 Later on, we'll show you the way. Time's going to tell you what to do. I know. The picture was going awesome, right? Oh, yeah. Well, it was a good opportunity just to have you here. I'm going to go forward. Good. I'll move. I'll go to the other part. Oh, yeah. I wish we could see. We can see the left side of the screen. The right side. What? Yeah. The left side. Yeah. The right side. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a little bit different. So, is there a difference in thickness? It's all just like the portion. It's how long do we do this? It's long. It's like how long? Yeah, the two is about 12 feet long. Yeah, so the first two is about 12 feet long. Yeah, so the first two is about 12 feet long. I'm going to turn your shirt. Dad, I don't know. The production, I don't know where it came from. Oh, wait a minute. I don't know where it came from. Here's one section. All of our lines. And you play the game. Also, no, but you used the all-in. You're going to kill the players. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to play the ball right here. I'll put your card in the corner. You can join that. I'll just move it down here. There's so much that we won't be able to do. You used your ball. Yeah. You have to use your fingers. Okay. I'll put you in the corner. I'll put you in the corner. I'll put you in the corner. Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. And happy Father's Day, everybody. Good morning and welcome to another Sunday, a special 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. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud fatherly member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend first a special welcome to all the fathers, and I see a few grandfathers here in the room, and a warm welcome to any guests, visitors, or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we'll be conducting a tour after today's service. Just gather over here by the windows after the service, and we'll take good care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, this is the perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need for the next hour. And while you're taking care of that task, let me remind you that if you're accompanied today by a youngster, and you think that young companion would rather experience the service from a more private spot, we have a couple options for you, our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your youngster can see and hear the service. One of the reasons we can see and hear the service today is that it's brought to us by a talented wonderful group of volunteers whose names you're going to hear right now. Helping us with the sound system is Mary Manoring, our lay minister today is Tom Boycliffe. The greeter upstairs was Anne Smiley. Our ushers are Marty Hollis and John Magevna. Our hospitality is provided by Helena Magevna and Sandra Plisch after the service, but they're working hard right now to get it ready for us. The flowers were donated generously today by Anne Smiley in honor of fatherhood. So thank you, Anne. And our tour guide after the service today is Yanaka Baski. That's all the announcements we have, so I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know you'll find that it will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. Today, we're glad you're here. The words with which we begin our service that come from the Buddhist tradition. Let a person leave anger. Let us forsake pride. Let us overcome all bondage. Those who hold back anger like a rolling chariot, I call them real drivers. Other people are merely holding the reins. Beware of bodily anger. Beware of the anger of the tongue. Beware the anger of the mind. The wise who control their bodies, control their tongues, control their minds, they are indeed well controlled. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And if you will join me in reading the words printed in this morning's program. May the light we kindle like a small defiance of the dark. Be an outward symbol of the inner light we may light that in their way dispel the darknesses we harbor within ourselves. And on this fine Father's Day morning, please turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. If you see it. And it is time for the message for all ages. So if we have some youngsters that would like to join me in the front, I would appreciate your company. We've got a couple more. It's always hard to be the first one. So have any of you ever been kind of angry with anybody? Kind of mad at somebody? Never? Never? Not once? Well, this is a story about a little boy who was kind of upset with somebody and about his dad and his dad had a solution. Okay? So it's kind of a Father's Day story too. Okay? So it should have been a perfect summer. My dad helped me build a tree house in the backyard. My sister was away at camp for a whole three weeks. And I was on the best baseball team in town. And it was all good until Jeremy Ross moved into the neighborhood. I did not like Jeremy Ross. He laughed at me when he struck me out in a baseball game. He had a party with his trampoline and I wasn't invited, but my best friend Stanley, he was invited. So Jeremy Ross was the only person on my enemy list. I never had an enemy list until he moved into the neighborhood. But as soon as he came along, I needed an enemy list. I hung it up in my tree house where Jeremy was not allowed to go. Now my dad, he understood stuff like enemies. He told me that when he was my age he had enemies