 So it doesn't have to turn to the same project at all. It's all the same. I just mentioned the same thing. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you'll find inside your order of service. Happy hello to everybody this morning. Welcome to the first Sunday of June 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 awake member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a very special welcome to any guests, visitors, or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we are offering a guided tour this morning right after the service. If you're interested, then just meet over here after the service at these windows and we'll take good care of you. And speaking of taking good care of each other, let's take care of our pesky electronic devices while we have the chance. And while you're doing that, if you're accompanied today by a youngster and you think that young companion would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and we also offer some seating right outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your young companion can see and hear the service. And as most of you know, the reason we are able to see and hear the service is because it's brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers. And if you join this team, someday your name will also be read from this podium. So I'm talking about David Bryles on the sound system, Tom Boykoff, who is serving today as our lay minister. Our greeters upstairs were Corinne Perrin and Patty Whitty. Dick Goldberg and Liza Monroe are the ushers today. And the all-important coffee and hospitality are provided by Bist Nitschke after the service. Our tour guide today is John Howell, so we're very grateful to all of those volunteers. We have three announcements before the service begins. All three relate to fundraising. Cabaret, one of our fundraisers of the year. As many of you know, cabaret includes group events, group dinners and outings and so on. And we still have some space at a couple of those group events. If you might be interested, you can sign up. Just check the cabaret table in the commons after the service or check your email from FUS to see where there might be room for additional participants in those group events from cabaret. The second announcement relating to fundraising is our annual campaign. And if you happen to have an outstanding balance on your campaign pledge, since our fiscal year ends pretty soon, I think it's the end of June, this would be a real good time to retire that outstanding balance. And believe me, I know what I am talking about when I say the word retire. And if you haven't pledged for next year's campaign, please help us with your pledge today. The third and final announcement relating to fundraising at our parish meeting later on today, around 12.30 this afternoon, we're going to be determining whether or not we're going to move forward with our capital campaign. And assuming that that will be approved, we will need help with that campaign. So if you are an outgoing, unshy individual, and you would like to help with this campaign, please feel free to sign up at the campaign table in the commons, and Molly Kelly will be happy to talk to you and answer your questions. With that, the announcements are finished. We're about to begin the service. I invite you to sit back or lean forward 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. By the subject of today's service, Henry David Thoreau, you must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. There is no other land. There is no other life but this or one that is like this. This is no world for the penitent, for the regretful. We do not live by justice. We live by grace. I invite you to rise and body your spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And please join me in the words of affirmation printed in today's program. For daylight and darkness, for sunshine and rain, for the earth and all people we offer deep thanksgiving. For all things bright and beautiful, for all things wise and wonderful, for all creatures great and small we offer endless praise. We kindle this light in celebration of the life we are privileged to share. And now it is a privilege to have all of you here today and please exchange a warm greeting with your neighbor. Please be seated. And I would now invite any children who are willing and able to come to the front for the message for all ages. So your shirt says on the front, surprise I'm awesome. And that's exactly what Henry David Thoreau would have said. And we began with some words from this man named Henry David Thoreau whose picture is going to appear here momentarily. And if Henry David Thoreau was alive today, he would be almost a couple of months shy of 200 years old. He was born in 1817. And Henry David Thoreau is kind of important to us because his parents were Unitarians and they lived in a small town in Massachusetts called Concord. And when he got older, Henry didn't really care for going to church in Concord because he'd rather be outdoors exploring in the woods and the fields and maybe tinkering with things in his father's workshop. Does that sound better than going to church? