 Well, good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Society. My name is Kelly Aspreuth Jackson and I am one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by my colleague, our affiliated community minister and our guest worship leader for today, the Reverend Andy Carlson, and by the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins and Stephen Gregorius and with special thanks to our guest musician, Brian Rainey. At First Unitarian Society, we question boldly, listen humbly, grow spiritually, act courageously, and love unapologetically. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We are so glad that you are with us. If you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table that's located in the Commons. We hope that you will be able to stay and join us for coffee hour immediately following the service also in the Commons. If you don't know where that is, it's out those doors and to the left. For those of you joining us virtually, welcome to you as well. We are so very glad that you are with us. We hope you will take a moment to watch the announcement slides shown immediately after today's service to learn more about upcoming programs and events. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Just a little less than 20 years ago in a lecture given here in Madison, the author and Unitarian Universalist, Kurt Vonnegut, said a good number of things to his audience and this is one of them. And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, among almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. So I do the same now and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is. Life isn't always easy. And the world isn't always nice. As we gather at this hour, some of us are glad for the gift of existing. And some of us are weary from the trials of living. Some of us, perhaps all of us, are struggling with how to resolve the dynamic tension between the pleasure and the panic of having been born onto this round, wet, crowded earth. But now we get to share in this time together our states of sorrow and joy and uncertainty. If that isn't nice, I don't know what is. I'll invite you to rise in body and or spirit and join me in the words for the kindling of our chalice flame. With the kindling of this flame, we reaffirm our commitment to accept life's gifts with grace and gratitude, and to use them to bless the world in the spirit of love. Now let's sing together our opening hymn, the lone wild bird number 15 in your gray hymn. All right. Well, I'd like to invite anyone who would like to come and join me on the carpet up here to come and join me on the carpet up here. Hello. Good morning. It is very nice to see you. I missed your faces for a couple of weeks. And I am very glad to be back to see them. Hello. Come on down. Yes. Howdy. So, who remembers being born? Yeah? Yeah? A couple of us? Okay. All of us did it, but I know not all of us remember it. So my question to you about being born is, when you were born, what did you believe? Nothing? We got one bid for nothing. Anybody else? We got one bid for argument for nothing. Yes, yes, yes, clear. Food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food. Okay, so I want to make space for the idea that the determination to eat, to consume, to survive is in itself a form of belief. Yeah, I want to make space for that. But it sounds like not a lot of other things going on. Nothing about the transmigration of souls. Nothing about substitutionary atonement. No. Square area of the circle. Square area of the circle, yes. So I think that for the most part, we don't start out with beliefs, but we gain them over time. There are things that we acquire in the course of our lives. Maybe because we get taught them by people in our family or we hear them from other people or maybe we develop them sometimes from experiences that we have that are entirely our own. We have to figure out how to make sense out of them. So here's a thought that I want to share with you which is that the way that we hold the things that we do believe, that we come to believe over time is sort of like we have a bag to put the things we believe in it, all right? So yeah, okay. So there are different ways to hold the bag though, right? Because we could hold the bag, we could put the beliefs that we have in the bag, we could hold the bag, we could crumple up the top of it real tight so that nothing new can get inside. That would be one way to hold the bag from... I see that it's not a popular attitude with this crowd, yes. I'm pleased by that, I will say. So if we like tear a hole in the side of... Okay, well that's a strategy. We could also just open the bag, I mean it's still openable. So it sounds like as a community we have a bias against closing the top of the bag, yes. Okay, cheese, quesadilla, sure. Different metaphor but I accept it. Well the calzone is closed all around there. So, all right, so first option, closed top of the bag, closed minded, cut off from new beliefs, maybe not the way we want to go. What's another way we could do it? Well we could open the bag, all right, we could keep the top open, sounds like we don't really like the closing the top part, but what if I hold it like this? It's not really going to hold anything that way, right? It's just going to be like I'll put something in it and then I just... Well it stands up pretty well that way. But I'm not quite sure what to do with that in the metaphor, I'll be honest with you. So the upside down bag, we're not really feeling that one either. Now what if I take this bag, all right, and instead of opening it up and putting anything inside it, I can make it into a pretty good stick, right? Because I think that's an approach too, right, let's focus on what's in the bag, then I'm telling other people that they're wrong on the basis of what's in your bag. But I think maybe we don't like that one either. So that's the third option. And then the fourth option would be I open the bag, oh I forgot to take the receipt out of that one. I open the bag and I put it in front of me where I can see where it is and I can see what's going into it or what I'm taking out of it and I keep it open but still upright so it can hold new thoughts, new ideas, new beliefs. How do we feel about that one? Bad idea. Bad idea, huh? I'm worried that I've set a pattern and we're not going to be able to pull out it. But you tell me why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. A filter. I think the filter is us because we can take ideas out, like the receipt