 and welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name's Kelly Crocker, I'm one of the ministers here. Today, I am joined by the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, and Daniel Carnes, and we are joined by our special guests, the Reverend Jody Weldon, along with our Anybody Choir. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, our community, and our world. We look forward to greeting you all for coffee hour outside on the Landmark lawn, where you will also find activities for all ages that coordinate with today's service. After service today, we will be making prayer flags together, and I hope that you will be able to stay after service for coffee or tea so we can create something beautiful. And if you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table that is located in the Commons, almost directly across from the center doors, and we hope you'll be able to stay after as well. And for those of you connecting with us virtually today, we are glad that you are with us as well, and we hope that you'll be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following today's service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussmedicine.org, as well as on the slide that will be shown again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after the service, so we encourage you to take a moment and watch those to learn about upcoming programs and activities. And now, I invite all of us into a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Amid all the noise in our lives, we take this moment to sit in silence, to give thanks for another day, to give thanks for all those in our lives who have brought us warmth and love, to give thanks for the gift of life. We know we are on a pilgrimage here, but for a brief moment in time, let us open ourselves here and now to the process of becoming more whole, of living more fully, of giving and forgiving more freely, of understanding more completely the meaning of our lives here on this earth. And now I invite you to rise in all the ways we do to join together in our words of affirmation as we laid our chalice. We come together every week, bound not by a creed or by a mutual desire to please one God or many gods, yet we are drawn together by a belief that how we are in the world, who we are together matters. We light this chalice together in the knowledge that love not fear can change the world. And as we stay standing to sing our opening hymn, I wanna point out that our second verse has an altered line and it is correct on the screen in the second verse. We're gonna rise and body and our spirit to sing. Hymn number 360, here we have gathered. Anyone who'd like to come up closer for our story to come on up, who do you have with that? Better? Thanks, Hari. It takes a village. Hi everybody, hi Naomi, it's so good to see you. So our story today, good morning Eleanor, is about someone named Vashti. And it's a story called The Dot. And art class was over, but Vashti sat glued to her seat and her paper in front of her was empty. See, just a blank piece of paper. And her teacher came over and looked over her shoulder and she said, ah, a polar bear in a snowstorm. Very clever, very funny, said Vashti. Vashti, I can't draw. So her teacher smiled and her teacher said, just make a dot and see where it takes you. And so Vashti took her marker and she just made a dot in the middle of the paper. That was it. And her teacher said, please sign it. What do you think? Would you sign that? If you made that dot, her teacher said, please sign it. See it? And now the next week, Vashti came back into art class and do you know what happened? Hanging over her teacher's desk was her dot signed in a gold frame. Huh, I can make a better dot than that, Vashti thought. So she got out her watercolors and she'd never even used her watercolors before but she got out her watercolors and she made a red dot and a yellow dot and a blue dot and a purple dot. And then you know what she discovered? If she mixed yellow and blue, something happened. What would happen? Green, that's right. So she made green dots and orange dots and all kinds of dots and then something really cool happened. She realized you could make a dot without even making a dot. That's so she kept experimenting with little dots and big dots and all kinds of dots. And then a week later at the school art show there were all of Vashti's dots hanging up and down that hallway and there was a little boy and he was staring up at all of her artwork and he said, you are an amazing artist. And she said, me? Well, I bet you're an amazing artist too. And he said, no, not me, I can't draw things. So Vashti gave him a piece of paper and a pencil and she said, just draw me a line. And so he did and his hand kind of shook when he did it and he showed her and she said, great, now sign it. Great, Charlie, I love that one. So everybody's an artist, right? What we have today, because I know you're here in service with us. So if you are interested, I've got some crayons and I've got paper on clipboards. If you wanna take one back to your seats with you and then you can draw some dots or draw some lines or draw whatever you want. Thanks for being here today, you all. Our middle hymn today is, I know this rose will open. We're going to sing it as a round, if you want. We're gonna sing it as a round and we invite you to do that too. We're all gonna sing it three times total. So just keep singing. And if you would like to sing a later part as indicated in your hymnal, you are certainly welcome to do that. To the giving and receiving of the morning's offering. We give freely and generously to this offering in order to sustain the ongoing work of this community. You'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll find our text to give information there as well. In addition, there are baskets at the entrance to the auditorium