 The second-last measure, I'm the same boy like everyone else. But what should we do? I fit in once. I don't particularly fit in the same way. So if you guys don't... It's like this. It's usually done so that they're all like... Can we go from the pickup to the third-last measure? There he is. It's perfect? Better than... Ah, I think maybe we should put on the other side. Like, the side of my knee shall as soon as we stand up. Where are we going? It's a little bit... It's like... Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now we get to sing. So please turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. And this service will also open. Good morning everybody. And welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing, and mercifully warm 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, intellectually gifted 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, I know you'll find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we're offering a guided tour after this morning's service. Just gather over here by the windows and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, I think you know the drill by now. This is the perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need during the service. And that goes for those of you watching at home as well. And while you're doing that, if you're accompanied today by a youngster and you think that young person would prefer to 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 comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your young companion can see and hear the service. And one of the reasons we are able to see and hear the service today is because, as always, it is brought to us by a wonderful group of volunteers who make sure that the service runs smoothly. So we extend our appreciation to Marine Friend, who's operating the sound system. Tom Boykoff, our lay minister. Our ushers Bob Ault, Tom Dalmudge, Marty Hollis and Gail Bliss. Coffee provided by Sandra Plisch and Helena Mugevna. Hannah Pinkerton takes care of all the greenery that you see up here. And John and Nancy Webster have donated the flowers. Our tour guide after the service is John Powell. Just one quick announcement, which you'll also find in your red floors bulletin. Our partner church dinner includes delicious food and folk dancing, almost as much fun as cabaret. It's a wonderful night on Saturday evening, January 14th, this upcoming weekend, 6.30 in the evening, right here in the atrium commons. This is where we celebrate and recognize our partner church relationship with our partner church in Romania and also the sponsorship that we provide for international students in the Philippines. So if this is of interest to you, it's a popular event, we need to make sure we have enough food for everybody. Please contact Kelly and also you can find additional information again in the red floors bulletin. January 14th, this coming Saturday. So end of the announcements. All you need to do right now is to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know you'll find that it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. Again, good morning. We're glad you're here. Opening this morning comes from the poet David White. Inside everyone is a great shout of joy, waiting to be born. And even with summer so far off, I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world. All those years listening to those who had nothing to say. All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard. All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening. And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter lead me to this otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life that I must call my own. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And please join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in today's program. We gather as a community of memory and of hope to mark the emergence of a bright new year. To this day of hope and promise. To a place of peace and beauty. To a journey toward truth and justice. To a community of acceptance and support we come. Seeking inspiration and encouragement along our way. And now I encourage you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with him or her a warm greeting. Please be seated. Any young people or people young at heart who would like to join for a story come on down to the front. It's wonderful to see you all this morning. Well today's story is going to be a fun one. I brought the book just in case you're not able to see the pictures up on the screen because half the fun of the story is looking at the pictures. And if you see anything that you think is funny or silly or strange just shout it out. While I'm telling the story and we'll just keep going with story. But if you see something funny or strange shout it out. You see something on the cover. Okay let's get started. On Thursday morning at a quarter past 10. Joseph K. Notice something strange about the kettle. Something strange about the kettle. You're right. Everything else in the kitchen was in its familiar place. Clean and tidy. It even smelled the same as usual. See anything else? Uh-huh. The chippa. Well the house was very quiet. Very quiet and Joseph's room was just as he had left it. And then he saw the slipper. A slipper with a wing and a kitty cat tail under his bed. That morning his father had gone to fetch Joseph's mother. Before leaving he said things were going to change. The sink has a face and there's a bird in the mirror. And there's a foot on the bottom of the sink. And a kitty cat face. So was this what he meant? Uh-huh. Or did he mean this? Joseph didn't understand. A gorilla. Well perhaps things would be all right outside. At first they seemed to be. You see a soccer ball? Is it turning into a snake? What happened here? The ball turned into an egg. He kicked the egg. Joseph didn't know what to do. Maybe if he went for a ride. The wheels are turning into a squid. Oh my. You see things