 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for in-gathering him which you'll find inside your order of service. Formulating Sunday here at First Initarian 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 member of this congregation and it's great to see so many of these ladies standing and looking at me wondering if we have switched the sequence this morning. I promise to get through the announcements real quickly because you don't have to stand up here too long. Okay. Ah, let's see, where were we? And I would like to extend a special welcome to all visitors, guests, and newcomers. This is your first time at First Initarian Society. You'll find that this is indeed a special place. If you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we offer a guided tour after the service. We gather over here by the windows after the service and we will take care of you. Speaking of taking care of you, this would be a perfect time. I cannot think of a better time than right now to silence those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your ability to enjoy today's service. Thank you for taking care of that simple but important task. And if you are accompanied this morning by a youngster and you get a little fidgety and that youngster would rather take you to a more private space to enjoy the service, we offer a couple of options. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and then there are comfortable seats out in the lobby as well. Today's service, as is the case every weekend, is brought to us by a great team of volunteers whose names you deserve to hear so that you can thank them properly after the service, you give them a hug, invite them to dinner, or better yet, put them in your will. So here are the volunteers who have helped deliver this service. You guys are really getting a kick out of this, aren't you? Bear with us. Our lay ministers are Ann Smiley and Tom Boykoff. We were greeted upstairs by the smiling face and hearty handshake of Dorrit Bergen. Our ushers are Paula Alt and Bob Alt, Liza Monroe and Dick Goldberg, and our hospitality is provided by Nancy Koseff and Gal Bliss after the service. And the tour guide today is John Powell. So there are no more announcements, much to the pleasure of these ladies who have been standing so patiently. You will hear from them in a moment as soon as I leave the stage. So I invite you to lean forward or sit back and enjoy today's service. I guarantee you that it will stir your spirit, touch your heart, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We are glad you're here. Ladies, you're on. The opening words come from Kaladasa, a third century sage. Listen to the salutation to the dawn. Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life. And in its brief course lie all the verities, all the realities of your existence, the bliss of growth, the splendor of beauty, for yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. Such is the salutation to the dawn. I invite you to rise and body your in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words printed in your program. In the name of beauty, warmth, light, and inspiration, we kindle this flame. May it remind us of our spiritual bond not only to the communities that share our faith, but to people everywhere who, like us, entertain visions of a world more fair with all her people want. And in the spirit of that oneness, I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated and if we have some of our young folks in the auditorium, I invite you to come forward for the message for all ages. So this is a story that I will bet pretty much every adult in this room has heard. But I'm betting that at least a couple of you haven't heard it before. And this is a version of the story that I hadn't heard before. When I came across it, I thought, this is kind of neat. So a long time ago in the country of India, there lived a company of religious men who were called monks. And the monks shared a large house outside of town. Every day they would go into the town with their empty bowls, food bowls, and they would knock on doors and they would beg for food. And the people would willingly provide them with this food when they would come to the door and knock because people thought it was very admirable of these men to be devoting their entire lives to religion and spiritual practice. Now the much of the rest of the time when they weren't begging and they weren't eating, they were studying and they were talking among themselves. And they were all seeking answers to big, important, complicated questions like, what happens after a person dies and why do bad things happen? And the monks would talk among themselves and they would offer different answers to those tough, tough questions. And sometimes they would get into arguments with each other and those arguments could become very, very heated. You're wrong and I'm right, one would say. How can you be so stupid, another one would say? Let me tell you the real facts of the matter, another one would say. Well finally these monks got kind of tired of bickering. They weren't liking each other very much. So they decided that they were going to go into town and get advice from a man that they very much admired, a very wise man named Gautama Buddha who was one of the wisest teachers in all of history. And they asked the Buddha, can you help us to tell right from wrong? And he thought about it for a minute and then he answered them with a story, a story that has become very, very famous. So once there was a certain king, the Buddha said, and he gave this order to his servant, go young man, he said, and gather together in one place all of the men in the town who were born sightless, who were born not able to see. And when all of these sightless men, these blind men came together, the king then said to his servant, now I want you to go and bring me an elephant. There are lots of elephants in India. And when the elephant had been brought, the king said to the blind men that were standing there, this is what we call an elephant, he said to them. I want each of you to go and touch this huge beast. And when you have done that, I want you to tell me what an elephant is really like. And so the servant led the blind men one by one up to the elephant. And he let the first one touch the elephant's head. And the second one touched the elephant's ear. And the third one, the elephant's long tusks. The fourth touched his