 I'm going to set the script. My friend Benny said I'm going to set the script. Good to know. Ready? Ready. This is good to read all of us in one day. To get set up. I'm doing a story. You said that's fine. No, that's not fair. You don't care. You wait until the script is done. Or is he just a crap rabbit? No. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. Good. End film. I'm still on battery. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. I'm in a cell phone. Let me know something else. It might get a bit too loud. Can I have it? I won't let you go in that way. I'll take it. Let's join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's join in a moment of musical togetherness by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn which we're going to sing through three times and you'll find those words inside your order of service. And I'm going to breathe out the announcements this morning. Good morning everybody and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. Speaking of things that are different, I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation and I know all of you joined me in extending a special welcome to Reverend Lynch, our special guest today. We look forward to hearing her message. And I also want to welcome any other guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I know you'll find that it's a special place. And if you're interested in learning more about our special buildings, every now and then after the service we do offer a guided tour and if we're offering one today you'll find the tour guide over here by the windows after the service. If there is no tour guide, you get a rain check and we invite you instead to join us for our fellowship hour right after the service. So we can enjoy the service, let's make sure we silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need for the next hour. And while you're doing that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, as Mrs. Wexler is accompanied by her youngster, and you think that young person would rather enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium. We also have some comfortable seating right outside the doorway from which you and your youngster can hear and see the service. We are able to hear and see the service today because of a great group of volunteers who help us make the service run smoothly. And I'm going to share their names with you now so that you can give them a high five during the fellowship hour and thank them. We want to thank Mark Schultz for handling the sound system and Smiley for serving as our lay minister. We want to thank Karen Hill for greeting us this morning. We want to thank John and Nancy Webster, Doug Hill and Patricia Becker for serving as the ushers of this unruly crowd. And we want to thank Gene Hills for handling the hospitality and coffee a little bit later and Betty Evenson for making sure that the greenery you see up here is vibrant and healthy. If you're interested in having your name announced from this very microphone on a Sunday morning as one of our volunteer team members, you can learn more about the volunteer opportunities. We're going to have an orientation session after the service next Sunday right here. So stay tuned and if you're interested, come to the orientation session and find out what's behind this mysterious idea of becoming a volunteer at the worship services. And the Sunday after next, so two weeks from today, October 9, after the 11 o'clock service we'll be holding our parish meeting, an opportunity to learn more about the annual reports and the budget and the fundraising success and other things, as well as enjoying a lunch buffet prepared by the world famous food haulers after the 11 o'clock service on Sunday, October 9. So and if the announcements, I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts as well as introducing you to some wonderful music and a great message. We're glad you're here. Thank you for such enchanting and invigorating music. Good morning. My name is Eric Severson. I am your ministerial intern for this coming year. Poet and sage, Mary Oliver wrote, Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift. May we as fellow seekers enter this space and help one another see the many gifts light and dark among us and within us. Let us worship together and let us begin with the words to our chalice lighting in your order of service. Let there be light, the light of joy, the light of happiness and the light of contentment. Let us illuminate our paths and fill our lives with peace and let there be darkness for it that we have brought forward, tried and rested and held to realize compassion and learning to love. Light and darkness, darkness and light, may they come together in harmony as we light this chalice for life's bright places and its shadows. And I invite you to greet your neighbor. Thank you. Please be seated. It is indeed a joy to welcome the Reverend Suzelle Lynch this morning. She is senior minister of UU Church West in Brookfield, a longtime UU who previously served as minister to congregations in Dallas and Bremerton, Washington. She earned her master divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California and is a recipient of the UUA's Donna Deschulo Award for Lifetime Achievement in the field of Young Adult and Campus Ministry and past president of the Central Midwest Chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. Suzelle and her congregation have a strong commitment to social and racial justice and she is co-founder of Black Lives Matter to Wisconsin UU's, a collaboration among five Milwaukee area congregations and Suzelle is a mom of a high school senior and she sings and makes unusual hats in her leisure time. Welcome Suzelle. It's good to be here with you this morning and I am sure good