million regimented assassins ranging from one end of Europe to the other practice murder and brigandage with discipline to earn their bread, because there's no other honest occupations. And in the towns that seem to enjoy peace, the towns where the arts flourish, men are devoured with envy and cares and anxieties more devoured by these than the towns that are under siege. Secret griefs are even more cruel than public miseries. In a word, Martin said, I have seen so much, and I have undergone so much that I am a Manichean. And yet there is some good, said Candide. That may be, Martin replied, but I do not know of it. And the second selection, more recently from 2010, Yifou Toan was a professor of cultural geography at the University of Wisconsin prior to his retirement. This was one of his many open letters to colleagues. A young friend tells me that he has become cynical, a pessimist, which leads me to wonder, what do those words mean? Am I, for example, cynical, a pessimist? If I am, and sometimes I think I am, isn't it because I have extraordinary expectations of myself and others? In other words, I can be cynical only because at bottom I am an irredeemable optimist. We are all such optimists as children. As children we expect perfection in the world. A story by John Updike, in which he tells about his childhood, gives concrete illustration to what I have in mind. Updike, you see, was a precocious child, and he was very close to his mother. The two of them seemed to know and to anticipate each other's intimate needs. One day Updike was finishing a sketch. He brought it to his mother to show her. His mother was reading a book at the time, and rather than putting her book down to admire her child's sketch, his mother looked slightly irritated by the interruption. Not a big deal, you say, but apparently it was a big deal to the boy, so big that Updike, as a grown man and a famous author, still remembered that small incident. Against that one maternal slight, all the attentiveness his mother had bestowed upon him faded into the background. Many of us are still like this as adults. Certainly I am. In the course of an ordinary day, I encounter numerous acts of thoughtfulness, acts of courtesy. Do I feel grateful? Not a bit. I take the world's perfection for granted, and so I feel irritated from the slightest departure from that perfection. The waitress's insincere greeting, the driver's failure to yield, my colleagues perfunctory high. If I grow cynical, it's because I do not meet with perfection at every turn. Now John Updike and I are of the professional middle class. We are spoiled. The poor certainly do not live with such unreal expectations, and yet the poor too are in a sense optimists. They are optimistic in regard to the moment, to what the next half hour might bring. Their optimism is, however, based on a deeply pessimistic view of life, and is the outcome in reverse of what we in the middle class experience. In the life of the poor, which is burdened with all this uncertainty and hardship, it is the small things that stay in the memory and lighten the day. The poor may feel bitter, but not cynical, because they have never been afflicted by middle class illusions of perfection, joining us again and regaling us with their wonderful and inspired music. In my estimation, one of the finest portrayals of cynicism that I'm aware of appeared in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Now this film was a fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a high school science teacher was prosecuted in the state of Tennessee for teaching the band theory of evolution. Inherit the Wind's cast of characters included a man named E.K. Hornbeck. Hornbeck was a reporter covering this trial for his big city newspaper. Now Hornbeck's sympathies clearly lie with the defendant, and he is alternately amused and disgusted by the retrogressive outlook of, as he put it, the local rubs. But while Hornbeck and the defense attorney Henry Drummond both subscribed to Darwinism and the tenets of modern science, the latter, Drummond, is sanguine about humanity and about its future, but the journalist Hornbeck on the other hand exhibits nothing but contempt. Oh, Henry, he says at one point. Why don't you wake up? Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape. The cynical Hornbeck continues in the same vein on another occasion. Henry, he says, you think man still has a noble destiny. Well, I tell you, he's already started on his backward march to the salt-filled and stupid seas from which he came. Now the character of the attorney Henry Drummond is patterned after the legendary 20th century defense attorney Clarence Darrow, a man who we Unitarians can claim as our own. Hornbeck stands in for a non-Unitarian for the celebrated H. L. Menken, who for many years wrote for the Baltimore Sun. Menken was known for his acerbic wit, and he once defined a cynic as someone who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. Candide's companion, the scholar Martin, is like H. L. Menken, a thoroughgoing cynic. He presents himself to us as a manachian because members of that ancient sect believed that Satan, rather than God, was responsible for the physical creation that we see all around us, which he believes serves to explain why the world is so deeply flawed, so filled with evil, so utterly irredeemable. Manachians believe that trapped in this corruptible body, the kernel of light within us, the image of the divine, yearns for release from these earthly fetters so that it can return to the source of all light and all goodness from which it originally came. Like a cynic, a manachian harbors no hope for this physical world of ours. According to Webster's collegiate dictionary, a cynic is someone who scornfully is distrustful of human nature and human motives. A cynic is someone who has a sneering disbelief in sincerity and nobility. Henry Drummond is a doubter. Henry Drummond