happening here? A goat looks like a goat head. An elephant trunk. Apple. A hedgehog. Or if he looked over the wall. Was everything going to change? Well Joseph went back to his room. Closed the door. And turned out the light. He just didn't know what his father meant. When the door opened light came in and Joseph saw his father, his mother, and a baby. Hello love said mom. This is your sister. So what do you think his father meant by things are going to change? A baby was coming. How did he see all those different things? That's the funny part isn't it? We don't know. Let's do that. Alright let's go back to our seats for now. Thank you very much. Something's going to change. Yeah a couple of weeks from now something's really going to change. This selection is from Daniel Smith entitled First Time Caller. And it was from a brief item in the New Yorker magazine at the beginning of the month. A video began to make the viral rounds late last summer. It showed a woman named Heather McGee. She was the president of the progressive think tank Demos. And she was responding to a call on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. A phone call. Heather McGee is black. The caller was white and he admitted that he was prejudiced against black people. Because of things that he had seen on the news. But he didn't want to be that way he said. What can I do to change? He asked plaintively you know to be a better American. Heather McGee was moved and she offered him some advice. Get to know some black people. Read up on African American history. Stop watching the evening news. Not long after the call a 58 year old disabled navy veteran named Gary Civitello flew to Washington D.C. from his home in the blue grid bridge mountains of North Carolina. And he came to spend a little time with Heather McGee. And since then she has spoken frequently about this man. Gary from North Carolina presenting him as a symbol of decency, hope and racial reconciliation. And the two have developed they say a genuine relationship. They've now talked on the phone about a dozen times. Civitello describes his prejudices to her and McGee suggests ways to transcend them. She talks to him and she says the way that a doctor would talk to a patient. So in Washington they met for a drink at a hotel a block from the White House. Shortly after that initial call to C-SPAN Civitello had taken McGee's advice. He went to a used bookstore. So he says I go up to this girl at the cash register this little hippie girl in Asheville. I say I found these black studies books and I'm practicing not to be prejudiced. And she's there on the register and she says well that's probably a good thing. A week before the election McGee visited Civitello in North Carolina and she brought him two more books. Just Mercy and the new Jim Crow. Civitello's reading he says has transformed him. My fears, my anxieties they still linger. But I'm starting now to see the root causes. You see I had always assumed the black people were just being lazy. They just didn't care that they were irresponsible in society. But now I'm founding out no, you know they can't get loans and banks. They have to use pawn shops and myself I inherited a house. Civitello has employed a number of strategies to realign his thinking. He avoids TV shows that focus on inner city crime or the traffic in minority stereotypes. And he's begun taking iPhone pictures of the many Confederate flags that fly near his hometown. I wasn't really paying attention to them before he said. And he has developed a system to transform his social interactions. Using a scale of one to ten, one being awful and ten being great, he grades his expectations of how friendly a black person will be toward him in an interaction. And then subsequently he grades the reality. His main laboratory is the VA hospital in Asheville. At first he said I was giving people threes. Those were your prejudgements McGee remarks. But then I'd have a little conversation I'd say wow, wow you know the traffic really got bad today didn't it? And they'll look at me and they'll reply and say yeah, really did. How long you been living here? And all of a sudden I'm having a laugh with them. And I'm scoring them as eights and nines. Now this is not a system that I recommended to him McGee says. This is Gary's own system. And McGee then mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr. finished writing his I Have a Dream speech at the very hotel where they were having this conversation. Yeah I read that Civitello says. He finished it here and then he walked right over to the Lincoln Memorial. He could have sat somewhere right around here. Could have come down these steps, who knows? You know it's really a privilege to be here. I have to thank you for that Heather McGee. You're absolutely welcome Gary. The second reading comes from the Irish poet John O'Donohue. It's entitled For a New Beginning. In out of the way places of the heart where your thoughts never think to wander. This beginning has been quietly forming, painting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you, noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown. I watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispered. Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, wondering would you always live this way? And then the delight when your courage kindles and out you stepped onto new ground, your eyes young again with energy and dream, a path of plentitude opening before you. Although your destination is not yet clear, you can trust the promise of this opening. Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life's desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure, hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk, and soon you will be home in a new rhythm for your soul senses that the world awaits you. What a lovely serene way to start the new year. Despite its diminutive size, the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas is one of the most recognizable faith communities in the United States. It is known primarily for its fierce antipathy toward gays and lesbians. Activists from that congregation have demonstrated at numerous gay rights events, and perhaps most notoriously, at funerals for fallen American soldiers. I had a chance to observe one of their protests several years ago when Madison's Covenant Presbyterian Church celebrated the ordination of Scott Anderson. Scott had received his ordination decades earlier, but he forfeited it when he was outed as a gay man. By 2011, however, the Presbyterian Church of America had changed its policy toward gay and lesbian clergy, and Scott, now the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, asked to be reinstated. He thus became the first openly gay person to be welcomed into that denomination's clergy ranks. Enter the Westboro Baptist Church, whose leaders, of course, found this utterly intolerable. And so on October 8th, 2011, 20 or so congregants drove to Madison and brandishing signs, promising hellfire and damnation to homosexuals and their allies. They stationed themselves across the sidewalk on Segal Road from Covenant Presbyterian. A hundred counter protesters, many of them wearing our own denominations standing on the side of love t-shirts, were already in the space, guarding the space in front of the sanctuary. And raising our voices in song, we overpowered the taunts directed at us by the Westboro crowd. So... You should have been there. How many people were there? Anybody here? A couple of them. Okay, thanks to them. So adamant and impassioned did these fundamentalist activists seem that I could hardly imagine any of them ever recanting their beliefs. But then I happened upon the story of Megan Phelps Roper, granddaughter of the Reverend Fred Phelps, the militant founder of Westboro Baptist Church. Now it's not clear whether she was among the contingent that traveled here to Madison. But three years later, by 2014, Megan Phelps Roper, at one time the church's social media and demonstration coordinator, by 2014 she had repudiated the Westboro Gospel. Her decision was not an easy one. It required a lot of soul searching. A process that actually began with a series of online conversations with a man who had been reading her Facebook posts and who gently but firmly challenged her assertions. Now seeking to convince her correspondent of the error of his ways, Phelps Roper persevered in this online conversation. But ultimately, well, he proved to be the more persuasive of the two. Phelps Roper swung back and forth for a time. Some days she was convinced that everything she thought was wrong. On other days she felt that God was testing her and that she had to stand firm. You literally feel like you are going insane. She later confided. But in the end, her doubts won out. She said, I could no longer bring myself to do what we were doing or to say the things that we were saying. Now since then, Megan and her sister Grace, also in apostate, have spoken to numerous audiences about their conversion. And they have made a real effort to engage with the very people that they once disparaged and condemned. As undeniable as the truths she had been taught seemed to her before, now they seemed just as impossible. One notices certain parallels between Megan's story and that of the former racist Gary Civitello. They both risked entering into dialogue with someone whose outlook was 180 degrees removed from their own. They were both willing to listen, to listen at length. They continued to listen, even when it cost them a certain amount of mental and emotional distress. And then they both engaged in some serious relational work. Gary took Heather McGee's advice, began entering into conversations with people of color. And soon he realized that so many of his earlier assumptions were utterly unfounded. And for her part, Megan tells of the time that she and her sister were invited to make a presentation in Montreal, Canada. Walking down the street afterwards, they happened to pass a gay nightclub. They made a snap decision to go on in. It really felt illicit, Megan said, but oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm even in here. But they stayed, and they started visiting with some of the patrons, and by intermission, these two women, Megan and Grace, were out of their seats and dancing up on the stage. Wherever we went, Megan said, people wanted to help us, despite the hurt that we had caused them. She was incredulous. Now undoubtedly, there was something stirring deep within these individuals, even before they consciously began to entertain alternatives. Megan had already witnessed others desert the Westboro church, and she had watched from across the street, as LGBTQ activists brought a house and painted it in rainbow colors and dubbed it the equality house. Its mission? To spread a gospel of tolerance and to support former Westboro members as they seek to transition. So at some point, watching these things, the cognitive dissonance just was more than Megan could handle, and she began her shift. The Indian spiritual teacher, Eknaath Eswaran, once compared this process, the process that Megan and Gary went through, to the unclogging of a fountain. He says, we all possess this reservoir of courage and compassion and goodwill. These are not qualities that we need to acquire. They're just ones that we need to bring to the surface. And thus he says, if we work to remove the impediments that have built up over many years of conditioning to dislodge all those old resentments and fears and selfish desires, then our life will become like a fountain of living waters. But often that fountain is so clogged with rubbish that hardly a drop can get through. This blockage can occur in societies as well as among individuals. Consider our country's antipathetic relationship with Cuba these last 65 years. That relationship has included the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition, territorial