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting here. We've got good things to say. Now Henry's father, you know what he did for a living? He manufactured pencils. He made pencils in his workshop. That's how he made his living. And Henry and his brother, they worked with their father to create these very important writing tools. How many of you have used a pencil as opposed to a computer? People still use pencils? I'm glad to hear it. And it is said that Henry's father, John Thoreau, made the best pencils in America. Now why was that? Well, because what you actually write with a pencil is this little point and it's made out of a material called graphite and you put the graphite into the wooden body of the pencil and what John Thoreau was able to do was to make a new kind of graphite that wouldn't smear when you were writing on the page, it wouldn't get all blurry. So people really liked the pencils that John Thoreau made. Now Henry Thoreau really respected what his father did because, well, he was a writer. Henry David Thoreau was a writer and he composed lots and lots of essays and a couple of books and he was writing all the time so he used lots and lots of pencils. And he's famous in particular for one book that he wrote that was entitled, Walden or Life in the Woods. Now when Henry was young he helped his father make pencils and then when he got older and his father died he actually took over his father's business. He used lots and lots of pencils but this whole business about writing, sometimes he said, you know, that can be a good thing and sometimes it can be a bad thing. So this is what he said. He said, writing your name, how many of you can write your name? Well that leads to what? It leads to writing sentences. And the next thing you know you're going to be writing paragraphs and then you're going to be writing books. And then he said you're going to get into as much trouble as I've gotten into. And Henry Thoreau actually did get into some trouble during his life but that's another story. Now although he did appreciate how important pencils are, Henry had other things that he wanted to do than just make pencils. He loved above all to be all by himself out in the natural world and sometimes he'd be out rowing the boat that he and his brother had made on the river or on the lakes or he'd be wandering around this pond called Walden Pond where eventually he built a small one room cabin. And Henry Thoreau spent two years living alone in that small cabin and during those two years he read a lot and he explored the natural world all around him and he recorded in this journal everything that he saw and everything that he heard he described all the animals and the fish that he caught and all the flowers and the plants that he saw and he used all of these sharp pencils to make all these notes in his journal. And finally he took all that information that was in his journals and he turned it into this very famous book called Walden. And because of that book a lot of people think that Henry Thoreau must have really been kind of a hermit and a hermit is a person that prefers to live by him or herself. A hermit is a person that really doesn't like to be around other people very much. Any of you ever feel that way? Yeah, once in a while, yeah. And in fact he said just that in his journal that you know I kind of don't much care for people he said I thrive best in solitude. I have a companion just one day a week. I find that the value of that week for me has been seriously eroded. It dissipates my days and often it takes me weeks to get over my time with that companion. So Henry is saying in other words that he would rather be out there alone in nature than talking to or interacting with other people. People just take up too much of my time he said. But even though that's what he wrote that's actually not the way that Henry David Thoreau really lived. In fact during those two years that he lived in that small cabin on Walden Pond he would frequently walk into the village of Concord where he had grown up and where most of his friends lived and it was only about 20 minute walk from Walden Pond into Concord and that's also where his best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson lived. And there were plenty of times when Henry David Thoreau could be seen not in his cabin but in front of the village store chatting with neighbors and catching up with news in the world. And then he would often appear at Ralph Waldo's home just before dinner time expecting that his good friend would invite him in to eat with him. So all this being alone stuff that was important to Henry Thoreau. But he wrote a lot of positive things about being alone and what it's like to be alone and it's good to be alone and to try to be happy while you're alone. But he didn't write very much about people and he didn't write very much about community and how communities like this one can help and support each other. And so he took a lot of pride in being alone and being independent but Henry David Thoreau had a very hard time admitting that like all of us he needed people too. So that's the story a little bit about Henry David Thoreau and like I say he was one of our great Unitarian ancestors and we go over to the other building across the parking lot there's what we call the hearth room and there's a dome in the hearth room and you look at the six names that are on that dome, famous Unitarians one of those is Henry David Thoreau. So thank you for listening to my story today and we're going to sing you out I believe with our next hymn. Have fun at summer fun, please be seated. Continue our service with a selection from Edward Abbey's essay Down the River with Henry Thoreau that was published in 1980. Edward Abbey is perhaps best known for his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Some of you may be familiar with that. November 4th, our river is the Green River in southeastern Utah. We load our boats at a place called Mineral Bottom where prospectors once searched for gold, later for copper, still later for uranium with very little luck. With me are five friends and I carry a worn and greasy paperback copy of a book called Walden or Life in the Woods. Not for 30 years have I looked inside this book and now for the first time since my school days I shall. Thoreau's mind has been haunting me for most of my life. It seems proper now to reread him and what better place than on this golden river called the Green. November 5th, Thoreau said, in wilderness is the preservation of the world. Somewhere deep in his 39 volume journal he also said, I go to my solitary woodland walks as one who is homesick returns to his home. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile as where I live. Thoreau once defined happiness as simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. But solitude? I never found a companion so companionable as solitude, he wrote. To be in company even with the best is soon worrisome and dissipating. November 6th, purity, purity, he preaches. The wonder is how they, how you and I can live in this slimy, beastly life eating and drinking. Like Dick Gregory Thoreau recommended a diet of raw fruits and vegetables. Like a Pythagorean he found even beans impure since the flatulence that beans induce disturb his more ethereal meditations. He raised beans not to eat but to sell his only cash crop. During his lifetime his beans sold better than his books. When a publisher shipped back to Thoreau 706 copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry noted Riley in his journal, I now have a library of 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself. November 7th. How easy for Thoreau to preach simplicity, aestheticism, and voluntary poverty when as some think he had none but himself to care for during his 45 years. How easy to work part-time for a living when you have neither wife nor children to support. But he was a family man nonetheless. Thoreau lived most of his life in and upon the bosom of his family. Emerson's family part of the time. Thoreau's family, mothers, sisters, uncles, aunts during the remainder. When his father died he took over the management of his pencil-making business, a cottage industry carried on in the family home. But Thoreau had no wish to become a businessman. Trade curses everything it handles, he wrote, and he never gave to pencils more than a small part of his time. He was considered an excellent surveyor by his townsmen, and whenever he did he did well. But to no wage-earning occupation would he give his life. He had, he said, other business. And this other business awaited him in the woods where he wrote, I am better known. November 8th. What is your favorite dish? A guest asked Thoreau as they sat down to a sumptuous Emerson dinner. The nearest Thoreau answered. And Harvard said, Emerson, they teach all branches of learning. But none of the roots, Thoreau replied. Refusing to pay a dollar for his Harvard diploma, Thoreau said, let every sheep keep its own skin. November 9th. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau wrote. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them. But is it true that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and if so, did Henry escape such desperation himself? Well, he allows for exceptions. He indicates that the mass of men, not all of men, live lives of desperation. As for himself, when one of his friends, Ellery Channing, declared morosely that no man could be happy under present circumstances, Thoreau replied, without hesitation, but I am happy. He spent nearly a year at his dying. And near the end of his life, too weak to write anymore, he dictated the following in answer to a letter from a friend. He said, you look particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live, but of course I know nothing about it. But I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and I regret nothing. It's delightful to have you singing right into the month of June, a special privilege for those of us who still make it to church rather than to the woods in the month of June. Shortly after he had moved to the village of Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson was introduced by a mutual friend to his fellow Harvard University alumnus, Henry David Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau was younger than Emerson by 14 years, and he struck Emerson as an individual of unusual abilities. My friend Emerson recorded in his journal has as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met. Now from a temperamental standpoint, these men could not have been more different, but they hit it off. At Emerson's urging, Thoreau began keeping his own journal, and a quarter of a century later he had filled some 40 volumes with his musings. Although more than a few of his acquaintances found Henry David Thoreau insufferable, Emerson admired some of the very qualities that put other people off. His speech, Emerson said, was laconic, biting, and laced with ironic humor. Emerson found that rather refreshing. Thoreau was not one to waste or to mince words. When he spoke it was often blunt and to the point, and Emerson found Thoreau's pithy epigrams particularly appealing. The bluebird carries the sky on his back, Thoreau wrote, and nothing is to be so much feared as fear, an expression which Franklin Delano Roosevelt later poached. Now physically, Thoreau and Emerson made something of an odd couple. A quaint stump figure of a man is how William Dean Howells described Thoreau while Emerson was noted for his long and lanky six-foot frame. But both men's noses dominated their features. Each was pale skinned and blue-eyed. Thoreau's glance could be intimidating, Emerson noted, for his terrible eyes often blazed with an icy, grayish light. And whether it was his chilly personality, his physical appearance, or a combination of both, Thoreau had difficulty ever making friends or finding a life partner. Twice as a younger man he proposed