for cash and checks. And we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. I swear to you, this is harder than it looks. And it looks really hard. I tried to get it off over there, but it's not gonna come off. All right, so you wanna hang it down the back? I'm gonna hang it down the back, it's not gonna come off. Is everything else in place? Everything else is in place. Is the microphone on? All right, how are we doing? Is it amplified? People hard of hearing especially, you okay? No, no, your mic is not on. Your mic is not on. Microphone's not on? Something is not on. It's on, your hair's already. Oh, last thing I imagined. Oh, there, how's that? Okay. Okay, thank you for your patience. Beings of Light, Carolyn Mace. We are used to identifying ourselves with our things, our bank accounts, our careers, our children. And now the shift is happening where we must begin to identify ourselves as beings of light. Operating within a system of universal laws. For instance, for every choice, there is a consequence. A universal law and order. For instance, gravity. If you drop something, it falls. These laws and order are all designed to expand our consciousness of life. To help us center in the most powerful source of power we have, love. And to motivate us to use our light inside of us and our power of love in the world to create the world we want. A world where there is enough, a world where the power of love is central, and each person is empowered to use their intuition and their search for truth for their own well-being and the empowerment of others. Just like in a dot story and this poem from David White, start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing, close in, the step you don't want to take. Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them smother something simple. To hear another's voice, follow your own voice. Wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step, you can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble and focused. Start close in. Don't mistake that other for your own. Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first. That thing close in, the step you don't want to take. I guarantee you, it was not a ruse not to wear a mask. No, but it is trailing down my back now. If we get close to each other and you want me to pull it around, I will. Just let me know. Here I'm talking this morning, I'm making meaning in a chaotic world. When I wrote this, I actually wish I added a tagline, the inner journey, because that's what we're gonna focus on this morning. However, I am gonna do a moment about how I see the world we're in, and also then some specific things about how to live from the inside out, what I call the inside out, from the light inside of us. For those who don't know me, I look forward to meeting you. Please come and say hello afterwards. I've been a member here since 1998. I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister and I specialize in hospital chaplaincy. I'm going to discuss the times we're in, the importance of the inner journey, and simple direction on how to live your inner light and heart. So, life has been so complicated, hasn't it? I think we all agree on that. We could all share stories about how we've navigated it. Most of those stories have to do with the outer life. Today I discuss the critical companion to the outer journey and that is of the inner journey of the heart, body, and soul. The path to expanded consciousness. Today is a simple message of how to use your body and heart in guiding your life, living life from the inside out. So what does life live from the inside out mean? Answer, to choose to protect and use the light within us. Why does it matter? Answer, our inner wisdom and intuition are our true identity. How do we do it? Answer, we make choices every day, all the time, small ones and big ones, to live from truth and love, through our body and our heart, knowing that every choice matters. Why? Because to create the world we want, we must become beings of the heart. Kelly, let me know that I needed to shorten my sermon which I was very glad to hear, helped me a lot, except I left a lot out that I wanted to share. And some of that, people who've inspired me. So I'm not including them here, but I did bring a handout and I'll leave it up here to anyone who wants to pick it up after the service. For myself, I believe this is a spiritual evolutionary era of humanity integrating the body, heart and soul to be used in equal measure alongside reason, science and philosophy. Everything changed in the global community of life when the nuclear atomic bomb was used on Japan to end World War II. The era of energy had been introduced. Somebody could send a bomb from the other side of the world and destroy a large population. So, the organization of time in chronos time which is what had been before that, chronos time is sequential time, one step after the other. This can't happen until the other thing happens. Began to morph and change. We went from living in what's known as horizontal time, one step at a time to vertical time. And the best example of this is the mail and email, right? We used to send a letter, write it, post it, put it in the mail. Somebody got it in a few days. Two or three weeks later they got back to us. That's sequential chronos time. Now we have email. You can send a message around the world in an instant and you can get a message back in an instant. That's vertical time. And that's what has begun to change on so many levels. That nuclear energy, the era of energy. Other things that happened in the field of religion, especially I'll talk about, the East and the West met in new ways. Eastern spiritual leaders like Thiet Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama spread the word of Buddhism around the world. Beginning to put out the message that all is an illusion and we need to live our