too, but he knew a way to get rid of them. I asked him to tell me how. Tell you how, he said. I will show you how. And he pulled a very old recipe book off of the kitchen shelf and inside there was this worn out scrap of paper with faded writing and dad held it up and he squinted at it. Enemy pie, he said with a satisfied smile. I wonder what exactly is in enemy pie. But dad said the recipe was so secret he couldn't even tell me. I decided it must be something magical. I begged him to tell me something, tell me anything. I will tell you this, he said. Enemy pie is the fastest way known to get rid of an enemy. That got me to thinking. What kind of things, what kind of disgusting things would you put into a pie for an enemy? Well I went outside and I got some weeds and I handed them to dad. He shook his head, no. I brought in some earthworms and some rocks. No, no. I don't think I'll need those, he said. And so I gave him the gum that I'd been chewing on all morning. And he said I don't think I need that either. I went out to play alone. I shot baskets until the ball got stuck on the roof and I listened to the sound of my dad inside chopping and stirring and blending. Enemy pie. It's gonna be awful. I tried to imagine what it would smell like. But then something really, really good was coming from the kitchen. I was a bit confused. I went in to ask dad, well what's wrong here? Enemy pie shouldn't smell this good. But dad, dad was smart. If enemy pie smelled bad, your enemy would never eat it. I could tell that dad had made enemy pie before. But still, I wasn't exactly sure how this enemy pie thing worked. What exactly did it do to your enemy? Did it make their hair fall out? Did it make their breath stinky? And dad wouldn't tell me a thing. But while the pie cooled, he told me what my job was gonna be. He talked real quietly. There is one part of enemy pie that I can't do. In order for it to work right, you have to do something. You have to spend an entire day with your enemy. And even worse, you have to be nice to him. Because that's the only way enemy pie will work. So are you sure you wanna go through with this? Well of course I was. It sounded scary, but it was worth a try. All I had to do was just spend one day with Jeremy Ross and then he would be out of my life forever. So I got on my bike and I rode it to his house and I knocked on the door. When Jeremy opened the door, he seemed surprised. Can you play? I asked nervously. Jeremy was confused. Well I'll go ask my mom, he said. He came back in a minute with his shoes in his hands. You boys stay out of trouble, his mom called after us. So we went out and we rode our bikes for a while and then we played on his trampoline and then we went in and we made some water balloons and we threw them at some neighborhood girls, but of course they all missed. And then Jeremy's mom, she made us lunch and after lunch we went over to my house. It was kind of strange. I was having fun with my enemy. Jeremy Ross almost seemed kind of nice, but of course I couldn't tell dad that. He'd been working all morning making his enemy pie. Jeremy really liked my basketball hoop. I let him win a game just to be nice. But he knew how to throw a boomerang. He would throw it and would come right back to him. I threw it and it went over the roof of the house into my backyard. So we climbed over the fence to go get it and the first thing that Jeremy noticed was my tree house. Can we go in? I knew he was going to ask me that. He was the top person. He was the only person on my enemy list and enemies are not allowed in my tree house. But he did teach me how to throw a boomerang. He did have me over to lunch. He did let me play in his trampoline. Jeremy Ross was not being a very good enemy. Okay, I said, hang on. So I climbed up to the tree house ahead of him and I ripped the enemy list off the wall. And then he came up and we played games until dad called us down to dinner. He had made us macaroni and cheese, my favorite and you know what, it was Jeremy Ross's favorite too. Maybe Jeremy wasn't so bad after all. I was beginning to think maybe we should forget about this whole enemy pie thing. Sure enough, after dinner, dad brought out the pie. I watched him cut it into eight thick pieces. Dad, I said to him, you know, it's really nice having a new friend in the neighborhood. I was trying to get his attention and tell him that Jeremy Ross was no longer my enemy but dad only smiled. And he gave each one of us a big slice of pie with a big scoop of ice cream on the top. Jeremy said, wow, my dad never makes pie like this. It's at that point that I kind of panicked. I didn't want Jeremy to eat the enemy pie. He was my friend now. I wouldn't let him eat it. Jeremy, Jeremy, I said, don't eat that pie. It's poisonous or something. Jeremy's fork stopped before it got into his mouth. He wrinkled his eyebrows and he looked at me funny. I felt relieved. I had saved his life. I was a hero. If it's so bad, Jeremy said, then why has your dad already eaten half of his piece? I turned to look at my dad. Sure enough, he was eating the enemy pie. Good stuff he mumbled through a mouthful. So Jeremy started eating and dad started laughing and neither of them was losing any hair. It seemed safe enough, so I took a little taste. Enemy pie is delicious. After dessert, Jeremy rode his bike home but not before inviting me back the next day to play on his trampoline. He said he'd teach me how to do a flip. As for enemy pie, I still don't know