 Please join me for a moment of centering silence and now please remain seated as we sing our in-gathering hymn number 349 the words appear in your order of service. First Unitarian Society of Madison this is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Karen Rose Gredler and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are with us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation so whomever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the middle doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal-colored stoneware coffee mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would welcome visiting with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service so if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our National Landmark Meeting House across the parking lot please meet near the large glass windows on what's your left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service however because it's difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven back in that corner and the commons area outside the auditorium are excellent places to go if a child needs to talk or move around. This service can still be seen and heard well from those areas. This would also be a great time to turn off any devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour especially cell phone ringers please. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our service run smoothly. On sound this morning is Mark Schultz and Smiley is our lay minister for this service. Karen Hill is our greeter. Helen Dyer and Doug Hill are our ushers. Jeannie Hills and Sharon Scratish are making coffee and lemonade back in the kitchen for our hospitality hour and I believe Mark Hoover will be the tour guide. We'll meet you over there. Please note the announcements in the red floors flyer which is an insert to your order of service. This describes upcoming events at the society and provides more information about today. I do have one announcement to read specifically and this is from Leslie Ross our children's education director. The children's religious education program is only two teachers shy of being fully staffed for the classes that begin next week. Please consider signing up to join a team of three other teachers to help bring our liberal religious education to our children. We need one compass points teacher at 9 a.m. and one by Balodian teacher at 11 a.m. If you are interested please find Leslie in the commons or way down at the end of the commons at the education table after the service to volunteer. Again welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind. Touch your heart and stir your spirit. Thank you. People take vows obedience even vows of silence by choice to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way to locate the most ten I invite you to rise and body or spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Please join me in the words of affirmation printed in your program. The work of the world is as common as mud botched it smears the hands crumbles to dust but the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies clean and evident Greek emporers for wine or oil hope evases that held corn are put in museums but we know they were made to be used the pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real and now on this fine Labor Day weekend I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with Emma warm greeted if we have some children among us at this second hour they would like to come forward for the message for all ages and I can tell you that as of Friday this is a clean carpet that all the carpets clean all throughout the building good morning everybody's back in school right yeah is anybody here in the second grade this year you're in the second grade okay you know I was in second grade once hard as that might be to believe and when I was in the second grade our whole grade school put on a class you know a great school play you know a big play up on a stage there were lots of people singing and acting and I actually had a part in that play when I was in second grade you know how many lines I had to memorize one now that play was about a man named John Chapman who was a rather strange and remarkable fellow and John Chapman lived almost 200 years ago and a lot of people if you ask you know do you know who John Chapman was they would say no because they actually know him by his nickname what other people called him and what other people called him this is a hint as to what they called him it's a banana an apple right so who am I talking about Johnny Appleseed have you heard of Johnny Appleseed well this was the play that I was in it was about Johnny Appleseed and Johnny Appleseed one artist thought he looked a little like this you can see he's kind of a strange man because what is his hat it's a saucepan because he would wear this is hat but then at night when he would be camping he would use the saucepan to cook his food so it doubled as both a hat and a saucepan so that was Johnny Appleseed and he was born in Massachusetts which is near the Atlantic Ocean about a thousand miles from here but when he was about 18 years old he left home and he started to walk west toward Wisconsin but he didn't make it all the way to Wisconsin he went to Ohio and there were not many people living in Ohio at that time the first pioneers were just starting to arrive now Johnny didn't really have a job that he was going to in in Ohio but he did know how to do something he had been taught by this other man called a nursery man how to plant and to prune and to take care of trees and the trees that he really learned to take care of very well were apple trees now there are a lot of stories about Johnny Appleseed and most people kind of think that he traveled around with this bag of seeds and he would go up to farmhouses and he would offer these seeds to people so that they could plant apple trees on their property but that's not really what he did what Johnny did is that he planted whole big orchards of apple trees himself and then he would build fences around his orchards to keep out the deer and the rabbits and the other wild animals that might eat those tender little apple tree shoots and then he would find a farmer who might live next door and he would say to the farmer I'll make a deal with you we can share the profits from these