 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present 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. That concludes this morning's service. Welcome morning everybody and welcome what must feel like an eight o'clock service to some of you here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe nurturing environment and an early environment today 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 sleep deprived member of this congregation and I'd like to extend a special welcome and a happy hello to anybody watching or listening at home but especially to those of you who might be guests, visitors, or newcomers. This is your first time here at First Unitarian Society. You'll find it's a special place and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings we offer a guided tour after the service. Just gather over here by the windows and we'll take care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other this is that wonderful time when we get to silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need for the next hour and while you're taking care of that important but simple task. Let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster and you think that young person might prefer to enjoy the service from a more private space we offer a couple options for you including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your companion can still hear and see the service. And shame on me if I would forget to mention the wonderful team of volunteers who make sure that the service runs smoothly today. Our appreciation to David Bryles on the sound system, Janine Nussbaum who greeted us upstairs as we arrive this morning, Tom Boykoff who is serving as our lay minister. Thank you Tom. Thank you to our ushers Bob and Paula Ault and Ann Kunen. The hospitality and coffee are hosted by Dorit Bergen and Nancy Kossoff and our tour guide after the service today is John Powell. Couple announcements for you, one relates to the annual campaign and everybody I know you've been waiting to find out who is the winner of our annual campaign gift basket it is Kirsten Sieber. Thanks Kirsten for pledging your support for FUS. You can pledge your support today or tomorrow or the day after by going to the website and or by picking up a pledge form in the commons right after the service. I submitted mine last week but I didn't win the gift basket. One more announcement and that is 68. 68 days until Cabaret. I know we keep changing the number on you but Friday May 20th is going to be a night in Italy and you don't have to leave the country to enjoy Italian food, Italian music and Unitarian auction items. We need a little bit of help from people who might be interested in sharing the energy and the magic of that evening and planning for it so if you're interested please see me or see contact Rhiannon at the staff and we will make sure that you have an opportunity to help lead Cabaret this year again 68 days May 20th a night in Italy. One more announcement and that is going to be from our friend James Morgan who'd like to tell us a little bit about Moses the Madison Chapter. James. Again I'm honored to be here amongst you all this morning and as Mr. Goldberg said this is indeed a special place with a lot of special people. My name is James Morgan I'm a member of the FUS Moses ministry team and we are fighting or working to fight mass incarceration in Wisconsin. Every year the Department of Corrections revokes or sends back to prison almost 4,000 former prisoners who are released upon condition of following rules of supervision. They are being revoked for not committing a new crime but because they broke one or more of their rules of supervision. Things like using a cell phone or a computer without permission for authorization, missing an appointment or failing a drug or alcohol test. Does breaking some of these rules mean that the person is now a threat to the safety of the public? Do we really need to lock people up for more years at a cost of $150 million per year? The impact of these decisions and human cost is devastating. Individual lives are destroyed. Families are torn apart and public safety is rarely approved. Our FUS Moses ministry team invites you to a presentation about the issue of the abuse of revocation in the Wisconsin prison system and that is this morning that is today. From 10 15 to 11 o'clock in the landmark auditorium coffee and refreshments will be served. We hope you will join us to learn more about the problem and how we can push for reform. Thank you. Thank you James. Thanks for providing that example of how collectively we're trying to make a difference in this world. With that I invite you to lean forward or sit back to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Come into this place, a place that is made holy by your presence. Come in with all of your vulnerabilities and your strengths, your fears and anxieties, your love and your hopes. Here you need not hide, you need not pretend to be anything other than who you are and who you are called to be. Come into this place where we can touch and be touched, heal and be healed, forgive and be forgiven. Come into this place where the ordinary is sanctified, life is glorified, compassion is realized. Come into this place because together all of us make it a holy place. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in your program. For every disappointment from which we have new growth, for every disillusionment after which we have a relighting of hope, from every disaster after which we have a resurrection into new life, we light this chalice and in the spirit of that new life please turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting. Please be seated and if there are any children who would like to join me in the front for the message for all ages. So is everybody as sleep deprived as Steve Goldberg this morning? Did you know that we actually lost an hour of sleep last night? Yes because what happened? You got to change your clocks. Yes you did because now it's daylight savings time so it's going to be light later at night and dark earlier in the morning. But today is also not only the beginning of daylight savings time it is March 13th and it is the birthday of a very famous Unitarian who was born almost 300 years ago and this Unitarian's name was yes it was light when you were falling asleep. My goodness you must have go to bed awfully early. Yeah but here's a story about a man named Joseph Priestley so I want you to listen to my story now. And Joseph Priestley was born in England which is a long way away it's all the way across the ocean and he became one of the most famous Unitarian ministers in the whole country of England. He's actually given credit for helping to spread the Unitarian church movement all through England. So he was a very highly respected man and he attracted some very important people to the congregation that he served including the grandparents of a very famous scientist the scientist by the name of Charles Darwin. Now Joseph Priestley's own reputation was based more on his own scientific discoveries than anything he wrote about Unitarianism. He was like Charles Darwin a scientist and he made some very important discoveries about how electricity works you know what turns our lights on and off and because of that work he became close friends with a very important American scientist named Benjamin Franklin. Anybody heard of Benjamin Franklin? Okay and besides that Joseph Priestley was widely known in this country and among his friends were two of our first presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson often talked in their letters about Joseph Priestley and what a what an amazingly intelligent guy he was and when Joseph Priestley got in trouble in politics late in his life and people in England didn't like him anymore Thomas Jefferson said Joseph you can come and you can live in the United States and so Joseph Priestley did come and began to live in the United States. Today he is best remembered not as a minister but as a scientist. Now when he was alive people didn't get paid for doing science for performing scientific experiments and so you know what 200 years ago many of the scientists in England were actually ministers and they got paid for being ministers but because ministers had lots of free time they were able to to do scientific experiments and you know and do the things that really interested them about science don't we wish that were true today. Now scientists are very curious people right how many wants anybody want to be a scientist. No okay you have to be really curious to be a scientist you got to you got to want to know how it is that the world works why things happen out there in the natural world like what makes the rainfall or how do fish breathe underwater you know questions like those. You know how fish breathe because they have gills that's right very good yeah they get that air out of the water don't they okay well one of the things about Joseph Priestley aspiring scientist yes I know now one of the things about Joseph Priestley one of the things about Joseph Priestley is that he could not go to the store to get the equipment that he needed to perform his experiments so he actually would make next slide his own equipment and this is an example of some of the things he made that he could use in his laboratory to find out things about the natural world now one of the things that really puzzled people that that really confused them had to do with why it was that if you were to do something like this candle what's happening to the flame it's going away you put a glass over the candle that goes away what would happen if I were to put a little creature in here like a mouse and put the top on it it would suffocate that's right it would die and people didn't know why that was you know why does that happen because when they thought about air all the air that's around us they just thought it was empty space they didn't realize that the air was actually made up of all was made up of all different kinds of things in other words people didn't know that the air that surround us is actually made up of what oxygen what's oxygen it's a gas right it's a gas that's right what else is in the air besides oxygen carbon dioxide and nitrogen and methane 70 percent of the air around us is actually not oxygen it is nitrogen now what joseph priestly discovered is he made this machine this this device that would measure the amount of air that was in a container like this and he discovered that when a mouse died or when a candle flame went out only 20 percent of the air was gone and that 20 percent was what oxygen that's right so he discovered that there was this strange gas in there is what kept mice alive and kept the candles burning and when you took it away that wouldn't happen anymore he did another experiment where he put a plant inside that glass what happened when he put the plant inside the plant created more oxygen so the mouse would stay alive inside that closed container so he discovered that well that must mean that these plants these green things they give off oxygen that will keep people alive and so he he discovered how these kind of gases affect us and