trunk. And the fifth touched the elephant's big leg. The sixth touched the elephant's back. And the seventh touched his tail. And when each one of these men had touched and felt the elephant, the king asked, now I want you to tell each of you, tell me what is an elephant like? And the man who had touched the elephant's head said, an elephant is very much like a large water jug. My friend is wrong, said the second man. The man who had touched the ear said, the elephant is like a big fan. They're both wrong, said the third man. Who had touched the tusk, touched the tusk. The elephant is like a sharp spear. No, no, said another one who had touched the trunk. An elephant is like a snake. Like a pillar, said the man who had touched the legs. Like a broad, smooth brick wall, said the man who had touched the back. Your majesty said to seventh man, I am the only one who is right. He had touched the tail. An elephant is like a rope. And when all of these men had finished their reports, they began arguing among themselves until the king had to command them, be quiet. Now the Buddha had finished his story, and he paused, and he looked at all the monks who had come to ask him for advice. How can you be sure, he said to them, that what you see reflects all of reality when it actually only represents a very small piece of it? And so when it comes to questions like, why are there bad things in the world, or who is God, or what happens after you die, there are many different possible explanations. And like these blind men touching the elephant, each one of you may only be a little bit right in your answers. None of you is going to be completely correct. So you should not quarrel about things that neither you nor anyone else can be sure of. None of us can see the whole. Understanding the point that the Buddha was making, the monks pledged that they were not going to argue with each other anymore, but they were going to listen respectfully to each one's point of view and consider what they said carefully without getting mad. We cannot know what the truth really is unless our minds are open. So that's my story about the blind men and the elephant. How many of you have never heard that before? OK, we've got a couple. At least that version. So thank you for listening. And now we have some fun. Some are fun and store for you. I wish we had an elephant out there for you to touch, but we're going to do some other things that are fun. OK, we're going to sing you out now with our next tip. Please be seated. We continue our service this morning with a selection from Aldo Leopold's essay, The Land Ethic that was composed in 1947, just shortly before he died. All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him also to cooperate. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively, the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members and also respect for the community as such. In human history, we have learned, I hope, that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows ex-cathedra just what makes the community clock tick and just what and who is valuable, what and who is worthless in community life. But it always turns out that the conqueror knows neither. And this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists. Abraham, in the Old Testament, knew exactly what the land was for. It was to drip milk and honey into Abraham's mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we can regard this assumption is inverse to our degree of education. A land ethic reflects the existence of an ecological conscience. And this, in turn, reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this particular capacity. It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for the land and a high regard for its value. And by value, I mean something far broader than mere economic value. I mean value in the philosophic sense. The key log, which must be moved to release this evolutionary progress for a land ethic, is simply this. Quit thinking about decent land use solely as an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. And the thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and the beauty of the biotic community, and it is wrong when it tends otherwise. And the second, reading in a somewhat different vein from Charles Siebert's 1990 essay, The Rehumanization of the Human Heart. William Schrader was the second man in history to receive a permanent, totally artificial heart late in 1984. He lived for 620 days with his Jarvik 7, the longest of five recipients of totally artificial hearts. Now, I'm looking at an old magazine photo. Schrader is outside, going on a fishing trip with his family. One son is pushing him up a hill in his wheelchair while a daughter walks alongside with a bookbag-sized portable heart driver over her shoulder and in an upheld hand the drive lines through which the air flows that powers her father's Jarvik 7. Everyone is smiling eagerly for the camera while Schrader in the foreground sits slumped forward and tilted to one side. It's an unsettling posture, poised somewhere between protest and powerlessness. It's the look of a man who literally has lost his heart. Once Schrader and the others were severed from their dying natural hearts, the doctors were kept constantly busy trying to counter each patient's failing physical functions and riotous rejection of the Jarvik 7. Although the Jarvik 7 did prove to be the ultimate pump, never missing a beat in any of the recipients, it failed on a purely physical level to hold up its end of whatever subtle give and take our natural pump has with the rest of the body. Each patient, for instance, suffered acute kidney failure, even though a perfect blood pressure and heart rate could be maintained. It's as though the organs were asking for more of the heart than an efficient robotic output, that the rest of the body was asking for some subtlety, some variety of pulse, a virtuosity that the Jarvik 7 simply was not capable of. Scrambling to keep their patients alive, the doctors had little time to consider the emotional effects of the implants in their patients. How does it feel to live with an unnatural heart? Margaret Schrader remarked that her husband just didn't see him himself, that often he was barely able to speak, was weepy, depressed. He cried at his son's wedding, held at the Humana Hospital Chapel, cried continually over his predicament. But when a man's heart no longer works in concert