for my congregation to be enjoying Michael's presence in our pulpit this morning. I have words to share with you this morning, words for meditation that are adapted from a prayer written by Anna Rosamano Quinn. So I invite you to join your hearts and your minds with mine now in a meditative spirit. Spirit of life and love, spirit breathing in us and through us and all around us, reaching out from each person here to touch every other person in this room and reaching far beyond the four walls of this place to touch all living things across our world. Spirit of life and love. As we breathe here this day, grant us connection, a connection that helps us remember those who have gone before us, cherish those who are here among us and work to ensure the possibility of this community being here for many generations to come. Spirit of life, grant us audacity, the audacity to love boldly, speak truth courageously and to dare to imagine a way of being that is beneficial not only to us, not only to humankind but to all life on our planet. And grant us passion, passion so that we might trust what we know at our core, passion that will allow us to take action, to enable real change, passion that allows us to be mercy for one another, spirit of life. Grant us emptiness too, emptiness so that in the absence of loved ones we might find solace in longing and in the absence of striving we may find joy in simplicity and in the absence of words we might find wisdom in silence. We honor these longings and the longings of our own hearts now for a moment in shared quiet. Spirit of life and love, we gather here together, connected, audacious, passionate people seeking the wisdom that will help us move toward wholeness. May we be open to the presence of grace in our lives and ready to heed its call in our hearts. Shalom, blessed be, and amen. Once a month, once a month, once a month. We generally gather and set aside a few minutes at the first part of the hour for the sharing of joys and sorrows. This is a time for members, friends, and even visitors to the congregation to relate to the entire gathered community, some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone you love in the recent days or weeks. General announcements, news items, and partisan appeals are discouraged during joys and sorrows. For the next several minutes, anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium and light a candle in one of our two candelabras, then using the microphone provided by our lay minister and share your name if that feels comfortable and a brief message. Please note that our services are livecast, so listeners are not restricted to those sitting in this room. You may also wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and simply return to your seat. I now invite you to come forward. I've known as Debbie Lofscore here, but I remember a long time. I'm having an upcoming surgery on Tuesday. Thank you. And if you could all pray for me, I'm having an operation on my trigger finger. I can't bend it. So it's a little abnormality that has to be corrected. And I pray that I wake up on the right side of the bed and not with Lord in heaven. But if I end up on that side of the bed too, I have plenty of angels watching over me. Our friends Laura and Paul lost their dog, Sojo, yesterday. And their little kids are trying to figure out what that means, and they lost their pet. And there are members here and lovely people, and I feel for them right now. Hi, I'm Teresa. I want to share a joy with everyone that some old friends of mine from college have moved to Madison and joined the congregation. We've kept up a friendship over 30 years, and it's just really delightful to have them in town now. It's Bob and Roxanne Quinlan, if anyone wants to know. Good morning. I'm new to the organization. I'm Maureen Gargano. I'm nervous. Sorry. My name is Maureen, and I'm new here to Madison and the congregation. I'd like to share a joy. I had a grandson born last Monday, who was in the intensive care in Dublin, Ireland, and was released yesterday. So he's fine. He's healthy. His name is Owen Joseph. I'm so happy. I'm going to go see him at the end of next month. That was my question. You get to go visit. I am indeed. Good. Yes. So thank you. Take our wishes with you. I almost hate to have a sorrow after that. Tim, I just want to... My niece Abigail, 17, recently lost a three-year battle with brain cancer. So I'm going to light a candle for her. I'm Rosalyn Woodward, and I wanted to share with the congregation that last night, I took part in a fantastic event, multicultural event. It was the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Against Gun Violence last night, and there were Indians and Sikhs, and First Unitarian Choir, and marvelous cultural event. My joy is that it was just a wonderful event. My sorrow is that it doesn't happen more often. Hi, I'm Nancy Vetterschultz, and I'm here with a concern. My niece Louise, who lives in North Carolina, is in the fourth year of a battle with lymphoblastic leukemia. She is at the point now where she's had a bone marrow transplant, and she's just miserable with sores all over the inside of her mouth, and she can't eat, and it just seems unfair that she's had to go through this for all this time. But I would like you to please send positive energy to her so she makes it through, so it's worth it. Any other joys or sorrows? If not, one more? Hi, my name is Bray, and I want to say something about my lava. She was a great grandma. She was my mom's mom, and she really loved me. And we lost her about six months ago, and I'm really thankful for her grandson, who has such a sweet... Thank you all for sharing. Let us hold all those spoken and unspoken joys and sorrows in our hearts. If you would, please rise as you're able. For him, number 