how to make it. I still wonder if enemies really hate it or if their breath turns bad, but I do know that I'll probably never get an answer because I just lost my best enemy. So that's the story of enemy pie, and anytime you think that you've got an enemy, you kind of remember that little story and how do you get rid of an enemy? By spending a really nice day with them, being nice. So thank you for listening. We're going to sing you out to summer fun if that's where you all are heading now with our next Tim, number 315. We continue our service with two selections. The first is what we call a personification, a personification of the emotion of anger by Ruth Gendler. Anger sharpens kitchen knives at the local supermarket on the first Wednesday of each month. His face is scarred from adolescent battles. He has never been very popular. His reputation as a fighter dates all the way back to the seventh grade. Children never understand how anger arrives at the house just in time for dinner. We never hear him ring the bell. All of a sudden, there he is. As soon as my son hears his footsteps, he's running for shelter underneath the twin bed in the guest room. Anger is trying to gain truth's friendship and her respect. Anger is a meticulous reporter. He's accurate about the details. He is insistent about the facts. He never lies, but he rarely understands anyone else's point of view. It is true that sharp knives work better than dull ones. They are also safer. A cut from a dull knife takes a long time to heal. However, if you have not used a sharp blade for a while, it is easy to hurt yourself. If you must ask anger to sharpen your bread knife, be careful how you handle it. He's not the only knife sharpener in town anymore. Probably only in a Unitarian church on a Sunday morning would you be able to hear a reading that comes from The Onion. This was published in 2004 and then republished in The Utney Reader. With gas prices exceeding $2 a gallon in some areas and gridlock on the rise, Detroit's automakers are stepping up development of their newest brainchild, an anger-powered car. By tapping into the unbridled temper of the American motorist, the new anger-powered car will take mechanical advantage of the way that Americans drive, a GM spokesman said. We plan to have these furiously efficient machines careening down America's highways and byways within two years. Now automakers have been researching fury fuels since the mid-1970s. As early as 1984, they began to look for ways to use the limitless supply of bad temper generated daily by American drivers, outrage currently being wasted on dashboards, steering wheels, and passengers. Now an engine burning clean, white-hot hatred will release fewer harmful byproducts into the atmosphere, just bad vibes and a bit of vapor combined in the form of human spittle. GM is currently developing two anger-powered cars, the entry-level Chevy Tantrum Coupe and the larger, pricier Buick Umbridge. Meanwhile, Ford plans to introduce an anger-gasoline hybrid engine for its popular Lincoln Frown car. Chrysler will resurrect the defunct Plymouth brand name and reintroduce the Plymouth Fury. We have a delicate balance to strike, a Ford motor executive said. Middle-income customers should be able to afford the car, but the price would still be high enough to eat away at them the entire time that they are driving. Thus endeth the readings. I've been a contributing member of the Sierra Club ever since the late 1970s, when as a graduate student in Berkeley, California, I first learned of the environmental organization founded by John Muir in 1892. In recent years, the Sierra Club, like so many other nonprofits, has been sending out these e-mail blasts, at least on a weekly basis, most of which I merely glance at before hitting the delete key. This past Wednesday, however, one incoming message got my attention. Hold tight to your anger, the headline read. It's a phase perloined from a popular Bruce Springsteen song entitled Wrecking Ball. Hold tight to your anger. The author of the piece, Michael Bruin, serves as the club's executive director and he was commenting on President Trump's recent declaration cutting our country loose from the Paris Climate Accord. If that makes you mad, he wrote, then that's good. If it makes you outraged, if it makes you disgusted, that's even better. Such sentiments as these have become commonplace and they are shared by climate change deniers, as well as by concerned environmentalists, by anti-immigration agitators, as well as immigration advocates. Political rhetoric during the last general election, observers noted, was especially vituperative. The electorate as a whole is mad to the tune of nearly 80% of us saying that we are angry or dissatisfied with the way our government is operating. Time magazine's Jeffrey Kluger wrote just before the nominating conventions. Clearly, the outcome of that election didn't do a thing to bring down the public's temperature. Our society is deeply polarized and while his detractors are increasingly angry with the president, his supporters are equally angry for him. One feature that left and right have in common, it seems, is outrage. But is today's environment all that much different from what prevailed in the past? Forty years ago in 1976, the British essayist Henry Fairley composed a series of articles on the seven deadly sins for the New Republic magazine. And reflecting on the prevalence of the fifth deadly sin, Henry Fairley lamented, we live, he said, in an age of wrath. 