and whether or not they will help to keep us alive but he made another experiment about gases that he said was the happiest experiment that he'd ever made and that experiment was one in which he was able to combine carbon dioxide with water to make what carbonated water which makes soft drinks possible so whenever your parents allow you to have on a special occasion a coke or a 7-up then you could remember to thank our old friend Joseph Priestley well Joseph Priestley spent his last few years as I said in the United States and he lived in a little town called Northumberland Pennsylvania and he continued to be a Unitarian minister here in the United States and there was this little chapel that was built and that he preached in until he died a few years later and so he helped advance Unitarianism in England and in the United States and he also helped to get people very interested in England and in this country in the whole science of chemistry so that's a little lesson about Joseph Priestley and I hope you remember him and thank him the next time you have a soft drink and so now we're going to sing you out with our next team thanks for being here thanks for getting up early oh nice please be seated good to see you kids with such an avid interest in science and so the reading that precedes the reflections today comes from the historian Frederick Turner the holidays that divide our calendar were meant to remind us of something important something we should not forget the word holiday after all means holy day religious holidays such as Passover and Easter they seek to transmute the memory of ancient suffering into the promise of better times at the center of the rituals in such holidays is sacrifice whereby we acknowledge by some smaller act of sacrifice or loss the greater gifts that enable us to exist at all but from time to time civilization demands the creation of a new holiday a holiday to celebrate a mystery or to call humanity to some new self-awareness and we need a new holiday today because we need to be reminded that the great works of humanity the very best that we have done and can do they entail a heavy cost not only to ourselves but to the world we inhabit as a species we cringe at the thought of the price that we pay to live in our civilization that we kill animals for food that we raise forests to provide shelter for ourselves that our cars and our factories darken the air both as a society and as individuals we are compelled to commit certain acts that make us ashamed after we have thought about them and shame which is nothing other than the discovery of self shame figures in the foundational myth of just about every culture on earth self-knowledge is humankind's most distinguishing attribute and our bodies inform us in a way that no other animal knows when we are caught in the ludicrous contradiction of our competing selves the blush the hot feeling around your neck and cheeks at the memory of something that you did last night or even 20 years ago and yet the hot flush of shame when recognized and accepted can serve as the prelude to a strange fresh moment of transformation and epiphany both as individuals and as a community but for this we require a holiday a ritual that enlarges the essential paradox of our humanity and so i propose the creation of a new festival to be observed on the first monday of august a month without a national holiday its name will be blushing monday and on this day we will recognize our destructive nature and celebrate our creativity and our lunacy the mood of the day will be shockingly mixed deadly serious comically manic cynical idealistic horrified joyful we will accuse ourselves forgive ourselves celebrate the absurd joy of mortal conscious life everyone has to dress and act in the most embarrassing way that he or she can imagine everyone must say the most embarrassing thing that comes into his head the thing that everybody thinks but nobody ever says you know either civilization is worth the cost or humanity is obliged to purge itself from the earth and because we have not chosen the latter option we owe it to the world to give thanks for its sacrifices favorite prayers and i'm happy to see that it was such music so thank you so much i recently finished reading a fascinating history of the vanderbilts at one time one of the wealthiest families in the world starting with virtually no assets no capital cornelius vanderbilt known as the comodore created this transportation empire in the decades following the civil war and the comodore's son william expanded his father's network of railroads and steamship routes and the vanderbilts social and economic influence helped define the gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th century subsequent generations of this family spent lavishly they built a half dozen mansions along new york's fifth avenue they established huge estates in north carolina new jersey and long island they commissioned the world's largest private yachts and they decorated their many homes with medieval tapestries and old masters and the vanderbilts entertained ceaselessly this this became their work this was a requirement of their lofty social station and it was a competitive contest that they engaged in with their equally wealthy peers now naturally only the right people were invited to their soirees european nobility powerful politicians and others like themselves who had more money than they knew what to do with in describing those who belonged to this privileged set a new york city reporter observed that its members devoted themselves to pleasure regardless of expense having read