apple trees if you will look after them while I go out and I plant more orchards and every once in a while maybe a year or two he'd come back to those orchards and look to make sure that the trees were still growing the way that they were supposed to but otherwise these other men would just kind of look after his orchards so what he would do then is that when an individual when a farmer wanted to have an apple tree they would pay the farmer and Johnny Appleseed to take one of these saplings these small apple trees they would dig it up and they would replant it on these farms and that's how he made his living so he had all these orchards all over Indiana and Michigan and Ohio and by the time Johnny Appleseed died in 1847 he had 1200 acres of orchards 1200 acres and he never picked the apples and used them himself he just sold the trees to other people that when the trees got big enough they're the ones that harvested and used the apples now even though he had all this land and all these apple trees Johnny Appleseed lived a very very simple life he would walk around to all of his orchards barefoot and he would always camp out in the countryside and like St. Francis of Assisi who you may know about he was also a very sensitive soul who really really cared about other living things other animals and even about insects so there's one story about Johnny Appleseed one night he was camping out it was kind of cold outside so he got some wood and he made himself a fire to keep warm but he noticed all these little insects were kind of circling around the fire and some of them would actually get burned up by the flames so he would immediately put the fire out and he said to himself God forbid bid that for the sake of my comfort my fire should destroy any living thing so he just sat there in the cold all night rather than burn up a few mosquitoes that's pretty sensitive isn't it now although the places that Johnny Appleseed traveled way back then were still full of Indian tribes and the Indian tribes didn't always like all these white settlers coming in the Indians never harmed Johnny Appleseed because he respected the way that the Indians live and they said we cannot hurt Johnny Appleseed because he's a man a white man who has been touched by the great spirit and here's a little picture of Johnny Appleseed talking to an Indian chief again this is kind of an imaginative picture nobody took a photograph of it now Johnny Appleseed actually had another job that he did that was just as important to him as growing apple trees he was a preacher and he was known for being very intelligent and for his great speaking ability and over the years with his preaching he converted many Indians and many settlers to the faith that he believed in and that faith was very similar to universalism but it wasn't called universalism it was called Swedenborgianism named after a man named Emmanuel Swedenborg and like the universalists Johnny Appleseed believed that God was infinitely loving that he just loved all creation and that salvation was available to anybody no matter what faith they belong to or what they believed well we grow a lot of apples here in Wisconsin and they're starting to show up in our farmers market so the next time you bite into a Macintosh or an empire apple grown in Wisconsin you might think that some of those apples may be the great-grandchildren of the trees that Johnny Appleseed planted 150 years ago so that's our story about Johnny Appleseed today and you're not going to be eating apples in summer fun but you're going to be eating something else that's really tasting so we're going to have have you go out to summer fun as we play you out with a little bit of traveling music Peter Frazee is the author of a book entitled for futures a book about how automation will change America and in this book Peter Frazee says that work is really about three things the means by which the economy produces goods the means by which people earn an income and an activity that lends meaning and purpose to many people's lives we tend to conflate these three things Frazee says because today we still need to pay people to keep the lights on so to speak but in a future of abundance you wouldn't need to do this and so we need to think about ways to make it easier and better for people not to be employed not to work Frazee belongs to a small group of writers academics and economists who have been called post workists people who welcome and even root for an end to labor American society Benjamin Honeycutt says has this irrational belief in work for work's sake Honeycutt is in a story at the University of Iowa we believe in work for work's sake he says even though most jobs are really not very uplifting a 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans do not feel engaged by their current job and honeycutt says that if a cashier's job at a store were a video game grab an item find the barcode scan it slide the slide the item onward repeat again add in for an item then critics of that video game would call it a mindless activity but it's a job and politicians praise its intrinsic dignity purpose meaning identity fulfillment creativity autonomy all of these things that positive psychology has shown to be necessary for our well-being they're absent in the average job in the second reading in a somewhat different vein perhaps a little more encouraging Scott Russell Sanders essay woodwork while never becoming a carpenter I learned a great deal about the meaning of good work from building houses and helping my father in his shop and I carry those lessons with me into the trade that I did eventually take up the trade of writing and I came to believe that a writer like a carpenter ought to make useful and durable things with a respect for materials and craft with an eye for beauty as in carpentry so in writing one ought to make tight joints clean lines avoiding showy ornamentation and cheap tricks and no matter how polished the surface of your work there ought to be substance underneath what you build ought to last bearing up under rough weather and the abrasions of time you ought to give the work the best that you have without holding anything back and that work ought to give you in turn the pleasure of exercising your full strength and knowledge and skill if work is going to fill our souls and not merely our bank accounts