1976. Now Watergate was only a couple of years behind us and a disgruntled American public had just elected as their new president, a little-known peanut farmer from South Georgia. Some years later, Paul Storobin had a similar take on the 2004 election in which the leading Democratic candidate, Howard Dean, let loose his famous yell that ended up toppling his campaign. At any moment, Storobin wrote, Dean looks ready to sink his teeth into the nearest available thigh. He's banking his campaign on the I'm mad as hell vote. And other Democrats, 2004, are doing their best to imitate Dean's snarl. The angry voter is back, the pollster John Sogby reports. He or she seems to have been on sabbatical. It seems, then, that the currents of anger coursing through today's politics, that's nothing particularly new. And I'm old enough to remember the angry fractious protests that accompanied the Chicago Democratic Convention at the height of the Vietnam War. That was preceded by all that inner city turmoil that was unleashed by the assassination of Martin Luther King just a few months earlier. Anger, as Rebecca Solnit recently commented, is a staple of American social and political discourse. It is the go-to emotion, she remarks, because it is inherently reactive, volatile, easy to provoke, easy to direct. It has become a kind of commodity, this anger, a product marketed to select customers. Anger provoked content is more likely to stick, not least because you have to imagine anger itself is a way that the mind gets stuck. As Americans, we may be especially susceptible to this kind of anger marketing, because far from being regarded as a sin, anger is often cast and presented to us in positive terms. If Trump's rejection of the Paris Climate Accord makes you outraged, Michael Bruin emphasized, that's even better. It's good to be angry. Whatever our political leanings, we feel that fury is the appropriate response to those malign forces that have all of our cherished values in their crosshairs. Anger is an equal opportunity emotion, as the shooting of a Republican congressman and several others by an overwrought progressive activist demonstrated a few days ago. Have we been culturally conditioned to be angry, to want to leap into the fray when someone pushes our buttons? Much of what passes for humor these days contains an underlying note of hostility. Our humor is often sarcastic and mocking and diminishing. Anger stalks the nation's playing fields, provoking bench-clearing brawls, and parental diatribes aimed at the referees in their kid's soccer games. The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, describes anger as a habit energy, because it erupts so frequently, just like a bad habit, doesn't really yield to conscious control. So whatever happened to the sin of anger? Medieval Christians believe that anger was a deadly sin, because the consequences of holding onto it could be so grim. If one died without having repented of and atoned for the damage inflicted by their angry outbursts, then they would forfeit God's grace and subject themselves to a great deal of future torment. But dire warnings such as those seem somehow quaint to us today, and they do very little to deter Americans' wrathful behavior. Now, of course, the traditional religious teachings are far from consistent on this score, but that makes a difference too. Quite often, the way that anger is presented in western religious literature would convince us not that it's a sin, but that it's normative, that it's even virtuous. Notice how routinely righteous anger is displayed by the actors in our Jewish and Christian scriptures. In the Bible, Columbia University's Robert Thurman notes, the angriest person around seems to be God, which would appear to give the emotion some kind of cosmic sanction. Examples of divine displays of peak are legion. Victims of God's anger include Adam and Eve, their eldest son Cain, the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Egyptian firstborn, a few thousand of Moses' followers saw the first ruler of Israel among many, many others. Anyone who was indoctrinated into the sacred texts that portray God in this way, Thurman continues, would be forgiven if he or she thought that anger was an excellent energy, an excellent manifestation, as long as one was powerful enough to overcome the enmity that anger stirs up in others. The great prophets, even Jesus himself are given to these disturbing outbursts of anger. In the book of 2 Kings, Elijah summons two she-bears from the woods in order to maul a company of boys who had dared to tease the prophet. In the Gospels, Jesus curses a fig tree, causing it to wither. Why? Because it bore no fruit to satisfy his hunger. Support for anger can be found in other sources as well. Aristotle, for instance, Aristotle held that without anger, a warrior would not be able to muster sufficient courage to fight and overcome his enemies. And the philosopher taught that the inability to feel or to express anger was a grave human failing. In a similar vein, Paul Storobin argues that the presence of anger can indicate a society's moral and political well-being. The absence of anger can be a worrisome sign of complacency in that culture. So according to this whole school of thought, anger is a natural, even a desirable human response to the threat of injury or injustice. Its value should not be sold short. And so much has been written in recent years about anger management, which seems to