is a skeptic, but his faith in humankind and his hope for a better future always remains intact. By contrast, E.K. Hornebeck's world, his world seems bereft of purpose and meaning and any evidence of human worth and dignity. Now, cynicism is not the same thing as pessimism. As Yifou Toine suggested, one can have low expectations of. One can feel uneasy about the future without writing it off completely as cynics are wont to do. Now, we owe our word, our English word, cynic to the ancient Greeks in whose language it literally meant canine, dog. The term was applied originally to a small school of philosophers who urged their followers to forsake the customs and obligations of human society in favor of a radically simple and unencumbered life, a life very much like that enjoyed by the dogs who wandered the streets of Athens. Diogenes, who lived in the 4th century BCE, was one of the most notable of those ancient cynics. He begged for a living. He slept at night in a large clay urn of the sort that the Greeks used for human burials. In other words, he slept in their version of a coffin. And Diogenes professed indifference to all things, to food, to clothing, to manners, to religious practice. And legend has it that on one occasion, the emperor Alexander came to visit this famous philosopher and he said to Diogenes, Sir, is there anything that I can do for you? Any favor that I can grant you? Because Alexander was testing this man's commitment to austerity. Diogenes looked up at the emperor and said, Yes, please move. You are blocking my son. Few ancient cynics lived as humbly as Diogenes. And Bertrand Russell observes in his commentary on the cynics that these individuals were not without values. They were not without a sense of larger purpose. By detaching themselves from the customs and mores of society, they hoped to acquire an elevated sense of personal peace and well-being. The cynics, Russell writes, had an ardent passion for virtue. They sought virtue and moral freedom by liberating themselves to the extent that was possible from all human desire, a little bit like Buddhists in that respect. And those who we so label today hardly resemble these ancient cynics who eschewed luxury, who cared little for reputation or for social approval. These ancient cynics were not so much disillusioned with the world as frustrated by the claims that it placed upon them. Henry David Thoreau would be a closer modern counterpart to these ancients than H. L. Menken, who basically had given up on humankind altogether. Now, in light of what happened in Orlando a week ago, giving up on human nature altogether might seem advisable. It might be understandable if people in the wake of Orlando felt more than a little cynical, especially if you happen to be part of the LBGTQ community, because proportionate to their numbers, more acts of violence, more hate crimes are committed against this particular group of our population than any other. And even though you may now have the right to marry, even though you may enjoy full civil rights, if you are openly gay or trans in this country at this moment in time, you still on a daily basis have to fear for your safety. The victims of the Pulse nightclub shootings were mostly of Latino extraction, an ethnic group that many Anglos have been taught to resent as parties responsible for the decline of their own economic fortunes. If you happen to be gay and Latino, you will probably be saddled with an especially heavy burden of disapproval. Wouldn't you be a little cynical? And then there's the rest of us who watch with heavy hearts as this now familiar scenario unfolds once again. And we wonder, is there ever going to be a time when our policy makers place a higher value on human life than on the questionable right to own and to use a weapon of mass destruction? Columbine, Aurora, Blacksburg, Tucson, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando. Another atrocity is committed, Americans ring their hands, the obligatory moment of silence is observed, calls for reform are repeated, and after a couple of weeks, congressmen and the national media turn their attention to other emerging issues. Maybe E.K. Hornbeck understated the case. Maybe human beings are worse than apes. You know, ironically, many of those who purchase those military-style weapons do so because they are deeply cynical. Oftentimes, they look to protect themselves not from common criminals, but from an institution, from the federal government that they believe is power hungry and determined to roll back their rights. One candidate for president recently suggested that Obama himself was in league with ISIS, enabling its terrorist activities. Is it any wonder that thousands line up to purchase AR-15s? Americans in general have become increasingly cynical about our nation's institutions and especially its governing bodies. But in some segments of our society, this has become a disproportionate form of cynicism and it threatens today to undermine our civil order. Cynicism is fed by events like the ones that I enumerated, which cause us to lose confidence in ourselves and in our future. But each of us has also created, at some point in our lives, a master narrative through which these events are filtered. And so if you happen to believe, as the scholar Martin did, that planet Earth is Satan's playground, if you happen to believe this, then you are going to interpret people's behavior very differently than if you are convinced that God designed this creation to be very, very good. The psychologist Martin Seligman calls this our explanatory style, the manner in which we explain to ourselves why events happen as they do. Now the choice should not be a stark one between abject cynicism on the one hand and pan glossy and optimism on the other. The 18th century British philosopher David Hume, he was like Henry Drummond, a thoroughgoing skeptic. He was known for his biting critiques