that it should serve some real human need it should offer nourishment or shelter knowledge or consolation instead of gimmicks and gadgets and sops for our vanity good work leaves the world enriched and not diminished good work allows us to express our beliefs as well as our talents and thus to play our small part in the sustaining of creation now I would like you to rise once more in body or in spirit as we sing together him number 312 some of you may have even read it but there was a length the expo say that appeared in the New York Times three weeks ago about Amazon Amazon that highly successful company this behemoth in the retail economy whose market value has now surpassed that of Walmart and according to Forbes most recent listing America Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos he is now the fifth wealthiest man on the planet but for Amazon's employees life at work can be brutal Bo Wilson says that nearly every person I worked with I saw crying at their desk he worked in book marketing from what the Times reported most Amazonians labor in an atmosphere of perpetual fear the company employs a strategy described as purposeful Darwinism with low performers cast aside in annual staff callings and some of those terminated the authors wrote suffered from cancer some had had miscarriages other personal crises they were edged out rather than given sufficient time to recover the Amazon workplace is extraordinarily competitive even cutthroat many of those interviewed called it a river of intrigue and scheming as individuals conspired with others to undermine a co-worker or to boost their own stock with their superiors more than a few described being sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue needless to say turn over at Amazon is rather high there is a pattern of burn and churn with a five-year retention rate of 15% Amazon is okay with moving a lot of people through in order to identify the superstars to whom they offer incredible opportunities VJ Rajendra a high-level manager conceded but Amazon may be an exceptionally demanding and stressful environment to work in but in America today work is not for many a pleasant or fulfilling experience a Gallup survey conducted last year found that 90% of the world's workers who were queried said that they either were not engaged or actively disengaged with their jobs and as you heard earlier even despite their off-praised work ethic 70% of Americans don't feel satisfied with the work that they are paid to do from a qualitative standpoint work for many is profoundly disappointing Barry Schwartz says you enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay but then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations can never be met so pretty soon you lose your lofty aspirations and with them a significant chunk of your motivation to do a good job as conditions in many workplaces have deteriorated and as compensation in real dollars has declined collegiality that has suffered as well since 1998 reports of rude treatment received at a typical weekend work have risen from 25% to over 50% and according to a 2013 John Templeton Foundation Survey Americans are less likely to express gratitude at work than at any place else in their life experience now of course if one is unhappy with their present job circumstances well he or she can always explore alternatives right Robert Markowitz was a successful young criminal attorney working out of a well-appointed office in Palo Alto California but the stress was taking a huge toll on him both psychologically and physically and so after a few years to the surprise of his friends and the chagrin of his parents he up and quit you are ruining your life you know that Robert's mother scolded him but after a period of discernment Markowitz discovered you know he really really liked entertaining young children so he went to clown school learned to be a clown and then he pulled out his old Gibson guitar practiced became a singer-songwriter who for the last two decades has performed at parties in schools and at other kid-friendly venues I wear jeans he says I do not frequent Nordstroms but most of the time these days I really like waking up in the morning now as a successful attorney Markowitz had a lot going for him he had social status professional stature high-income and in terms of today's prevailing social standards Markowitz he had it made but ultimately those rewards just didn't matter enough to him he was depressed with his life he was disillusioned with his profession the longing to act meaningfully in our work is as stubborn a part of our makeup as any appetite we have for status or for money Alain de Breton writes he goes on it's because we are meaning focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering the security of a career to help for instance bring drinking water to people in rural Malawi or we might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing a stories like Markowitz's are not exceptional but I think that they are relatively rare because a lot of people don't have the versatility the wherewithal the courage to simply make that leap into an entirely different livelihood so most of us are going to have to come to terms with the work that we are already doing which may be hard but what can help is the realization that with practice with practice this same work can become a vehicle for our spiritual growth and our personal development in the world of work there is no guarantee that a high status high paying job will reliably produce sustainable satisfaction or provide us with a rewarding life experience in fact payoffs such as these can inhibit can limit our ability to find meaning in and through our work the perks and premiums of high level jobs become what they call golden handcuffs that keep us trapped in a role even as our dissatisfaction with that role continues to mount but if if as Elaine de Botan argues if we are as much meaning focused as we are materialistic beings we are wise to try to look to our work to satisfy that craving people who are employed full-time spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else and as Americans we spend more hours in harness than the citizens of any other country in the world so yes there is meaning to be had in family life and in friendships in community service in creative hobbies in child rearing but why