marriage, and twice he was met with a rejection. For someone with Thoreau's hypersensitive character, Edward Abbey speculates, these must have been disabling blows to what little confidence he possessed. Still, Thoreau did not lack entirely for companionship. Although he once did declare that nature was far more interesting than people, he enjoyed a close relationship with members of his immediate family as well as with those who belonged to the Emerson household. As a some-time house guest, Thoreau served the Emersons as a handyman, a gardener, a secretary, and a childcare provider for the Emerson children, winning their enduring affection. On one occasion, Thoreau responded to young Lydian's concerns about her chickens. See, Lydian was upset that the hens had to be confined to their coop during the coldest months lest their feet freeze. A master of invention, Henry made for each hen a pair of fitted cow-hide booties that could be secured around their slender ankles, and thus they were able to promenade freely in the yard in even the coldest weather. Given our subject's reputation as a hermit, well, that is owed largely to his descriptions of his life at Walden Pond, and so what I've just said about him may seem somewhat out of character, and it is indeed true that in this classic piece of American literature, Thoreau does provide us with a very different self-portrait than that of a family man, as it were. He built his small cabin on a piece of property belonging to Emerson for a total cost of $28.12, a detail that Thoreau faithfully recorded in his journal. And here, as he famously put it, he set out to live deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Those were to be his watch words, and as Thoreau tells it, he took pains to apply that principle of simplicity to both his material and his relational life. No superfluous curtains would adorn his new domicile, nor, he said, do I require a doormat of which he wrote disparagingly. I have no room to spare for it within my house, no time it to spare to shake it outside of my house. I prefer to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. He could be equally dismissive of friendship. I love my friends very much, he conceded, but I find it of no use to go and see them. And even when I meet my friends unexpectedly, I part from them with sorrow. Reacting to this aloofness, Ellery Channing, a frequent hiking companion, wrote, Behold Henry David Thoreau, he who believed in simplicity, he who has gone steadily along the rough places and the thorns in order to crucify and kill out all human virtue. Each social faculty in which others take delight, he mortifies. What is his compensation? Eternal solitude and endless blundering. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's birth, an appropriate occasion to inquire into the source of this man's ongoing appeal. During his lifetime, he was surrounded by the social and literary leaders of the transcendentalist movement, including people like Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Henry Wadsworth, Longfellow, and Margaret Fuller. And although Emerson recognized Thoreau's genius, Margaret Fuller scorned him, and as the editor of The Dial, a transcendentalist periodical, she rejected most of what he submitted to that particular publication. And yet Henry David Thoreau, he is the one of all of those notables who has survived, who has conquered the test of time. Edward Abbey did not bring along Emerson's essays for inspiration as he floated down the Green River. He chose Walden, which in the estimation of the historian Perry Miller, certifies Thoreau as the supreme artist to come out of all that transcendentalist ferment. As a writer, Miller says, he stands far above the pale wraith of Ralph Waldo Emerson. So how do we account for the enduring source of this man's appeal? Well, here there are three facets of his thought that I think are worth mentioning. First, what he has to say about our relationship to the natural world. And then the lifestyle that he says we should choose to adopt. And then the social and political responsibilities that we as individuals must assume. With respect to nature, Thoreau's outlook can only be described as religious. Nestling near to her bosom, we sense the divine presence. Close to nature, we become privy to transcendental truths. And here Thoreau comes closest to the Emersonian ideal of the natural spirit-infused man. The river god, the good river god, has taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau, Emerson enthused. And Thoreau's own meditations on nature, they read like a 19th century Psalm. O thee, O earth, are of my bone and sinew made. To thee, O son, I am brother. To this dust my body will gladly return as to its origin. Here I have my habitat. I am of thee. Thoreau qualifies as a nature mystic. For as Paul Bowler observes, his sense of kinship was so profound that on occasion he felt totally absorbed into the natural processes enviring him. And in this capacity he has been a source of inspiration for spiritually oriented naturalists like Lauren Eisley and Annie Dillard and Sigurd Olson. He was impatient with the abstractions and the armchair philosophizing of his fellow transcendentalists and Thoreau was much more eager than they to equate himself with nature firsthand. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. The 20th century poet Gary Snyder wrote, and Thoreau would have wholeheartedly agreed. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. This was not a passing fancy for Henry David Thoreau. Both before and after his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, he continued to spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time trekking through the woods and the fields of eastern Massachusetts. He would typically be seen wearing an old straw hat, sturdy shoes, trousers that were heavy enough to wade through the thick underbrush or to fend off the rough bark of a tree that he might want to climb to explore a hawk's nest. His outsized passion for the outdoors, it sometimes frustrated Emerson for whom it signaled a lack of ambition, a waste of good potential. It is, Emerson wrote, an inexcusable fault that Henry would rather be the captain of a Huckleberry party than the head of the American engineers. Brushing off such criticism, Thoreau expressed his own displeasure with the Puritan work ethic. The order of things should be somewhat reversed, he said. The seventh shall be man's day of toil, wherein to earn has living by the sweat of his brow. And the other six that shall be his Sabbath in which to range this widespread garden and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature. Thoreau's relationship with the natural world did, of course, have its practical side. Extolling its therapeutic value, he wrote, if you are filled with melancholy, go to the swamp, see the brave spears of skunk cabbage buds already advancing in the new year. Do not despair of life, you have no doubt, force enough to overcome all of your obstacles. In much the same vein, traditional Japanese healers prescribe forest bathing, shinrin yoku, to treat stress and insomnia and anxiety. Thoreau in this regard was ahead of his time. And lastly, there is Thoreau, the scientific naturalist. He claimed to be able to tell the time of year within two days by simply observing the behavior of the plants in the forest. His journals, much of the material found its way ultimately into Walden, they contain detailed descriptions of the plants and the animals he encountered, the landscapes he traversed. His powers of observation, Perry Miller writes, seemed to indicate that he had additional senses than the five we all possess. Thoreau's sensitivity toward his deep knowledge of the natural world, they also aroused his protective instincts. He became a sharp critic of unrestrained free enterprise. He anticipated by a hundred years Aldo Leopold's land ethic. A man would be judged a loafer if for love of the woods he walked in them half of the day, Thoreau wrote. But if he spends, that same man, if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing off those woods, making the earth ball before its time, then he is esteemed an industrious and an enterprising citizen. Thank God he said they cannot cut down the clouds. All kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with those fibrous paints. This is perhaps the most important aspect of Thoreau's legacy, but a second facet of his life and literary output is summed up in another of his epigrams. He wrote, a man is rich in proportion of the number of things he can afford to let alone. Thoreau was an outspoken advocate for voluntary simplicity and his retreat to a sparsely furnished cabin on the banks of Walden Pond was meant as a test of that principle, simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. That has become a mantra for generations of admirers that they have repeated at infinity. Although he would not emulate them, Ralph Waldo Emerson did applaud his friends' efforts at simplicity. How near to the old monks in their aesthetic religion, he commented, my Henry has no talent for wealth and he knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. There is unfortunately more than a whip of hypocrisy in the claims about simplicity that Thoreau made for himself. Writing recently in The New Yorker, Catherine Schultz took issue, both with Thoreau's rigid asceticism and with his failure oftentimes to walk his talk. On the one hand, Thoreau described salt, salt as an unnecessary luxury. He advised eating only one meal a day to save time. On occasion, he declared that a six-by-three-foot tool chest would make a fine home, provided it was equipped with a few air holes. He abstains from almost everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasurably used. Robert Louis Stevenson observed after reading Waldo. But his abstemious claims beside, it was Thoreau's inconsistency on these matters that troubled Catherine Schultz the most. In Walden, he glosses over the fact that it was just a 20-minute walk from his cabin to the friendly village of Concord, where he procured food from his own family's larder and was often invited to share Emerson's table. Thoreau, Schultz complains, lived a complicated life, but pretended to live a simple one. Does it matter in the end that Thoreau failed to measure up to the ideals that he professed? To the extent that he faulted others for their simple indulgences, yes, it does matter, because he's asking more of us than he's asking of himself. Nevertheless, at a time, as I recently read, when the average person in the world's 34 richest nations consumes over 220 pounds of stuff every day, most of it simply a function of our modern lifestyles, when that is in fact the case a little more emphasis on simplicity wouldn't hurt a bit. Finally, let's consider Thoreau's social and political positions. As a thinker who elevates individual rights and prerogatives over collective responsibilities, Thoreau is often quoted approvingly by libertarians and advocates of limited government. Human institutions became a favorite target of Thoreau's disdain. Businesses, he said, are invariably rapacious. Churches are filled with hypocrites and moral cowards. The voice that goes up from our houses of worship, he wrote, is not so brace and cheering as that which rises from the frog ponds of our land. Thoreau's harshest criticisms, however, reserved for the