heart and our compassion into the world and shed our illusions and be present and with each other. Organized religion began to fade. As people no longer wanted institutions to tell them what to do and what to believe and they have to go to a certain person to get forgiveness. But people did want spiritual experiences in their body for themselves. Transcendent experiences. Ways of experiencing their life in connection to the rest of the world that felt real to them. So the world of wires became wireless. The world of hierarchical privilege became flattened and the compartmentalized boxes of greed became opaque. Events multiplied in many directions. In recent times, an autistic teenager from Sweden spoke to the UN demanding action on climate change after an eco-friendly boat trip across the ocean because she refused to take an airplane and everything it did to destroy the planet. A working class black man died of prudish brutality in our neighboring city of Minneapolis and kicked off a worldwide revolution. Yes, we are connected in ways we never were. That old world of cronious time is gone. The power structure and underpinnings of it are in the process of demolition and a new era of human evolution is upon us. Demanding that we go beyond reason and integrate our heart's wisdom into worldly decisions. We've been organized around external power and now we are moving to organizing around our internal power and living it into the world. However, established patterns of greed, privilege and power never go easily. And so have come the setbacks. The centralization of power and resources reserved for the wealthy. The mounting refugee population of the world and its needs. The decline of opportunity to peoples around the globe. We know we don't want that world. But in order to create the new world, a world that is based on the power of compassion and love and kindness, we must each embrace and choose to use our power, our great power that's inside of us, our inner light to become beings of light and of love. I'm going to suggest a outline about how to think about that. And to live your inner light, you must live through your body, through your intuition and through your heart. To choose or to live by your light, we need to integrate our physical body and our energy body. And because of the amount of time I have, I'm going to use a simple example. It's not meant to be a difficult example. It's just an explicit example that when someone has died, the energy is gone, right? The body is inert. And the energy that used to be there and there's a lot of theories about where it goes so we're not getting into that today, but it's not there anymore. So this is a simple illustration to say we have an energy body that lives in our physical body. And often we live our lives split so that our energy body is somewhere else, worrying about dinner or depressed, down below us or planning vacation. And as the energy body is somewhere else, the physical body is here. And this is a normal course of events. However, the more often we can work to bring the energy body and the physical body together, now we're integrated, now we're at one. We're like a silo on a farm. Tall silo, and on the farm, of course, we want the sides to be solid and keep the food in for the animals. But in our silo, there's a light inside of us. And we have a choice about what kind of windows we create in the silo to let our light out. And we can create a tiny row of windows just at our own eye level and let out that amount of light and let that amount of light in. Or we can create all kinds of windows and doors and structures all around our silo, remembering to keep ourselves grounded in reason and the science of stability and staying solid, but yet to open and create new windows. And that allows our light out and allows us to let other light in. Interestingly enough, that light inside the silo is always getting fed energy and intuition. Our intuition is one of the great gifts that we have been given through our light inside of us. And we've all had experiences where we followed our intuition and it worked out so great. We've all had experiences where we pushed back our intuition. I spent four or five years hearing minister, minister, minister, and I'm like, no, no, no. I mean, I was 45, 50. I didn't want to start a new career, spend all that money on education. I was doing holistic psychotherapy. I was happy. Well, finally, one day I realized I have to embrace this intuition that keeps coming at me. Otherwise I will have betrayed myself. And that happened in the late 1990s and I came here and signed the book that's over there today or anybody wants to sign it over in the loja. And that began my journey into the Unitarian ministry. We're all like that. We push away intuitions, but the more we can allow our intuition, which is a natural gift to us that gives us so much wisdom, the more we can widen the windows in our silo. So you put these two things together. The energy, working with your energy body and your physical body, coming at one with each other and the major way to do that is breathing. Just noticing, I remember I was in a grocery line when I started to practice this, I had time. Okay, I'm gonna practice. I said, where is my energy body? Oh yeah, it's at home worrying about cleaning the kitchen floor. Okay, I just bring it back. I feel my body, I breathe. I'm pretty sure that I could feel that lovely feeling of energy in my body. I can do the same thing at my heart with my breath. It's that simple. You have all the choice in the world to live with your energy body in your physical body. We add that to intuition. Now you have two very important pieces of empowering your light within. So how do we use it? There's lots of things I'm gonna present three today. One is to begin to think about decisions in your life, not only with your head. I know many of you already do this, but