should work where we spend so many hours be bereft of such opportunities the kind of work that we perform may not really matter all that much although the average individual might imagine that certain callings like teaching or healing are more likely to produce the meaning and purpose we crave than others but then here is Jean Kincaid Martine she worked in an office kind of a pedestrian job and she often dreamed of doing something more stimulating more fulfilling but at the same time Martine knew that her approach to her current job was really leaving something to be desired so one day she was reading and she came across something that the novelist Henry James once said take what is there and use it take what is there and use it without waiting in vain for something else so she told herself to dig deep into the actual and to get something out of that this undoubtedly is the right way to live and so Martine began to practice I'd call it a spiritual practice attending to her business to her responsibilities hour by hour minute by minute often failing starting over again and again but determined to make of this ordinary work something extraordinary something as Scott Russell Sanders wrote something that has substance underneath that leaves the world enriched and not diminished Martine was now working with intention intention an important concept here when we begin our work day what is our intention for that day and for that work what is it that our heart wants us to do with that work what's it telling us to do and if before we step out of our house and into the workplace we set aside a few moments to set our intention and then resolve to follow through on that for the next eight or ten hours our efforts are likely to be more fruitful and more personally meaningful so for example a few years ago researchers at Yale University interviewed custodians at a large hospital interviewed them to see how they felt about their job a custodial work is is messy you can imagine what it's like in a hospital the pay is modest and the position status it's pretty much on a par with orderlies or the people who work in the kitchen and yet when they were queried many of these custodians reported a high level of satisfaction why was that it's because they perceived themselves to be part of a healing and caregiving team now they weren't required to do so but they would all often help patients and their families to find their way around in this complicated hospital probably a lot like the one across the street they would strive to calm patients before they underwent stressful procedures by telling jokes or with just casual banter in other ways they would seek daily to comfort the afflicted and these custodians assume these responsibilities which were not in their job description freely and without any extra compensation but as one of them said it's what gets me out of bed every morning it's what I enjoy the most about my job remember your core intention and shape its expression to the real circumstances that you find yourself in my adored founder of the liberation life project counts as us so if you want to be a healer but you're working in a supermarket greet each custom with kindness and compassion bring that healing energy into the job if you if you do your job with the right frame of mind and if you focus on your positive intentions then you can be a healer while you're working in a food store and this in turn will make the work more purposeful more fulfilling all work contains drudgery wendell berry once said the issue is whether or not it holds meaning and as for the drudgery at least some of that can be relieved if not completely eliminated through the practice of mindfulness in her book real happiness at work Sharon Salisbury co-founder of the insight meditation society Salisbury identifies a few of the more prevalent work-related maladies that make our jobs less pleasant and less fulfilling than they ought to be first there is mind wandering the inability to maintain focus on the task at hand feeling good about what you are doing for a living depends more on our moment-to-moment experiences than on the prestige or the high pay Salisbury says and so it is important to try to stay on task longer and to be less distracted by the surrounding environment and this is where a meditation practice can help mark lesser is a Zen teacher in the CEO of an executive coaching firm and he recommends that if you want to maintain your focus in your concentration take small mindfulness breaks from time to time and that will support those intense efforts and keep the distractions at bay so you've been working for a couple of hours get up spend a minute or two in walking meditation or mindfully nibble on that granola bar in your desk short moments many times is what one Tibetan teacher puts it a second related hindrance is attention deficit trait ADT which has become more and more prevalent in workplaces like Amazon where employees have to cope with the constant relentless input of information never in history Salisbury says has the human brain been asked to track so many data points smartphones tablets computers that for many of us function as electronic umbilical cords they exacerbate that problem information overload compromises our ability to attend and yet if you ask them many workers will say hey it's not a problem for me I'm really good at multitasking but unfortunately a growing body of evidence disputes this according to Salisbury multitasking can stimulate us into mindlessness giving the illusion of productivity while stealing our focus and harming our performance many studies seem to substantiate that claim and so there was one executive of a multi-billion dollar consumer products company who tested that thesis he was frustrated with all the multitasking that occurred at the staff's weekly planning meetings so the executive placed a box outside the door of the conference room into which all participants were ordered to deposit their electronic devices they could have them back when the session was over the change he said was a challenge initially employees were like crack addicts as the box was buzzing with incoming calls but almost immediately the meetings became more productive and within a month the time that they spent together solving problems was cut in half there was more presence among the participants there