of religion and political systems and social customs. But David Hume was also a remarkably clear-eyed about the world that he lived in and he would reach his conclusions about the world and how it worked through rigorous empirical investigation. Hume was one of those rare individuals who was admirably free of prejudice, his perceptions generally uncontaminated by any particular or personal master narrative. And so as a result, he could look out in the world and he could recognize benevolence, benevolence in families and in friendship and in the social clubs that he frequented. But he was also acutely aware of the human capacity for cruelty and self-centeredness. Hume was skeptical, he was critical, but he also remained throughout his life hopeful. And this is a strategy that we ourselves can adopt when we feel that cynicism rising up inside of us. We can try to drop the narrative, to set aside the preconceptions, to adopt the pose of an empirical investigator because the alternative to cynicism is not necessarily positivity because as Barbara Ehrenreich says, positive thinking can be just as delusional as negative thinking. And so the alternative to both, she says, is to try to get outside of ourselves so that we can see things as they really are as uncolored as possible by our feelings and our fantasies. And thus we come to understand that the world is full of danger, but it's also full of untapped possibilities. This isn't easy, Ehrenreich acknowledges, because we become so deeply invested in these narratives which are often reinforced by the people around us, the people who we have chosen to consort with. Our expectations of others and of ourselves also play a role here. And our expectations may be affected by the degree of entitlement that any one of us enjoys. My late colleague, Forrest Church, served the upscale All Souls Unitarian Church in Upper Manhattan for many years. This was a congregation, being Manhattan, that was filled with successful, urbane, wealthy, and near-wealthy individuals. Now the perspective of most of those people was balanced, basically healthy. But Forrest Church observed that more than a few of his parishioners had succumbed to what he called the sin of cynical chic. They had adopted a dim view of the world and they routinely dismissed all idealism as naive and destined for defeat. Forrest Church would probably have concurred with Yifou Toine and with his analysis of cynicism that cynicism is often a luxury enjoyed by comfortable people who discount their comfort because they harbor these illusions of perfection. Or as my colleague put it, cynical chic can serve as a tombstone for wishful thinkers whose disappointments have left them hopeless. Rebecca Solnit offered similar thoughts in a recent issue of Harper's Magazine. Her beef is with what she calls naive cynics who uphold unrealistic standards. Again, these are people with perfectionist tendencies who will accept nothing less than the best. And so when an individual or an institution comes up short, they dismiss it as inadequate and its efforts without any redeeming value. Scratch a cynic, underneath you'll discover a disillusioned idealist. But such an attitude is, Solnit suggests, horribly disempowering. It bleeds the sense of possibility and the sense of responsibility right out of people. And so Solnit offers the example of Occupy Wall Street, that protest against the so-called 1% and the financial industry, a movement that spread to cities across the United States including to Madison. The movement petered out in a year or two and afterwards many cynical commentators dismissed Occupy Wall Street as misguided, inconsequential. Hey, Occupy Wall Street failed in its audacious attempt to overhaul our entire economic system. And of course it was both naive and cynical to think that it could achieve this. But if you can step outside of yourself and your master narratives, put aside those exaggerated preconceptions, adopt a more empirical approach, we might just have to revise our assessment of Occupy Wall Street. The fruits of OWS are too many to count, Solnit writes. People who are involved with all those local encapments tell me that there are all these thriving offshoots in their community that are still doing good work. Occupy helped to bring politicians like Bernie Sanders and Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren into the mainstream. But cynicism tempts us to turn away from that which is incomplete or always just a little imperfect. Cynicism will not acknowledge small victories and incremental gains. Qualified success, Solnit writes, unsettles those who are locked into those fixed positions, people whose world lacks any gray tones, which is always perceived in the stark colors of black or of white. And so cynicism discourages people from engaging in problem solving or imagining that they might possess some personal agency. Realists like Rebecca Solnit or David Hume, they somehow have managed to step outside themselves and so they can recognize, realistically, that some outcomes are positive, some are negative, some are mixed and some are still a work in progress. And so the trick is to view the world through a lens of possibility, free from those naive expectations that anything will ever approach perfection. History can serve as an important teacher here. Unfortunately, Americans tend to lose track of their past rather quickly. Couple of years ago, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and now professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, Robert Reich was hearing a lot of discouragement from students who were approaching the end of their undergraduate years, getting ready to go out and join the workforce. And many of these students that he talked to expressed a lot of fear. They thought that they were gonna be helpless to affect any kind of positive change in the face of opposition from these powerful multinational corporations and these deep-pocketed billionaires. And Reich felt moved to respond to their concerns in a blog post. He says, you have no chance if you assume that you have no chance. Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Easy for you to say, Reich's students pushed back at him. Things were different. Things were easier when you graduated from college than you just don't know your history, Reich responded. And so he shared a few of the challenges that his generation faced in 1968 when he received his undergraduate degree. Those of us who remember 1968 remember that that was the year that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was the year when there were race riots in many of our largest cities. A year in which 500,000 American soldiers were still bogged down in Southeast Asia. A year in which rivers were clogged with industrial waste and cities were blanketed with smog. It was a year in which an avowed racist, George Wallace, carried five Southern states in the general election. It all seemed pretty hopeless to us back then, Reich says, and I assumed that America was going to hell. It would have seemed beyond possibility, he continues, that a black man, the child of interracial parents, would at one day become president of the United States. That the Cuyahoga River, which used to catch fire regularly, would now support 44 species of fish. Today, yes, we face widening inequality. We face climate change, the corruption of democracy by big money, all of these and more, but I say to you, he says to his students, I understand your cynicism, and it does look pretty hopeless, but believe me, it is not. Not if you all pitch in, not if you pitch in. But first, like Robert Reich, you need to believe. What we do begins with what we believe we can do. Rebecca Solnit writes, and she's merely echoing the philosopher William James, who said much the same thing 120 years ago. In the end, we will only accomplish that, which we believe we can accomplish, and if you are a cynic, that's probably going to be very little. Last week, I listened to a TED talk by a woman named Maya Birdsong. Maya Birdsong has been working for 30 years in underprivileged communities. She's African-American, and she said on that TED talk that everywhere I go, I encounter people who are broke, but not broken. Perhaps, as Yifou Toine suggested, these are folks who have been spared our own middle-class illusions of perfection, and thus they rejoice in the small, but meaningful victories. They rejoice in the partial achievements, knowing that there are going to be more ahead, and although her poor friends know that individually they may not have a whole lot of power, they have learned from their communities and from their experience that when they combine their strength and combine their talents, they can be unstoppable, and perhaps we can be too. If we refuse to succumb to the sad, but seductive song of cynicism, may it be so. And now it is time for the giving and the receiving of our offering, and your gifts today will be used to help support this wonderful institution that we all admire and respect so much. Please be generous. Because a community of memory and of hope, and to this time and place, we bring our whole and sometimes our broken cells. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received, and celebrated, and shared. And we have two joys to share this morning that members put in our little Cures of the Congregation book. Dave Weber and Trudy Carlson are very happy. Thrilled, I would guess, to announce the birth of their grandson, Christoph Weber, to Will and Peggy, their son, and their daughter-in-law. Congratulations. And then a little longer acknowledgement. From Roger Bacchus, Sally Hested, his wife, a UU member here, since childhood, was recently named president of the local organization Women in Focus. Women in Focus is an organization of predominantly African-American women, about 25% white members, that's been in Madison for 34 years, raising money for college scholarships for students of color through the proceeds of the annual I Have a Dream Ball that's held each January, little promotion there. Sally believes in the mission of Women in Focus that through education, we can create a better and more diverse society. So congratulations to Sally now playing that very, very important role. And in addition to those two mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys and sorrows among us. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Please join me now in the spirit of meditation. Here in the sanctuary of our dreams, wisdom, and beauty, we come to grow, we come to be healed. We come to stretch minds and hearts to be challenged and renewed, to be supported in our ongoing quest for meaning and love, for help in building a world with more justice and more mercy in it. In the face of brutality and of cynicism around us and within us, we seek to align ourselves with this, a living community of faith that would affirm life rather than deny it, and it would rather think and act than remain passive and inert. Here we invite the spirit of our own humanity to be present with and around us, giving us the nerve and the grace, the toughness and the sensitivity to enable us to serve without fear the cause of justice, to grow in hope and conviction into our full and glorious humanity. May it be so. Amen. And now I would invite you to rise one more time in spirit or in body as we sing our closing hymn, number 170. These closing words are from the Ojibwa Indian tradition. Grandfather, look at our brokenness. We know that in all creation only the human family has strayed from the sacred way. We know that we are the ones who are divided, that we are the ones who must come back together to walk the sacred way. Grandfather, sacred one, teach us love and compassion and honor that we may heal the earth and heal one another. Blessed be, and amen. Please be seated for the postman.