invasions, blockades, economic sanctions, travel restrictions, and years and years of mutual recrimination. Suspicion, mistrust, stubbornness have served to keep our two countries at odds for more than a half century. The fountain quite literally was dry. But then as we all know quite recently, that shifted as well. And as with Gary and as with Megan, that's not something that happened overnight. A number of important developments preceded the breakthrough. As John Lee Anderson recounts in the October issue of The New Yorker, the process actually began with the 2012 summit of the Americans, a gathering of the Western Hemisphere's top leaders. A lot of people spoke at that summit and spokesmen from a number of nations sympathetic to Cuba used the occasion to lambast at length the United States for its imperialistic policies. Barack Obama was sitting with our delegation. Now a lot of previous presidents probably would have walked out. They would not have tolerated that kind of invective. Obama and his delegation kept their seats. They were quiet. They listened. And then when it was his time to address the assembled delegates, Obama surprised his critics by saying, yes, in fact, I would like for U.S. Cuban relations to move in a new direction. A year later, many of the same leaders gathered in South Africa for the funeral of Nelson Mandela. In a chance encounter with the new Cuban president, Raul Castro, Barack Obama reached out his hand and grasped Castro's. This was the first handshake between leaders of our two countries since 1959. The gesture was not premeditated, Obama said later. It was a purely human response. Although his domestic opponents were scandalized by this display of affection for the Cuban dictator, the door now had opened just wide enough for productive negotiations to begin. Obama's takeaway was this. You know, if people think he sees me, even if they disagree with you, then there is going to be the openness to have a conversation. And indeed there was. Now this is a story that is still unfolding. A new administration may very well decide to return to the status quo entay and reverse any progress in U.S. Cuban relations that has been made. The old Cold War rubbish that some politicians still cling to may plug up the fountain of hope and promise once again. Too many people are still incapable of suspending their black and white view of the world just long enough to have an open and honest conversation. Because those who they've placed among the opposition, they've become untouchable. That's all they need to know about them. That's all they care to know. The task of breaking down barriers like these becomes even harder when powerful forces conspire to keep us enthralled. Instead of appealing to the better angels of ourselves, opinion leaders too often raise hackles and reinforce some of our worst instincts. As the acclaimed novelist Zady Smith recently told an audience when she was accepting Germany's Welt Literature Prize, individual citizens, she says, are internally plural. We are internally plural. We have within ourselves the full range of behavioral possibilities. People are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out, others ignored or suppressed, depending at least in part on who's doing the conducting. At this moment all over the world, the conductor standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and the most banal melodies in mind. The Internet, it's also proving to be something of a mixed blessing in this respect. To be sure, users have ready access to information from a plethora of sources. An incredibly wide spectrum of viewpoints is represented online. And like Megan Phelps Roper, you can enter into these illuminating conversations with people very unlike yourself. But on the other hand, studies show that most Internet users gravitate to sites that serve to confirm and strengthen their biases. And indeed, Google, Amazon, other content providers aid and abet this behavior by nudging us toward books and sites that reflect our online preferences, ones that we have already expressed. And so one has to make a very concerted effort to break out of this information and opinion bubble that we have inadvertently surrounded ourselves with. That bubble is something that Richard Miles is all too aware of. Richard Miles was wrongfully convicted of a serious crime. He spent 15 years in a Texas prison before being exonerated. And upon his release, he founded an organization, Miles for Freedom. It's devoted to assisting communities that are adversely affected by mass incarceration. For most of his 15 years behind bars, Miles says, I dwelt in a bubble. I dwelled on my own victimhood. He had been a regular churchgoer. He had been a diligent student before his arrest at the age of 19. But at some point during his incarceration, he realized the futility of his present outlook and how this sense of victimization was hindering rather than helping him to move forward. So he decided instead of playing the victim anymore, I'm going to become a benefactor. Being incarcerated? That's a real problem, he said. But the thornier problem for me lay on the inside. We've all been in prison, he said. We imprison ourselves in bad relationships. We imprison ourselves in financial problems. We lock our own selves up. And the only difference between the prison I was in and yours is that someone else had the key to my release. Reuben Carter was a former boxing champion. He was convicted of a triple murder. He would also agree with Miles. In his late 20s, Carter received three life sentences from a New Jersey court. Repeated attempts to overturn his questionable convictions, they all failed. But in the process of struggling to get out of the joint, Carter gained his freedom. The bitter, angry man who entered prison was not the same man who came out, he said. After yet another unsuccessful appeal, Carter suddenly had this vision. This vision that he was never going to be freed by the