with his feelings, does he lament the fact? Does he cry more? Could Schrader's depression have stemmed not from the physical suffering, but from the severance of that natural conversation between the heart and the brain? Having had his heart cut out of a lifetime of internal interaction, does he begin to live more exclusively in his brain to draw in computer-like fashion on the memory of his old heart's role in that emotional equation, and to proceed toward a realm for which there is no human precedent? A man whose heart is all riverbank and no rainstorm. Thank you. I felt like chiming in with the lyrics. The parable of the blind men and the elephant that I shared with the children a bit earlier is, as I said, very old, and it is of unknown authorship. And it remains relevant today, because in certain respects human beings haven't changed all that much over the centuries. Like the sightless men of that particular story, despite our own incomplete grasp of any given subject, we still make assumptions about the nature of reality. And then, once we have formed an opinion, we will vigorously defend it rather than entertain the possibility that other points of view might very well have a measure of truth value. And the reasons that we do this, I think, are several. First, we do tend to place too much confidence in our own perceptual abilities, despite the fact that they reveal only a tiny slice of what's really out there. Our awareness provides enough information for us successfully to navigate our environment. But much of what sustains other non-human life forms with their specific needs and interests, that remains out of focus or out of range. The senses grasp what they need to grasp, and all of our scientific apparatus notwithstanding, they don't grasp a whole lot more. And then, too, unlike other creatures, we humans have the capacity to process the perceptual data that we do receive, and then having processed it to form these mental constructs, ideas, concepts, beliefs, dogmas, which then produce a feedback effect. Once a belief has become fixed, it imposes additional limitations on our sensory and intellectual capabilities. We establish a personal worldview as it were, which is only partially extensive with the world as it is, and yet it is uncritically accepted, these worldviews of ours as the real deal. And then, of course, we often choose not to acknowledge information that might cause us personal inconvenience or interfere with our accustomed lifestyles. In the quote on the cover of Your Order of Service, Wendell Berry argues that as a general rule, work can only be justified if it contributes to the health of the body, the community, or the ecosystem in which it is performed. A Buddhist would call this right livelihood because it is chosen and performed with full consciousness of its likely impact on other sentient life forms. But whether it is the work that we are considering or our patterns of consumption, most of us are primarily concerned with ourselves and the needs and the interests of those who are nearest and dearest to us. The wider and deeper communities to which we belong and which we are connected to in more subtle ways, those needs are often ignored, short-changed, or discounted. To take fully into account their interests might mean making different and less self-gratifying choices, which oftentimes we are reluctant to do. We need to look at the big picture, as Aldo Leopold might say. But that's not to say that big picture thinking is always what is called for in our lives. When some vision of theirs did not come to fruition, I have heard people over and over again use the excuse, well, you know, I'm just not a detailed person. But the devil is in the details. And often if we get the details wrong, the picture never coalesces. So for instance, sermon writing, or what I call reflections, requires a person to focus on what is immediate and close at hand. In their first efforts, beginners will often try in composing their sermons to cover too much territory, striving to produce the sermonic equivalent of Stephen Hawking's theory of everything. But exclusion is every bit as important as inclusion in the art of sermon writing. Early in my career, I remember thinking, okay, I've done this successfully a few times. What more do I have to say? Apparently quite a lot. Because there are so, so many pieces to the puzzle of life. And the details in sermon writing are where you must always begin. Another example. In Robert Piercic's semi-autobiographical classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author, Piercic, describes a situation that he encountered while teaching school in Bozeman, Montana. If you've read the book, you will probably remember this particular sequence. Now, Piercic was having trouble with students who, when he would assign them an essay, would complain, you know, I just really can't think of anything to say. And at first he thought that they were just being lazy. But then, eventually it became clear to him that that wasn't it. Often, he would give them an assignment and they would simply be stumped. And there was one girl in particular who was having a great deal of trouble in this respect. He had asked the class for a 500-word composition on any topic that they chose. And she came to him and said, you know, I wanna write my essay on the United States. Piercic sighed and then patiently suggested that maybe you need to narrow the subject down a little. Why don't you write about your hometown, Bozeman, Montana, which she agreed to do. Well, when the paper came due in about a week, she didn't have it. She was very upset with herself. She didn't know what to say. Now, Piercic had discussed this particular student with her previous instructors and they had confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, very disciplined, hardworking, even smart, but she never struck them as particularly creative. So she wasn't bluffing, Piercic. She really couldn't think of anything to say and she was frustrated, deeply frustrated by her inability to complete the assignment. It puzzled him. He and the student sat in his office silently for a little while, but then he had an insight. Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman, he suggested. She nodded dutifully and walked out. But shortly before the next class, she again came back in genuine distress. She was still drawing a blank. What to say about the main street of Bozeman, Montana? Now, Piercic was kinda angry. You're just not looking hard enough, he said. And so brusply he commanded her. Narrow your composition down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. Make it the opera house. Start with the upper left-hand corner brick. Her eyes open wide. She came to the next class with a 5,000 word essay on the front of the opera house on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. There are definitely times when we need to start with the small things and work our way into the big picture. At a recent gathering of my Unitarian Universalist clergy colleagues, a colleague from Racine, Tony Larson, spoke on the topic of finding the all in the small. Finding the all in the small. There are, he observed, certain grand concepts like love, grace, beauty, justice, compassion, but those grand concepts can hardly be grasped until their humble manifestations appear. The sight of an elderly couple walking hand in hand. Awakening on a winter morning, amazed by a world covered in whore frost. A stranger who stops to help us change a flat tire. And mundane events like those remind us of and restore our faith in those overarching realities that truly do make life good and meaningful. But then on the other hand, sometimes the small becomes a stumbling block, inhibiting our ability to perceive the overall pattern that conveys that greater truth. I read recently that former President Jimmy Carter has formally left the Southern Baptist Convention. A case in point. For years, Jimmy Carter had taught Sunday school in the Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, and occasionally he would openly criticize the increasingly fundamentalist direction in which the Baptist Convention was headed. But now finally he had had enough. And what he said is that he no longer wishes to affiliate with a church whose leaders cherry-picked scriptural passages in order to support injustice and inequality. The Bible, the church's leaders assert, teaches that woman was responsible for the introduction of sin into the world and that therefore she must ever and always remain subservient to men. Carter says, I am also familiar with vivid descriptions of these, in these same scriptures in which women are revered as preeminent leaders. But he said, for centuries, men, not just in the Southern Baptist Convention, but in other denominations as well, for centuries, men have twisted and distorted the Bible in order to preserve their own power and privilege. And he has had enough of it. Now like most thoughtful Christians, Carter tries to see how particular teachings, what we call pericope's, can be squared with the overall thrust of scripture. And looking at the big picture and the issues that Jesus and the prophets before him were most concerned about, is it proper to place such heavy emphasis on stray comments in the Bible about gender roles and the place of sexual mores? Of course not, Carter would say. Taken as a whole, Jesus's message is one of radical inclusiveness and compassion for those who are disadvantaged, stigmatized, the people who live on the margins of society. In other words, the Bible, and especially the Gospels, are not to be treated as a collection of freestanding disparate rules and regulations. Its overall objective is to teach people how to consciously be in the world in faithfulness, humility, reverence, righteousness, and with mutual regard. And in the absence of that broader understanding of what the Bible is about, the textual minutiae loses pretty much all of its meaning. In her sermon of last week, Sasha Ostrom made a related point when she invoked the word Ubuntu, which in the South African Hossa language connotes unity and interconnectedness. This is also about seeing the big picture and acting accordingly. Now as a concept, Ubuntu has a lot in common with ecology and its place in Aldo Leopold's land ethic. How wide does the circle of Ubuntu go? Bishop Desmond Tutu asked. If Ubuntu encourages us to cultivate and care for ourselves, for our families, for our brethren, so too we should care for the larger extended body, which includes the veld, the bush, the soil, the air, the water, and the wetlands. And yet we know very well that making the leap from an intellectual acknowledgement of the importance of Ubuntu to the practical application of sound ecological principles, making that leap can be very, very daunting. The extractive policies that govern the behavior of our modern profit-driven economies represent a significant impediment. So for instance, the monocultures that are so characteristic of modern farming have had a devastating effect on beneficent bird and insect species. Contemporary agricultural practices have led to a proliferation of chemical resistant super pests degraded the soil, emptied our aquifers. Because the interconnectedness and interdependence of so many elements has not been properly acknowledged in our farming methodologies, the environment continues to suffer. Take two, the practice of hydraulic fracking for oil and natural gas, which has allowed the United States to approach that promised land of energy interdependence, but not without certain sacrifices. Increased earthquake activity, contamination of groundwater, deeply scarred landscapes, noxious frack sand mines, declining energy costs which simply induce greater consumption. So again, the problem boils down to a refusal seriously to contemplate and to take into account the larger context in which such activities as these take place. Those who engage in extraction apply the label externalities to the depletion and the damage that they inflict. But these losses in the natural environment, they don't appear on the quarterly balance sheets. So they must not really matter. Rit large, what we see here is a face off between what Wendell Berry calls the two economies, the industrial economy on the one hand and the so-called great economy on the other. The former, the industrial economy Berry contends is absolutely dependent on the latter. And yet those who are invested in the industrial economy routinely refuse to concede this most obvious of facts. Berry says that Esop's fable, the goose that laid the golden egg, affords the perfect analogy here. For the goose to have value, he said, as a layer of golden eggs, she must be a live goose and therefore joined to the life cycle which means that she is joined to all manner of things, patterns, processes that sooner or later