be based on the premise that anger can manifest itself in positive or constructive ways. And so our challenge as a society then is to respect anger's potency while developing strategies for keeping anger, like atoms in a nuclear reactor, contained. And in that way, its energy can be tapped for commendable purposes rather than unleashed for destructive ones. And this, it seems to me, is what community activist Alex G, the pastor of Fountain of Life Covenant Church, had in mind when he launched here in Madison his Justified Anger Initiative in response to Madison's glaring racial equity gap. Justified anger. Even that apostle of nonviolence, Martin Luther King, admitted that he drew strength, he drew inspiration from his anger. If I wish, he said, to compose or to write or to pray or to preach well, I must be angry. And then King said, all the blood in my veins is stirred. My understanding is sharpened. But even if we grant that some good can come from properly managed anger, it's hard to dispute that ours has become an anger-saturated culture. And sure, it's still classified as a deadly sin, but for most people, that classification seems to function kind of like a stop sign that you can coast through or a speed limit so loosely enforced that it can be safely ignored. And even if some of the anger can be defended as righteous or justified, it still behooves us to ask if, as Americans, this is what we want for ourselves in our culture, for our children, for our society. Buddhism, with its sophisticated insights into the human psyche, offers an approach that's well worth considering. Here in Buddhism, anger is not treated as a moral failing. It's not regarded as a punishable sin. It's more like an addiction. It's an ingrained pattern of responding to the world's unpleasantness. And because it hinders our ability to achieve equanimity, because it poses a very real threat to our well-being and the well-being of others, anger, along with greed and delusion, is described in Buddhism as being a root poison, a root poison. There is no evil as harmful as anger, the Buddhist sage Chantadeva declared. Your mind, he said, cannot rest when anger stirs within you to revenge yourself on your injurer. Things that ordinarily cause you pleasure, even joy, all of them immediately lose their appeal the moment you become angry. In some, he said, there is no way to live happily while you are burning fire of anger. Now, because of its addictive tendencies, Buddhism holds that anger has the power to take possession of us, just like an addictive substance, and it operates outside of the sphere of our conscious control. Not will ourselves to be angry, but once we're in its grasp, we generally have little choice but to let it run its course. Anger is hostile to understanding Rebecca Solnit writes, and at its extreme, it prevents comprehension of a situation and of the people that you oppose. It prevents comprehension of the situation and of the people toward whom you are hostile. It is not for nothing, she says, that we call rage blind. In African Masai culture, anger is quite naturally associated with the color red. According to tribal teaching, adolescent boys are naturally red, and in the early phase of their life, that redness needs to be indulged by the tribe. Youth are therefore allowed to strut and to posture, to get into fights, to be arrogant and quarrelsome. But with maturity, Masai men are taught that they have to move into a second phase of life, the white phase, in which a newfound sense of social responsibility and generosity and tenderness serve to balance and moderate that inherent redness. And then later in life, one enters the black phase where wisdom and generativity and leadership qualities also emerge. You never cease being completely red, but there needs to be a balance of those three elements. And without a culture that recognizes the need for and supports these kinds of transitions, the individual is likely to develop an anger addiction. And thus, a youth may get stuck in that red phase, unable to exhibit self-control, unable to show respect for others, unable to develop humility. And they will be prone, even as adults, even as elders, to flare up at the slightest provocation to pick fights to assume an adversarial stance toward the world. No one trusts a red man very far the Masai caution. Does it not seem to you sometime that our society is stunted, kind of fatally trapped in the red phase? In terms of our cultural norms, have we not given our citizens, particularly our men and boys, permission endlessly to indulge their redness through these weaponized cars and these concealed handguns and these unhinged Twitter postings? Although it does classify anger as an addiction, Buddhism does not advocate its complete abolishment. If the poison of anger can be distilled, then its potent energy can be brought under conscious control and utilized for peaceful purposes, the Buddhist teach. We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends, Robert Thurman writes. And the recommended process for doing this, for distilling anger, is patience. Patience begins with developing a clear recognition of anger's authority over us. I was helpless before my anger. Clouds our minds, impedes our good judgment. It's not a good thing. And once that problem has been recognized and accepted, this analytic process kicks in. We try to get in touch with that anger and we have to understand it's not the same for everybody. We don't have to routinely erupt in