1029. Our first reading today comes from Jackie James. Black male, black list, black mark, black Monday, black mood, black hearted, black plague, black mass, black market. Good guys wear white, bad guys wear black. We fear black cats and the dark continent. But it's okay to tell a white lie. Lily white hands are coveted. It's great to be pure as the driven snow. Angels and brides wear white. Devil's food cake is chocolate. Angel's food cake is white. We shape language, and we are shaped by it. In our culture, white is esteemed. It is heavenly, sun-like, clean, pure, immaculate, innocent, and beautiful. At the same time, black is evil, wicked, gloomy, depressing, angry, sullen. Ascribing negative and positive values to black and white enhances the institutionalization of this culture's racism. Let us acknowledge the negative connotations of whiteness. White things can be soft, vulnerable, pallid, and ashen. Light can be blinding, bleaching, enervating. Conversely, we must acknowledge that darkness has a redemptive character, that in darkness there is power and beauty. The dark nurtured and protected us before our birth. Welcome, darkness. Don't be afraid of it and don't deny it. Darkness brings relief from the blinding sun, from scorching heat, from exhausting labor. Night signals permission to sleep, to be with our loved ones, to conceive new life, to search our hearts, to remember our dreams. The dark of winter is a time of hibernation. Seeds grow in the dark, fertile earth. The words black and dark don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. The words white and light don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. Imagine a world that had only light or dark. We need both. Dark and light, light and dark. Our second reading is a story. I love stories. Anybody else here like stories? We think stories are just for kids or young people. We're here for all of us, especially this one. This is a story called The Half-Boy of Borneo, and it comes from Old Tales for a New Day by Alice Cobb and the fabulous Unitarian religious educator of great renown, Sophia Lyon Foss. Long, long ago, on the island of Borneo, he lived a boy who was the dread and worry of all who knew him. This is because he was only half a boy. He was a half-boy. Somehow, sometimes, somewhere, he had lost the good half of himself. And now he was just his bad half, and he was always doing bad tricks. A woman in the village might be doing her washing in the river, and half-boy, who had just one hand and one leg, would hop by and spatter mud all over her freshly washed clothes. Another woman might be spinning, and half-boy would sneak up behind her and yank the wool off the spinning wheel. A man picking fruit would find half-boy pelting him with coconuts. And when half-boy played games with the other boys, he always found a way to spoil their fun. Well, the boys jeered at half-boy, and they threw sticks at him, and the men scolded him and chased him away. But as half-boy grew older, he became more and more annoying. The other villagers were very angry with him. They were almost ready to drive him out of the village, and some even said we should just kill him. But one young woman felt differently. She believed that half-boy might change. And so one day the young woman said to half-boy, you are only half a person. I am sorry to say you're the bad half. But somewhere in the world is the other half of you. If you go away and find your other half, and then come back, I will marry you. Well, half-boy could hardly believe it. He said, you're the first person who's ever said a kind thing about me. I will do what you say. So the next morning half-boy started off on his search. He hadn't the slightest idea where his other half could be. But he hopped along all day, and at evening he came to a village deep in the jungle where people were sitting around a big fire. He hopped up and he asked, is there a half-boy here, a boy here who has just one hand and does nothing, but that which is kind and good. The villagers shook their heads. We once heard of a person like that, one of them said pointing to the setting sun. He is supposed to live two days' journey from here. The next morning half-boy went on with his search, and at evening he came to another village and he asked the same question. Everybody shook their heads. And they looked at him. He did see a half-boy once. It was in a village by the sea. I don't know if it was a good half-boy or not, but it was a half-boy. With that encouragement, half-boy started off again on his journey, traveling many miles and many days. And at last, as he approached the little village by the sea, a loud cry went up from all the people who lived there. Another half-boy they shouted, wow, we must find our own half-boy. He must see his brother. While the people were shouting and milling around, half-boy saw the other half-boy coming toward him. And there could be no doubt that he had at last found his other half. Hey, brother, said the half-boy, I have come a long way to find you. I'm glad, said the good half-boy, for I certainly would have never gone a long way to find you. That may be true, said the bad half-boy, but what are we going to do now? Can we be joined together to make one whole boy again? As the two half-boys stood watching each other uneasily, the chief of the village came near. Taking each boy's hand in his, he said, the two of you must go off by yourselves into the bush and wrestle. If necessary, you must wrestle for a day and a night or even longer and as you wrestle, you will find yourselves growing together. Well, it'll be a short wrestle, said the bad half-boy, for I am strong and tricky. You may find a match in me, said the good half-boy, for I too am strong. I have the spirit of the sunrise in me. Oh, said the bad half-boy, I have