that comment a wealthy new york socialite corrected the journalist we devote ourselves to expense regardless of pleasure she sniffed an incident that took place place at florham florins vanderbilt toamley's 1200 acre new jersey estate reveals the ethos of america's privileged elite during this time period mrs vanderbilt had invited several dozen guests to spend the labor day weekend in her 110 room mansion emerging from breakfast after the weekend monday morning these visitors were surprised to find their bags all packed and awaiting their departure at the front door surely madam does not expect us to leave today one of the guests asked surely she knows that this is labor day a legal holiday and all businesses and offices are closed well the butler to whom these remarks were delivered bowed slightly and left to convey this concern to the lady of the house returning shortly he announced to the gathered guests begging your pardon mrs vanderbilt says to tell you that she has never heard of labor day this was of course an earlier era with the stock market crash of 1929 and the widespread pain caused by the great depression such posturing as hers came to be seen as callous and utterly inappropriate overt displays of wealth and privilege had become in fact at this time period a cause for shame but not so much today for we are living in what some observers have described as a new gilded age one in which the conspicuous display of wealth and the use of great substance to tilt the political playing field once again these have become common practice shortly after the recession of 2008 hundreds of millions of dollars were withdrawn from the nation's treasury to bail out some of the nation's largest financial institutions including the prime insticators of the mortgage meltdown out of those taxpayer funds the top executives of these same firms claimed huge bonuses feathering their own nests at the expense of the recently foreclosed now jennifer jackett teaches environmental studies at new york university and she argues that shame shame can be an extra legal weapon in the fight against this kind of corporate greed and malfeasance even if no specific legal statute has been violated egregious instances of exploitation and influence peddling can be called out and so jackett would target repeat offenders who seem to have scant regard for the public's well-being or for the health of the environment she says if shaming can benefit the community why not use it in ways that the community finds acceptable that shaming can provide a powerful incentive to modify behavior is attested by california's example when the state threatened to publish the names of its tax of its leading tax delinquents on a website before california could carry out that threat they had received more than 400 million dollars in back taxes the communist witch hunts that shook the nation in the early 1950s afford another example during those years wisconsin's senator joe mccarthy gained a nationwide reputation by lodging largely baseless accusations against functionaries in the state department the pentagon and other government agencies and for a time joe mccarthy was the most feared man in washington but as we know he carried his crusade a bit too far and so at a nationally televised senate hearing on june 9th 1954 an army defense attorney by the name of joseph nye welch famously rebuked the inquisitor saying have you no decency sir at long last have you left no sense of decency this episode succeeded in drawing a curtain of shame around wisconsin's junior senator and he left those hearings disgraced and with greatly diminished power and with his departure a dark page in american politics turned over examples like these highlight the difference between a society in which shame can serve a constructive social purpose and where it cannot the vanderbelts lived during an era in which the very wealthy lived lavishly and shamelessly often paying their employees less than a living wage eventually and in keeping with changing social and cultural norms behaviors that once excited public adulation became a source of resentment and disapproval and sure enough the wealthy learned to live less ostentatiously and similarly joe mccarthy played to the public's fear of the soviet union and initially he enjoyed widespread support for his anti-communism efforts but eventually eventually those fears dissipated and mccarthy came to be seen more as a persecutor than a savior public shaming hastened that man's downfall but what about today is shame still part of the national conversation and does it deter public figures from acting inappropriately or in ways that defend public standards and our democratic values not so much corporate leaders of stupendous wealth receive tax breaks and subsidies worth billions of dollars while at the same time promoting policies that push middle and low income americans even lower on the economic ladder one is tempted to ask the members of this plutocracy have you no decency sir have you at last no sense of decency and when it comes to shamelessness what are we to make of donald trump whose scurrilous attacks on entire categories of human beings have become red meat for a large segment of disaffected americans mr trump for whom shamelessness seems to have become a criterion of strong leadership has even lately been inciting his followers to physical violence so does contemporary society require a renewed sense of shame robert caron a psychotherapist who practices and teaches in new york city says that compared to some other cultures he knows we tend to give shame rather short shrift people hear