law, even though he eventually was, but that he would be freed by a miracle, as he put it. And with that vision, he undertook a disciplined study of philosophy and spirituality and religion, and as he put it, I awakened to a higher level of reality. And when his conviction was, in fact, overturned, Carter, like Richard Miles, became a benefactor. He founded the International Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. How do you wish to be remembered? Reuben Carter was asked in a 2003 interview. Well, I've been a lot of things in my life, he said. I've been a fighter, I've been a soldier, I've been incarcerated, but if I had to pick an epitaph for my tombstone, if I had to do that tomorrow, this is what I'd say. Reuben Carter, he was just enough. He was just enough to overcome everything that was laid on him. He was just enough never to give up on himself. He was just enough to have the courage always to stand up for his convictions. He was just enough to perform a miracle, to regain his humanity in this place of living death. He was just enough. Reuben Carter, Richard Miles, Gary Civitello, Megan Phelps-Rober, they all had this in common. They were unhappy with what they had become. They were tired of wallowing in unhealthy emotions. They were mired in a rut of negative thinking. Barry Shank, who is the head of the Innocence Project, says that for many ex-prisoners, this is the crux of the problem. The individual either has to transcend where they're at, move into a more life-affirming mental and emotional space, or they're simply going to die. So what's the takeaway here? To affect deep and meaningful change, a major shift in orientation, there needs to be a letting go both of all the old rubbish and an opening up to new experiences. Zen Buddhist teachers often describe the enlightenment process as one of unlearning, emptying ourselves of all the notions that prevent us from achieving a clear and uncontaminated apprehension of reality. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard echoed that insight when he compared the pursuit of truth with swimming. Now, to swim, you first have got to take at least most of your clothes off, right? As a truth seeker, he said, we must undress in a more inward sense, divesting ourselves of prejudices, assumptions, and self-centeredness. And this emptying project is enabled when we open ourselves to the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. It's a woman by the name of Hannah Black. She is a multiracial artist, writer, and teacher. And in the course of giving a lecture to a group of college students one time, she made a rather untoward, unkind comment about transgendered people. And this provoked an angry response from several wounded listeners in her audience. Now, Black could have justified her comment, but instead she controlled her reactivity, swallowed her pride, and she openly conceded that what she had said was both wrong and hurtful. And later she said, you know, I'm grateful for the people that called me out, that yelled at me. I did not regard the experience as some kind of attack by the thought police. To the contrary, she says, my realization about the complicated untruths of gender was one of the most intellectually expansive experiences in my whole life. It released me into a new, gentler conception of my own body and the bodies of others. It brought new people into my life. It gave me a greater and sometimes scarier sense of possibility. So as this new year begins, let us be honest with ourselves. We all have some work to do, both at the personal and the societal level. We are living at a time when the deep story, the deep story that many of our fellow citizens are telling themselves, is a story of resentment and bitterness and anger. And we need to develop peaceful, powerful strategies for dealing with that, lest we become a more polarized people than we already are. And of course, as individuals, this is an ideal time to take stock, to take inventory, for there is undoubtedly rubbish blocking the release of our own living waters. Let us be about this business that we too may be granted a greater sense of life's possibilities. Blessed be and of that. And with our first offering of the new year, we will be sharing it with the Urban League, both this week and next, which is doing a great deal of good work in our community. I invite you to be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope. To this time and this place, we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be perceived and celebrated and shared. Today, we offer healing thoughts to FUS member Carol McGuire, who underwent hip surgery last week. Not sure if that was hip replacement or just hip surgery. And then also sending good wishes to Helene Burns, age 96, long-time member of First Unitarian Society, who was hospitalized last week with weakness and now has been relocated from her apartment at Oakwood Village to Hebron Care Facility. And then good luck and bon voyage to lay minister Anne Smiley, who is usually here for services. She is leaving for India, not Indiana, but India, to attend the wedding of her son. So, bon voyage and good travels to her. In addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any unexpressed joys and sorrows that remain among us as a community. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope. So, by virtue of our brief time together, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And speaking of joy, I invite you to join with me in singing our final hymn, a very upbeat little number, 151. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. One final piece of poetry from Lucille Clifton. I am running into the new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair. Like strong fingers, like my old promises, it will be hard to let go of what I said about myself at 16 and 26 and 36, even 36. But I am running into a new year and I beg what I love and what I leave to forgive me. Blessed be you, and amen.