was more participation and as the culture shifted they were all having more fun boredom that's another problem that Salis our work experience but most of the time boredom arises not from having too little to do but from disinterest in and disengagement from our activities and so the antidote to boredom is not to find some new and novel project to work on rather as Jean Kincaid Martin discovered in her office job the solution is to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that or as the founder of Gestalt Therapy Fritz Perls put it if you're bored you're just not paying attention the more we learn to attend to what is before us regarding it with fresh eyes with what the Buddhists call beginner's mind and the more interested in and the more curious about our work we will become and it is impossible to be both curious and bored at the same time finally our work experience can be tainted by communication patterns that sabotage collaboration and collegiality now studies have shown that the workplace climate has gotten considerably worse in recent years Christine Porath a business professor at Georgetown says that incidents of incivility have notably increased with over half of employees reporting at least one episode of incivility in the course of a typical week this is not an insignificant problem because there is good medical evidence that rudeness and incivility and abusiveness that these cause employees to lose focus and it weakens their problem-solving ability you can't solve problems if you're constantly anxious and over the long term workers in difficult social environments suffer from higher levels of obesity cardiovascular disease diabetes ulcers exposed to too much negativity too much incivility porath writes people contribute less and they lose their conviction about their jobs and so the importance of skillful sensitive communication cannot be overestimated and this requires that we develop habits that will promote civility that will promote trust and greater self awareness is the key to this you know one study indicates that in our face to face interactions 55% of the emotional meaning of a message is expressed through body language 38% through the tone of voice we use only 7% through the words that we utter and so if you are not aware of your physical response to someone Salzburg says it's going to be hard for you to gauge your verbal responses so here too a spiritual practice can be very beneficial as we become more adept at identifying and setting our attentions and we're skillful at monitoring our emotions in our body language then we will increasingly be able to hit the pause button before complaining or coveching or venting to a co-worker and we may also begin to employ certain strategies that will serve to combat in civility are we tempted to send a self-righteous scathing email to a co-worker send it to yourself first says Michael Carroll put yourself in the place of the person that would eventually receive that email then see if you want to send it in the same way and Sharon Salzburg says always remember that with each email set with each call that you ignore with every negative water cooler conversation or alternately on better days with every pat on the back every supportive smile every task that you undertake to help somebody else with every action that we take we are sending love or suffering into the web that connects us all keep that in mind and because so many of us do spend so much of our day gainfully employed or perhaps if we are retired and volunteer roles it behooves us to put some good spiritual practices to work in the workplace and as we do we may find that our non-work life begins to improve as well when Matthew Fox asks when are we happier than when our work is a joy to us and a joy to others when indeed blessed be at the man and there's now time for the giving and the receiving of the day's offering and our gifts will be shared with ICWJ which works hard and diligently to increase compensation benefits and workplace sanity for people in our larger community please be generous whether each week is a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken cells we carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past and we seek here a place where these might be received and celebrated and shared and so today we remember two of our members who passed away this week Steve Anderson after a recurrence of cancer and Angie Volcker there was a memorial gathering in Manona for Steve this past week but we hold the friends and family of both of these individuals in our hearts today on a more celebratory note we would acknowledge the wedding this past month of Han Wong and Kerry Earhart Kerry is one of our board of trustees members a wonderful celebration here in the meeting house about a month ago and then I would on a personal note celebrate the fact that my brother and sister-in-law will be here later today to celebrate with my wife and me my mother's birthday which occurred a couple of days ago and then one other person entered in the book to please should we all keep the refugees in Europe the refugees fleeing Syria in our thoughts and if there are opportunities for us to help materially we would hope that some of us would do so and so in addition to those mentioned we would also acknowledge any unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us but that remained again unspoken we hold these with equal concern in our hearts let us quietly for a moment in the spirit of empathy and hope so by virtue of our brief time together today our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded please turn now to our closing hymn number 289 please be seated for the benediction and postlude may the light of your soul bless your work with love and with warmth of heart may you see in what you do the beauty of your soul and may the sacredness of your work bring light and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work may your work never exhaust you may it release well springs of refreshment inspiration and excitement may you never become lost in bland absences and may the day never become a burden may dawn find hope in your heart approaching your new day with dreams possibilities and promises and may evening find you gracious and fulfilled may you go into the night blessed sheltered and protected your soul calm and renewed blessed be and amen