a spirit in me that is stronger than yours. It's the spirit of the night. It can blow out the fires of the sunrise. Well, after all that posturing, the two half-boys went into the bush and there they wrestled and they wrestled and they struggled all night long. At sunrise, the good half was clearly the stronger, and when the sky began to darken, the bad half had the upper hand. And all the while they wrestled, a storm raged, lightning flashed, thunder roared and rain flooded in. The villagers said to one another, those two half-boys are not the only ones who are fighting. The stars are shooting, there's silver arrows at one another and the north and south winds are wrestling in the palm trees. When morning came, when the people of the village went forth from their houses, all was calm, and then they looked out toward the bush and behold, a boy was coming toward them. And he was beautiful and he was whole. The people shouted for gladness. Let me hear it, gladness. They ran to the beautiful young man and they asked him to live with them in their village, but he should have said no, no, he said. I must go back to the other village and find the young woman who believed in me. And so he did. When he arrived in that village, his neighbors did not know him. They thought he was a stranger. But the young woman who had believed in half-boy, she knew him at once and they were married that same day. And here ends the story. Three kids on either side, kids kind of if one of those groups of ... resisting. While they're not stuck anymore, something is lost. The kids who let go have lost the game. Their only consolation perhaps is laughing at the poor saps on the other end who fell down in a spectacular way when this group let go is a loss of another kind. Isn't that just like life? We're confronted with something we don't like. Some unpleasant aspect of our existence or our personality, something happening in our lives, and deep down we either try to win over it by resisting and it stays stuck or we push it away in an attempt to let go of it and we lose. But there is another way. In 1886, before psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung plumbed the depths of human darkness, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson had a highly revealing dream. In his dream, a male figure pursued for a crime swallows a powder and undergoes a change of character so drastic he is unrecognizable. Once awake, Stevenson was haunted by the power of this dream. He worked feverishly and developed it into the now famous story, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's that tale in which the kind, hard-working scientist Dr. Jekyll discovers a way to transform into the violent and relentless Mr. Hyde, whose evil grows larger and more encompassing as the story progresses. Jekyll and Hyde, we still use that shorthand today for a person whose moral character shifts widely from one situation to the next. 130 years later, we still use that phrase, Jekyll and Hyde, because it speaks to something universal in us. And that universal in us, that archetype in us that it speaks to is the shadow. The shadow is the place in us where all of the unacceptable aspects of ourselves reside, including those aspects of ourselves which we think are not just bad, but too good to be true. The shadow is made up of the traits we disown. We human beings don't consciously develop the shadow. The poet Robert Bly says each one of us is born with a full circle of personality, 360 degrees of energy and vitality that we're expressed without reservation. So there we are where young people were expressing without reservation and the adults in our life say, Bad girl, stop hitting your sister. Or they say, Susie, pride goes before a fall when we're crowing about the home run we hit or the A++ on the art. And then we're told, please don't sing so loudly in the bathtub. Or we're told over and over again, boys don't cry. Boys shouldn't cry, boy. In response to the criticisms, admonitions and corrections we receive, we repress those parts of ourselves which seem to the adults in our lives to be unacceptable. We push our rage, our pride, our creativity, our music and even our sorrow, our sadness and our compassion into the shadow, along with the feelings of hurt and anger and shame. In adolescence, shadow making goes on with the help of our peers. To be acceptable to the peer group, we slice away more pieces and parts of ourselves. And our society puts pressure on adolescence as well. Different cultures have different taboos, but in our culture, sexual energy is one of those things that is rising in adolescence and our culture says that's taboo. And so we push that down. And when that gets pushed away, it takes with it much of our spontaneity. By the time we get to young adulthood, the full circle personality and energy we came into the world with has been cut down to a slim pie slice. And all of those disowned feelings and behaviors have taken up lodgings in the deep recesses of our unconscious mind. And we continue to repress them and resist them and they become the Mr. Hyde, the shadow within each one of us. Now, this process of shadow making sounds regrettable, I know, but it is perfectly normal. In every human society, there have to be norms and rules and, you know, restrictions. But as we grow in maturity, we need to develop the capacity to invite our shadow material back into our lives in an appropriate way, to grow in wholeness. And if we do not, we will bear the consequences. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde show us why. If you know the story, you know that Jekyll invented Hyde as a personality through which he could express his baser desires, violence, hatred, contempt. But over time, expressing those desires through Hyde and not as himself led to a fracturing of self and Hyde took over Jekyll's body entirely. It's a pretty dramatic metaphor for the impact of the human shadow, but it's not entirely without truth. If we do not begin to work with that, we have relegated to the shadow when the shadow feels judged, misunderstood and unloved, it can rise unbidden from our doubts. How many of you saw the recent documentary, The Sharp's War, Defying the Nazis? It's the story of Unitarian ministers Waitstill and Martha Sharpe and their fight against Nazi Germany, their work at great odds to help refugees survive and flee. In Nazi Germany, the Nazis did their best to exterminate the Jews and other groups like gay people and folks with disabilities because their shadow was projected onto those groups. They were seen as inferior and threatening. From the time the European ancestors of many of us in this room arrived on this continent's shores, we have projected our shadow onto the American people of color. First, Native Americans, then onto the African slaves who were forcibly brought to these shores. And continuing onward, right up till today, we project the shadow, scary, threatening, dangerous, onto people of color. Racism, institutional and personal, is evidence of our collective shadow projections and it is a beast of massive proportions. For most of us, the shadow, individual shadow is unlikely to show up as the will to commit genocide. It's more likely to make itself known in fear of the other or in symptoms germane to ourselves like chronic pain, ruptured relationships, rage, depression, or addictions. All the shadow wants from us is to be known and owned, accepted, perhaps even loved. And to become whole, we need to be able to dance with the shadow to honor it, to work on it. This is tricky because the shadow is unconscious. We can look for it, but we can't see it directly. But in the meantime, it is seeking us. So someone after the nine o'clock service said to me, well, how do I know how to work on my shadow? So I'll talk a little bit about some ways that we can do that. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the shadow almost like out of the corner of our eyes. When we react intensely to some quality in a particular person or group, this might be our shadow showing ourselves. So how many of you here have had an intense reaction to any political candidates recently? Yeah, right? So, and it's probably justified, you know, from whatever political persuasion you happen to be. But for example, if I project my own selfishness onto a political candidate and say, they are selfish, if that's what's really got me fired up, that's my own shadow I need to be paying attention to. How have I repressed my own selfishness? If I project, if I, somebody else says, well, they're untrustworthy. What is it in me that is projected when I say that person is untrustworthy? It can work in our personal relationships as well. Let's say we're unhappy with our spouse, and it seems to us that the spouse is always angry. Well, maybe it's me projecting my anger, my unacknowledged anger, and it's coming through my spouse. As Carl Jung said, everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. Everything we worship or are dazzled by in others can do this as well. For example, ministers often end up with projections. We are so spiritual, we're so compassionate, we're so kind. Well, yes we are. And perhaps it is your own repressed compassion that you are seeing come through us. The shadow also shows up in dreams and stories and symbols. Carl Jung first recognized the shadow archetype in his own dream in which he was walking against a mighty wind in an unknown place, carrying in his cupped hands a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. And in the dream, everything depended on his keeping the light alive. When he looked back, he was terrified to see a gigantic black figure following him, but he knew that he had to keep going with the light. When he woke from the dream, he realized at once that the gigantic, threatening black figure was his shadow brought to life by the tiny light of his own consciousness. The story of the half-boy of Borneo also tells us of light and shadow, portrayed very simply and graphically. It reminds us that by relegating essential qualities of our very self to the shadow, we become one-dimensional, one-hand, one-foot. We are thin, we are not whole, we are more easily manipulated, but when we engage with our personal shadow in a courageous and loving way, we move toward wholeness. So what about those ways to find the shadow or own our own shadow? Creative work is one thing that we can do. When I was younger, this is a sort of funny story about the shadow, when I was younger I used to have an annual pumpkin carving party the week before Halloween, and I'd invite all my friends over and we'd make a big pumpkin-y mess, lots of pumpkin guts everywhere, and one year I was so impressed with the artistry of my friends on these jack-o-lanterns that I took a photograph of each person holding their jack-o-lantern right next to their face. So this was before digital photography, so I had to get the film developed, and when I finally got those pictures back, oh my goodness, there was the shadow. Every single one of us had carved the shadow face, into our jack-o-lantern. My buddy Brad, at the time, was a really insecure guy, kind of turned in, tried very hard to hide this. He had taken the tiniest little pumpkin and carved the tiniest little face. My Chinese-American housemaid Evelyn had carved a buck-toothed, squinty-eyed, Asian face caricature. My friend Michelle had carved her pumpkin into a clown face, right? It's supposed to be happy, happy clown, but the clown was very sad, very sad-looking, and for her, the happy face in life was covering over a depression that she had relegated