must surpass human comprehension. The industrial economy, Berry continues, is simply not comprehensive enough. And in the absence of respect for the whole, it relentlessly consumes the goose, the natural capital that the great economy provides. Now one of the favorite words of the industrial economy is control, Berry says, control. More than anything else, we would like to control the forces of nature while refusing at the same time to impose any limits whatsoever on human nature. This habit of approaching and dealing with the world piecemeal rather than holistically has personal as well as social and environmental implications. For all of the efficiencies that are achieved by assembly lines, little pleasure and little satisfaction can be gained by performing the same task hour after hour, day after day, year after year. True craftsmanship requires involvement in every step of the process, whether knitting a shawl, throwing a pot, fashioning a piece of jewelry. There is something aesthetically and even spiritually uplifting about creating something useful, beautiful and whole from scratch. Dimitatio Dei in imitation of God. Renet Justin was a family practice physician and she recently expressed similar feelings about her own lifelong career in medicine. The field's increased emphasis on specialization has left her with mixed feelings. Justin spent much of her career as a solo practitioner. She worked long hours but she was a comprehensive caregiver. She was there for her patients at the birth of their children. She was there when they were hospitalized, when they were suffering depression, when they were nearing the end of life's journey. She routinely made house calls and visited nursing home patients. But then like many of her colleagues after 25 years of solo practice, she joined an HMO, solo practices going out of fashion. It's also unremunerative. And so she settled into a predictable routine with fewer demands on her time but she was no longer in a position, she said, to treat the whole person. Now obstetricians saw the expectant mothers. Pediatricians cared for the newborns. I did not attend to patients' needs during crisis. They talked to therapists if they had personal problems. Hospitals looked after the acutely ill. Palliative care physicians attended those who were close to death. Now Renet Justin appreciates the expertise that specialists bring to our healthcare system. The leisure hours that she now has at her disposal. But she is truly less fulfilled in her profession. And she admits that if it were possible, she would return to the long hours of her former life and the joy and the satisfaction that went with it. In the selection that I shared earlier about William Schrader and his artificial heart, the author speculated that a body's various organs, kind of like an ecosystem, and that the heart in particular interacts and affects the other organs in ways that science may not really be able to fully comprehend. The body is not in the end, a collection of interchangeable parts. It's an integrated whole and when that wholeness is violated, something ineffable but truly vital may be lost. As he said, when a man's heart no longer works in concert with his feelings, does he lament the fact? Does he cry more? Some have argued that an awareness of and an appreciation for wholeness comes more naturally to those of an artistic or a religious temperament. Mystical literature is replete with references to wholeness and it's no accident, I think, that some of our most influential naturalists, including Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, were also writers who were very adept at using poetry and metaphor and painting word pictures. The idea of the cosmos as a whole can be properly comprehended not by reason but only by aesthetic intuition, the 19th century romantics believed. And perhaps that is at the heart of the problem. Today's civilization may be too rational but not poetic enough. Technically proficient but lacking in reverence. Confident but too often uncaring. We've lost touch with this sense of wholeness and to restore our hopes and our dreams for the future we must somehow find that sensibility again. An Ojibwa prayer begins, grandfather look at our brokenness. We know that we are the ones who are divided and who must come back together to walk in the sacred way. Grandfather, sacred one, teach us love, compassion and honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other. May it be so, amen. And at this time, we ask you to join in the giving and the taking of our offertory and as you will see a portion of that will be shared with Wisconsin Wave which is fighting against the plague of gun violence in our state. Please be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and a community of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken lives. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. We have a joy in that yesterday in this lovely space the son of George Austin and Martha Vocalic Austin longtime members of First Unitarian Society that their son Ben was joined in marriage to his sweetheart of more than a decade, Gabby. And so we offer congratulations to the couple and to their families. And then someone has put in here a happy birthday to a man who would be 148 years young today. Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday is tomorrow on June 8th who built our lovely landmark auditorium across the parking lot. In addition to those joys just mentioned we would also acknowledge any unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us and we hold them with equal concern as a community. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. And so by virtue of our brief time together may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now I invite you to turn to our closing hymn number 134. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. These are the words of Walt Whitman. I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete. The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remain jagged and broken. I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth. There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborates with the theory of the earth. No politics, no song, no religion, behavior of any kind. Unless it face the exactness, the vitality, the impartiality, the rectitude of the earth, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, our behavior shall never be complete.