are strange about shame caron's asian students tell him amity etzioni well-known spokesman for communitarianism has called for a revival of shame he says it can be an effective means of altering behavior promoting the common good and so he suggests that we should publish the names of men who solicit prostitutes we should place identifying labels on license plates for those who have been convicted of dwi we should require serious troublemakers to wear special clothing like any tool etzioni says shame can be abused but that does not make it wrong in principle but if it's not wrong in principle it is quite often wrong in practice and whatever benefits it might confer we are probably right to be suspicious of this powerful potentially disabling emotion so let's let's step back for just a moment and ask what is it we're talking about here what is shame how is it triggered and what are we going to do about it well we can begin by drawing a necessary distinction between shame and guilt because these two terms are often used interchangeably but they're not at all the same according to robert bligh we experience guilt when we have done something wrong realize we have done something wrong and recognize that we have to atone for it shame on the other hand is the conviction often unwarranted that as a person you are an utterly inadequate being on this planet barbara flannigan agrees saying that guilt guilt is this internal reaction to a moral transgression it is linked to doing something wrong and it presumes personal agency responsibility shame flannigan says lacks this moral dimension it is the experience she says of feeling bad about oneself but not for having transgressed a person experiences shame not for what he or she does but for what he or she is one's very identity as a worthy person is called into question and exposed for everybody else to see so unlike jennifer jiquette and amity atcyoni houston universities brunet brown has some very serious reservations about the utility of shame it is often she says the cause of destructive behaviors and if it once served a beneficent social purpose it no longer does she argues according to brown a person's negative behaviors can very often be traced right back to unacknowledged shame it is she said highly correlated with conditions like addiction depression violence and aggression so when we think again of those fervent supporters of donald trump this kind of rings true because surveys indicate that many of trump's followers have lost significant economic and social ground in recent years this is the same demographic that now leads the country in the rate of suicide and substance abuse feeling inadequate feeling ashamed of their own ability to capture the american dream these are folks who need a scapegoat a person can respond to the shame they feel in several ways brunet brown suggests you can move away from it which means stuffing it down keeping it a deep dark secret you can move toward it which may involve ingratiating yourself to others becoming an overcompensating people pleaser or you can move against shame by attacking those who are thought to be responsible shaming and hurting them in turn this is the message mr trump seems to be delivering when he promises to make america great again to make you great again the subtext here is only i donald trump can remove the shame that you feel living with active conscious shame can be very distressing especially when one doesn't quite know what to do with it how to dispel it if we fess up to a moral transgression and a tone for it then we can assuage our guilty consciences but since shame has to do with one's identity and not with any particular wrongdoing what can we do except just disappear think of the expressions that we use when we are ambushed by shame i could crawl into a hole i could sink into the floor i could just die and in this age this age of the social media and the internet this is important to keep in mind because there have been too many stories of impressionable teens and young adults who were driven to suicide or perhaps less often to acts of violence because embarrassing information about them was circulated online exposed to the whole world these young people no longer knew how to live with themselves they were afraid to show their faces in public because once you have been shamed on the internet laura kipnis writes you are shamed for life despite these various services that claim to be able to scrub the search engines of victims names now is it possible to immunize people from shame to a certain extent yes and the formative years are so very very important children who are raised by parents and who are exposed to teachers who help them to feel secure in themselves are better equipped to deal with guilt and shame as adults it is so much easier to shame a person when he or she already possesses from childhood a sense of their own unworthiness francis weller is a psychotherapist she recalls or he recalls one morning when his young son bursting with enthusiasm runs into the kitchen yelling daddy daddy and he was startled and he was making breakfast and francis weller snapped at his son stop that quit that which caused his young son to retreat in tears to his room weller knew immediately that he had acted inappropriately and so he went to his child's room to apologize you wanted something from me i didn't give it to you right his son responded i didn't think that you wanted to be my daddy anymore that's how fast the rupture can occur weller says and afterwards i thought to myself what would have happened if i had not gone to my child's room somehow he