public sector, for as he famously said, that government is best which governs not at all. So despite the able assistance that Thoreau rendered to members of his own and Emerson's family, he routinely denied that the individual has any social obligations beyond him or herself. I come into this world, he said, not chiefly to make it a better place to live, but just to live in it, be it good or bad. And despite his professed scorn for those who labor over those who leisurely walk in the woods, Thoreau evinced very little sympathy for non-producers, as he put it. He characterized those non-producers as bloodsuckers fastening themselves to every helpful man or woman in the world. Anne Rand could not have said it better. Thoreau was no fan of democracy. He mistrusted the popular will, which he said, exhibits strength, but not morality. And he expressed great confidence in his own conscience, which he insisted is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Thoreau fancied himself a man who was in touch with the higher truths about which the masses of humanity ruled by their passions know absolutely nothing. With respect to the wisdom of his elders, he wrote dismissively, I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my elders. But that being said, and despite his notable inconsistencies, Thoreau often did himself respond to the promptings of his own conscience, the seat of all moral and ethical authority, as he put it. And so he protested the government's imperialistic policies by refusing to pay his taxes, a stand that landed him in jail until an unknown party paid his taxes for him, and he was released. He was an ardent abolitionist, and he defended John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and wrote that in a slave state, prison is the only place a free man can abide with any honor. Reformers from Gandhi to the Bergen Brothers to Martin Luther King Jr. have all gained inspiration from Thoreau's germinal essay, Resistance to Civil Government. And it's also important to remember that Thoreau's denunciations of government and of American society more generally, those criticism belong in their proper context. Much of what he wrote and said was in reaction to the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and his successors, which Thoreau characterized as vulgar and mediocre. It was a decline in America's public standards, Paul Bowler writes, that made Thoreau into a militant nonconformist and caused him to express a preference for solitude over society and nature over humanity. Two centuries after Thoreau's death, an admirer of President Andrew Jackson sits in the Oval Office, which may make it easier to understand how Thoreau felt at the time. He struggled with tuberculosis in his final years. He succumbed to that disease in 1862, just shy of his 45th birthday. And whatever they made of him in life, his friends were inspired by Thoreau's dying. He refused all medication to ease his pain. He said, I elect to die with a clear mind. Nor did he lose his wry sense of humor. One world at a time, he said, brushing aside questions about the afterlife. And when his Aunt Louise asked if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau smiled at her and said, I did not know we had ever quarreled. Sam Staples, the jailer who had locked Thoreau up for one night many years before. Sam Staples was one of the last people to see Thoreau alive. Later, he reported to Ralph Waldo Emerson, never spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much peace and pleasure. Henry David Thoreau. Now I would invite you at this time to participate generously and with gratitude in our morning's offertory. As you note from your program, a portion of your gifts will be dedicated to the work of the Bosse de la Frontera, which is partnering with us on the problems that we face with respect to undocumented immigrants and the threat of deportation. Please be generous. As a community of memory and of hope, and to this time and this place, we bring our whole and at other times our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where these might be received and celebrated and shared. In our Cares of the Congregation book, there are three entries this morning. First of all, a family hug to the Goodmans, Sarah, Sean, and Jamie, on Jamie's first year in our world. So congratulations to Jamie on her first birthday. Theresa Stabo writes that my 91-year-old mother suffered a heart attack and a series of many strokes, and I'm hoping she regains some strength and is able to stick around long enough for her to meet her great-grandchild that is due in August. And so we share those wishes as well, Theresa. And then finally, I'm sure, something that's on all of our minds, we are thinking this morning of the friends and family in the city of London after the latest terrorist attack, it almost seems to become something that's happening on a daily basis and very hard to get used to. In addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us that we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently now for a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope. And so by virtue of our brief time together this morning, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now I would invite you to turn to our closing hymn, number 75, and I think that we will sing just the first three verses of the Harp at Nature's Advent. As you note, the tune is entitled, Walden for this particular song. Please rise, suffering from our subject of today's service. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend it all. What is sublime? What is noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us? Go to the woods and be happy. Please be seated for the postlude.