a rage in order to qualify as an angry spirit. If we often feel annoyed, irritated, frustrated, indignant, or just generally aggrieved, that's the kind of anger energy that we want to work with. Milder and seemingly innocuous varieties of anger can be just as problematic as its more overt expressions. In dealing with your anger, Roshi Nancy Baker admonishes, you first need to discover your own particular version of it. And then, through the patient application of mindfulness, we become familiar with that impulse. Thich Nhat Hanh says, it's like taking the hand of a little brother. And the purpose here is not to banish anger any more than we would banish our little brother, but to place its energy in the service of human need. And this work must be done compassionately rather than judgmentally, understanding that while anger may not be a sin, unbridled anger does cause a whole lot of suffering, transforming it, and therefore represents a major step toward our own and the world's liberation. Now, he was not a Buddhist practitioner, but Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, he had plenty of time to reflect on his own patterns of behavior while languishing in a South African prison for a quarter of a century. Nelson Mandela was intensely read when he entered that prison by his own admission, but he emerged 25, 26 years later as a black man as the Maasai would put it. He had kicked the anger habit, but he had been able to make its energy available for healing and ultimately for nation-building. What in the end does anger accomplish? For the individual that expresses it, maybe catharsis? Well, studies actually indicate the opposite. Within a short period of time, most people regret their outbursts. They experience a loss of self-esteem after they've had an expression of anger. And there are physical consequences as well. Evidence suggests that hard-driving type A personalities are not at greater risk for a heart attack than other people, unless that aggressiveness is accompanied by hostility, aggressiveness plus anger. For our own sake and for the sake of others, we are better off if the causes that we care about are not contaminated with anger. Some will undoubtedly argue that displays of anger are sometimes necessary because otherwise people will not take you or your concerns seriously. But then that presumes that we are talented enough to control our anger, that we can deploy it consciously without creating a resentment or alienation. And from my own personal history with anger, I do not think that is the case. Anger, as the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca put it, always makes it harder to get things right. Is it possible to achieve more without anger than with it? Well, the story with which this service began suggests as much. We can let that enemy pie serve as a metaphor for the careful patient process of transforming the urgency of anger into the energy of friendship. And even if conflict seems inevitable, unavoidable, the writer Kent Nürburne counseled his own son this way, appropriate to end on this Father's Day note. Kent Nürburne said to his son, you must fight always if you have to fight without anger. You must act with the dispassionate involvement of a physician because you are seeking a cure, not punishing the carrier of the disease. And if a fight finds you, avoid undertaking it in a way so that you can emerge from that situation whole in body and in spirit. Blessed be. And now it is time in our service for the giving and the receiving of the offering, and your gifts will be used to support the fine work that this congregation is doing, both inside our walls and without. Please be generous. Through this time and place we bring our whole and occasionally our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. In our Cares of the Congregation book, there are two entries from Liz Wessel. She asks that we keep her dear friend, Randy Wexler, in our thoughts. She suddenly lost her father and her mother has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness at the same time. And then of her second entry, and also keep in your thoughts my brother Sandy and his wife because they are mourning the loss of their Scotty dog named Moses. Moses was a rescue dog, but despite their best efforts and patience, he was unable to transition into their family and they have now returned him to the rescue society with hopes that he will find a new life. Of course, those of us that have beloved pets would understand those sentiments. In addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any unexpressed joys and sorrows that remain among us, and we hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us now be a community of silence for a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope. So by virtue of our brief time together this morning, the burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. Now I would invite you to turn to our closing hymn and to please rise once more in body or in spirit. Let's be seated for the benediction and the postlude. We'll close with these words from the Buddhist teacher, Tich Nhat Hanh. Treat your anger with the utmost respect and tenderness for it is no other than yourself. Do not suppress it. Simply be aware of it. Awareness is like the sun. And so when it shines on things, they become transformed. When you are aware that you are angry, your anger is transformed. Mindfully dealing with anger is like taking the hand of a little brother. Blessed be Adam.