would have been left with that thought that i did not want to be his father and worse than that that it was his fault humiliation alice miller notes was once a commonly used pedagogical strategy that teachers employed to undermine and to erase what they called a child's self-conceit this humiliation this shaming is still employed perhaps not as rigorously as a classroom management tool surveys have revealed that 85 percent of adults today can recall one or more painful incidents in their childhood and 90 percent of them can trace this humiliating instance to a specific teacher administrator coach or loved one much of the shaming is not meant to hurt children brunet brown acknowledges but we need to talk about alternatives to using it now there are antidotes available to us who have reached adulthood and brunet brown suggests something that she calls rumbling rumbling the employment of mindfulness in pursuit of greater insight into the causes of our shame she says that those people who are troubled by shame tend to ruminate a lot they turn over these negative thoughts and sensations without ever reaching closure but rumbling is different from ruminating its purpose she says is to find the truth of the story what is it that i need to understand about myself what is the fictional part of the narrative that i'm telling myself and where is that coming from and what we do this kind of internal processing we may discover with robert caron that not all shame is the same so there is for different for example class shame the shame that adheres to skin color social class sexual orientation disability this is the divisive kind of shame used to stigmatize an entire class of individuals and it is all too visible today in our political discussions but then there is narcissistic shame which leaves its possessor feeling unlovable and wholly inadequate burdened with this curse as ineradicable as original sin narcissistic shame and class-based shame both are toxic and neither performs a useful service either to the individual or to society but then in his typology robert caron includes something called existential shame which he says arises when you see yourself as you really are and then use that knowledge to begin a process of rehabilitation and so writing in the new york times recently sally satel and scott lilean felt argue that this existential shame can assist addicts in their recovery if those addicts retain some measure of confidence that their habit is within their control if on the other hand that same addict that individual believes that their addiction is a disease over which they have no volitional power then that shame can become narcissistic this indelible stain that can potentially become a cause for even deeper despair so whether or not shame possesses redeeming value well i think that the jury is still out some of those who i have read insist that it is an emotion shame's an emotion just like any other like guilt it has the potential to play a useful role under certain circumstances shame jennifer jiquette says is a norm enforcer and where it's gotten a bad rap it's because the norm being enforced is a bad one just because shame is uncomfortable doesn't mean it should be banished others others look forward to the eventual disappearance of shame they celebrate the de-shaming of sex and a decline in the shaming power of institutional religion there are better and more humane ways of altering people's behavior and maintaining a just society than by using this blunt instrument of shame they maintain now personally i think that as human beings you know we're kind of stuck with it and that being the case i think we would all do well to learn a little more about shame and how it has affected us learn more about its potency and if necessary to employ it very very judiciously sparingly always within the spirit of justice and gracious goodwill may it be so amen and our outreach offering today will benefit the league of women's voters who are assisting many people to register to vote in advance of the upcoming elections and i believe that if you have not registered or if you have changed addresses and need to re-register you could actually do so in the commons today at the table that is being staffed by our league of women voters volunteers please be generous this is a time when we do share joys sorrows and concerns that have been registered by our members in our cares of the congregation book which sits right outside the middle doors uh every sunday except that sunday when we have joys and sorrows which you can share personally from the front of this auditorium that usually happens on the last sunday of the month and this morning there was one notation here we are informed that longtime f us member sally hanson had died this past week and her name was included in this morning's obituaries sally hanson was a very active member of the society and for a number of years now she had been suffering from severe dementia for many years she lived at home and her husband lee hanson was an absolutely dedicated caregiver and and very very devoted to sally so we will miss her and we wish lee and the family well on this painful grief journey and so now i would invite you to turn to our closing hymn number 323 break not the circle please be seated for the benediction and the postlude and so now with gladness for our achievements and with forgiveness for our all too frequent mistakes and misapprehensions and with perseverance in life's adventure we push on onward with respect to our yesterday's onward with praise for today onward with hopefulness for tomorrow blessed be and amen