to the shadow. My own pumpkin, I will confess, had a huge screaming mouth, testimony to an inner rage that I was unwilling to let out or talk about. Everything we were trying to repress and hide outed itself in those jack-o-lanterns. Another example, my son and his friends love going to anime conventions. Anybody here ever gone to an anime convention? Anybody ever done cosplay? So at anime conventions, people dress up and they take on the persona of characters from comic books, animated movies, web comics, internet novels, or other media, everything from Star Trek and Doctor Who to Hello Kitty and My Little Pony and Steven Universe and a whole bunch of stuff that I have never heard of. My son loves this, and it's been so much fun to go into that universe with him and make these amazing costumes so that he can portray these characters. Whether or not he realizes it, my friend and my son and his friends are bringing to life the shadow. Halloween costumes give a similar opportunity. Anybody like Halloween here? So when I was growing up, you'd get a nurse costume, right? You'd be a nurse for Halloween. Or you'd be a witch. Well, you go to the Halloween shops nowadays, it's sexy nurse and sexy witch. That's the shadow. It's not doctor anymore, it's butcher doctor. So Halloween gives us a chance to show the shadow. Some of us find ourselves doing our shadow work through our work to serve human need. Mother Teresa used to say, when we serve those whose needs are deepest, we meet Christ in his most distressing disguise. I say that we also meet our own hidden face. Our work as Unitarian Universalists long ago in the civil rights movement and in today's Black Lives Matter movement is both justice work, but it is also work on our individual shadows and on the collective shadow of Americans in this country. It is work bringing our shadow into consciousness Religious rituals help with integrating the shadow as well, so good thing you're all here doing your shadow work. Losing the self via the practice of Buddhist sitting meditation or the grand drama of a Catholic mass or the simple ritual of being with others as they light a candle of joy and sorrow. We help hold the shadow. Religious holidays are holy days, holy with the WH. Literally times when we forge wholeness they bring light and dark together and fight joy and sadness to reside together because the unconscious mind cannot distinguish between actual acts and symbolic acts. Rituals integrate our shadow energy in gentle ways and help heal the wounds of separation. But rituals that help us own the shadow or entertain the shadow can also be silly or mundane like the one practiced by a famous Jungian analyst and her housemate. Their custom was that whichever one of them had had the best week had to take out the garbage. Any chore that involves waste or bad smells if done playfully, if offered up to the shadow can be a way to balance the good fortune of life. So I did this between the services. Preachers, we stand here and we share our light with you and we think we're all that. Well, in the women's room I cleaned up the mess around the garbage can between the services. Just doing a little shadow work. I'm not kidding, I did this consciously because otherwise one can become too inflated, my shadow will then get projected onto you. When we begin to seek out our shadow material to invite those repressed and judged and forgotten abandoned parts of ourselves into relationship it can be startling. Those things back there in the shadow are not just neutral, they are festering and rotting and getting foul. But when we feel compassion for the parts of ourselves that we have abandoned and accept them, our inner conflicts come unknotted, the tug of war in us ends, and along with freeing up our anger or our pride we may also reclaim our joy and our vitality and our playfulness. This is religious work, really heal, binding back. It is spiritual work, it is the process of building compassion for that which we have rejected and it will change us. It will help conquer our fear of darkness. We learned early on as Jackie James said in the reading that the good guys were white and the bad guys were black and as we embrace the shadow we remember that only when a seed knows darkness can it open and begin to grow into the mighty tree and it is only the darkness of the womb that can nurture a baby to birth. And just as in the story of the half-boy of Borneo when we begin to reclaim our own shadow material we recall that the one that helps us find wholeness is the bad half-boy, the shadow half-boy. So as you move through the weeks and months ahead toward the November elections through the crazy things, the scary things, the heartbreaking news that happens across this country every day as we move toward the holidays that lie beyond the elections I invite you to pay attention to the places in you where there might be a tug of war going on. Notice what you fear. Notice what disgusts you or makes you angry. Notice what you worship or admire. Begin to recognize your own shadow and to welcome it. Not as a way to grow more perfect but as a way to grow more whole. Because it's only when we become more whole that we truly become able to help our world become more whole as well. Shalom, blessed be. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for our closing hymn Number 1008. There is an energy at the heart of every human being. What it is we do not know. How it works we cannot say. But it is as certain as our breathing, as powerful as our heartbeats, as real as the moments we've shared here in this sacred place. So I say to you, let us seize that energy and go forth into this day to love our lives, to welcome one another and the stranger, to work for justice and to help make real a world of greater wholeness. Shalom, blessed be.