I always like reminding, and some of you, this may be new information to consider, but to allow yourself to literally drop into your heart where you feel the question. You allow yourself to let the question go through your energy, through your body, through your heart and say, well, what should I do about vacation with my sister this year? Yeah? And wait, wait for that intuition to come through your heart, through the feeling in your body, waits for a feeling of expansion for an answer. Couple it with how much money you have in the bank and how much time you have, all those things. But let your heart wisdom grow and be a part of, I say, all your decisions. Following your intuition, I gave you an example that happened in my life. We all have intuitions, little ones and big ones, turn this way, no, don't turn that way, stop here. Go to Africa and help with the refugee camps. Wow, oh my golly, how am I gonna do that? Okay, well, I'll put that off till next year. Well, it's an intuition that's coming through you and you can consider maybe reconsidering, thinking it through a little more. The third thing is truth with compassion. This is one of the challenging ones that we learned to practice compassion through our heart. Again, it's not a cerebral thing, it's a physical energy thing in your heart, in your body. You let your heart rest in the question, something you're upset about, somebody you're angry with and wait for the question to come asking, praying, letting a message come to you about how you can answer that question with compassion. Your heart will help you with that. I remember teaching a class on this and a young man with cancer spoke during the question and answer period and he said if I live this way, I'd have to change my whole life. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know what he decided but I loved how honest he was and in that way I felt like well, maybe that will mean that he'll take another step because those small steps are as important as the big steps. They help us grow brighter to create more windows in our silo to let more light in, to let our light grow bigger and go out and each of us has remarkable light inside of us that the world really needs right now. I have a set of movies I'm gonna date myself, The Matrix from the late 90s, which I love and at the end of it, there's a sage and she's sitting on a bench and she's blind and she has a stick and her assistant is with her and of course the hero has saved the world and he says to her, did you know? Did you know he was gonna do it? And she said, I didn't know but I believed it was possible and that's the piece to hold, to believe it's possible and to take that next step. So that's why I keep David White's poem on my desk and I look at it every time I'm struggling and to repeat the first stanza, start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take. May it be so. Amen. Blessed be. Oh yeah. Kinda getting an altered state though. The problem with being in your body is you're in an altered state. Okay. I'm coming down to do the questions and answers. We want, I want to speak with anyone who'd like to make a comment or ask a question or answer. We're gonna take a few minutes to do this and anything that doesn't get answered now we'll do later, yes. Yeah, wonderful. How do you know the difference between fear and intuition? Fear is a gateway to your intuition. Fear, we all feel fear all the time. So allowing yourself to let that fear in and think about where it's coming from in your system. Your heart is probably pretty tense. Your mind is probably tense. You're probably running fearful thoughts through your head. So you practice saying, okay, this is a gateway. I'm gonna let myself breathe. Relax my body, relax my heart and ask myself, ask my intuition. Is there anything behind the fear that I need to know? And sometimes what true is we have fear to keep us safe. Like there's a wonderful story about wolves at the wisdom gates. And there's something we want to do. Like I just went and visited my niece in France but I got really scared at some point. I said, oh, maybe I shouldn't go, too much money, too much, how will I do it? And the wolves are at the wisdom gates and you step up to the wisdom gates and they yell, they fear all the problems. And if you're not ready to go through the wisdom gates, that's great, you just step back. You reconsider, you relax your body, open your heart. You say, okay, what's behind this that I need to listen to? And eventually there may come that moment where you say, oh wait, they get up to the wisdom gates and the wolves are there. They yell at you and you say, oh yeah, okay. You're doing, just doing your job. Okay, I'm going to France. Is that helpful? Anybody else? Yes, oh, the choir, we're singing to the choir today. Pardon? You've been preaching to the choir successful. Yeah, very important. You've used the word heart so many times. Yeah. Do you mean by that the physical sensation of emotional feelings or do you mean something psychological? Yeah, no, great question. Do I mean something physical, emotional, or do I mean something psychological, more thought-oriented? Got it, we need both, don't we? I think that's the point today I'm trying to say is we need to be able to think about our heart and what we believe about how to use our heart, but when I'm using it, thank you for that clarification, I'm talking about the physical heart and sometimes there's going to be emotion, but sometimes if you allow yourself to learn to access your wisdom through this part of your body, now you're developing a new tool where the heart actually is a source of information beyond the emotion. Does that work? Okay, all right, maybe one more, Kelly? Kelly's giving me the time. Anybody else? The choir, I'm going to have to send chocolates to the choir. Okay. I love your grocery store practice being mindful. Yes, yes, and of course, the Buddhist message around mindfulness reflects what I'm talking about here. I like to make sure people know you don't have to care about or be Buddhist to be mindful, this is another way to think about it. Oh my golly, everywhere, right now, doesn't matter where you are. I did that in the grocery line when I was first learning this, because here I had time and I was in Cronus time. I definitely had to go step by step to get to the cash register. I think it's particularly powerful to practice it when you're with other people. When you're agitated or anxious about what's going on, say, okay, breathe, feel my heart, feel my energy body come into my physical body before I do anything, before I say anything. That's a really powerful way to practice, because everything will change once you get in your physical, your energy body into your physical body, it'll all change what you wanna do and how you wanna do it. Yeah, thank you, great. If you find you're thinking of something or you wanna talk one-on-one, I'd love to do that. And again, I'll put a mask on if you'd like me to. But of course I'll be outside, thank you. Thank you, Jody. So the Anybody Choir is something that we, we just open our doors up to anybody who wants to sing. So all these folks came here at 8.30 and we did a little rehearsal and then we're gonna sing our anthem for you in a moment. Before we do, the anthem that we're going to sing is a South African apartheid protest song. And it was collected by a musicologist during the time of apartheid. And he wrote this forward. South Africa is one of the few countries in the world ruled by a declared Christian government. Christian nationalism is what they subscribe to. According to a former prime minister there, it is an ideology most closely resembling Nazism in Hitler's Germany and fascism in Mussolini's Italy. No one who has studied the real situation in South Africa with open eyes has reason to doubt the prime minister's words. The white minority regime stops at no method to maintain and consolidate its power. But out of the suffering of the black people, a song is born. The singer can be silenced, but never the song. The hope of a free country, the dream of freedom, this song can never be taken from the people. It booms out from the courtroom where the young people accused of treason sing their freedom songs with raised fists. It booms out from Pretoria's central prison where those condemned to death sing day in, day out from their cells. The night before an execution is never silent. When dawn breaks, the condemned man sings the song of his comrades during his last steps. But above all else, the South African song is a victory song. A defiant hymn. There are the celebrations and the sorrows of our days. This morning we light a candle for William Jacobson, longtime member of FUS, who passed away on the evening of July 6th. William's family writes that he was a good and a kind man, and he was blessed with a gentle death at home in the arms of his family. We light a candle of memory for Fran Castleman, who passed away in Bloomington, Illinois this past February. Members of Fran's family are planning a reunion this afternoon at 1.30 p.m. here in the Gabler living room to share stories of Fran's 31 years here in Madison, and they invite all those who knew and remember Fran to join them. And we light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and in their struggle. Together we yearn for peace for them and for all people, and an end to wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. And finally, we light a candle for all those lost, all those injured and all harmed at the shooting in Highland Park this past week. I offer you these words of prayer from Reverend Lucas Herbert, Minister of the UU Congregation of Deerfield, Illinois. Lucas offered these words at an interfaith prayer vigil the following day in Highland Park. If you'll join me in a moment of prayer. Your hands, the ones that you hold together in prayer or in desperation or in hope. The ones with the tiny scar you carried since that bicycle accident all those years before. The ones that today may shake with worry or sit still from the gravity of headlines. These hands, your hands. There is something to remember, a needful thing to remember about your hands, that they are the same hands that pet the cool, slick back of a kitten on its very first day. The same ones that flattened the crumpled edges of a construction paper heart after the glue came unstuck. The same hands that just last night pulled your family's patchwork quilt under the chin of your youngest as you whispered, it's going to be okay. And how desperately you wanted it to be so. The same hands that offer in the simplest gesture of gift giving a tissue to a stranger who tears streaking her face ask why. A question addressed not to you but to a God of some kind asked of a world whose glue has come unstuck. They're the same hands that give the world its most needful thing. You know it's most needful thing. You know because your hands have always given it. Always offered or always tried to offer the kindest touch exactly when it was hoped for. And you know nothing can change that, right? Nothing can take away the brilliant, beautiful power of the hands you were given. Not to pull a trigger, but to proclaim the softness of this world. Nothing can annul the kindness of your touch. There's a power in your hands. The power of a kindness that beckons to remake the world always. As though this were its very first day. Blessed be and amen. Let's rise in body and spirit to sing our closing hymn. Number 95, there is more love. Word into this frightening, exhilarating, confusing, miraculous world. May we offer our comfort to the afflicted, our love to those who are lonely, and our wish for all to be safe. Blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the postlude.