that I forgot to take out. Yeah. I mean it was useful at the time but its utility is over now. And we can choose what to put in and we can choose what to take out. So here's what I want to suggest. It matters what we believe, it matters what each of you believe, right now and in the fullness of your life. The beliefs that we have, they shape the choices we make, they shape the lives that we lead but at least as important, at least as important as what we believe is the way that we believe and what we, yes, Cleo. No but that doesn't have to stop you from doing it. I think we have some outside. Alright so in conclusion, bag better open than closed, bag better right side up than upside down. Also don't hit people with bags. That's an important take away from this lesson. Right now, we're going to send our children to their activities. Friends I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens the work of our community. You will see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll also see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Good morning. Good morning. It is awfully good to be here this morning, to be in this community, to have a chance to listen, to hear the joy and the laughter and the obstreperous insights of some of our younger folks and to share this time. So I am just awfully glad to see everyone and to be able to be here with you. I am the Reverend Andy Carlson, I serve as a spiritual care manager and hospital chaplain for UW Health and as Kelly said, I'm the affiliated community minister here. So I'm just hitting my second year at the hospital and I'm hoping to be able to be more engaged with this community in the years to come. So we live in a culture and a society that loves and prioritizes straight lines and linear thinking which promises implicitly and sometimes explicitly that there is a correct way to come to an understanding of a thing and an even more correct way to express how you came to that understanding. But there is more than one valid path towards knowledge and my hope for our time this morning is that in sharing a little piece of my own path and sharing a little about how I have come to a place of peace and trust that my sometimes magpie-like mind is following a deeper pattern as I gradually assemble these bits and oddments, sayings and small epiphanies that become almost like little mantras that taken together help reveal to me a picture of the world and of my place in it. I used to think that I was a math whiz. I had been in accelerated math classes all through elementary and middle school and even though I sometimes got dinged for not showing my work, I felt sure that my aptitude with numbers would someday lead me into a career in science or technology. I could envision myself doing work that I enjoyed that would be a contribution to society in which I thought I would probably make a pretty good living at. I had it all figured out back when I thought I was a math whiz. And then I ran straight into a cognitive brick wall named freshman year geometry class. I spent that year in a fog of baffled and ashamed frustration as my tendency to lean on my intuition and to not worry about showing my work turned every quiz and test into an ordeal. After all, showing one's work is the whole name of the game at that level of geometry. And no matter how much I studied, no matter how many extra credit sheets I turned in, by the end of the year I considered myself lucky to have escaped with a C minus. This is an important story for me for a number of reasons. For one thing, as I was selecting my classes for the next year and agonizing over my fears of taking another math class, my beloved mother Trudy said, well, why don't you take that drawing class you were talking about instead? There's no law that you have to take math every single year. That moment was one of the hinge points of my life. That motherly wisdom set me on a completely different trajectory. And as a plus, I had an absolutely amazing time that year making art instead of struggling through proofs. More pertinent to my topic this morning, that experience taught me so much about how my brain and how my spirit work together. The big picture for me comes so much more quickly and with so much less effort than its constituent parts. And often it happens without much or any conscious thought. The author M. John Harrison once referred to this intuitive unconscious part of his own mind as the deep pilot. And that captures so much of my experience of thought. The other part that I like to think of in my mind is the deep butler who uncomplainingly fetches the odds and ends of information that my magpie mind has squirreled away in the corners and crevices of my mental attic. While I've tried and struggled to strengthen my ability to think in more straightforward, linear, conventional ways, I've also learned to trust the deep pilot because as Harrison says, it is seldom wrong. Even though it can feel scary to trust the outputs of an operating system whose code is unknowable to me, and even though it is a way of thinking that is not seen as valid by our culture's evaluative structures, learning to trust the way my mind and spirit work has been for me an important act of self-love. And as a bonus, a handy side-effect of a mind that automatically picks up factoids like a magnet, picks up scattered nails and screws around a construction site is that I am, as my in-laws can attest, obnoxiously good at trivial pursuit. I am grateful to have been raised, Unitarian Universalist, and to have been raised in this community for so many reasons. And perhaps chief among them is that growing up in a faith where I would have had to start from a creed and set state of beliefs would have been, it's hard for me to imagine what that would have been like to start from a certain point of belief and have everything proceed from there is so backwards to the way that my mind operates, to the way that I experience the world and am in community with others. This faith prioritizes how each of us cares for one another and how we extend that caring into how we are in community with one another. As a worldview, it was so evident, it made sense so naturally and easily to me that I never gave any thought to those in-between steps to the work that I wasn't showing. The whole thing had been set in front of me and it was sufficient and it shaped my life and my choices. And then I found myself in seminary and I found myself applying for chaplain residencies and parish ministry internships and I found myself in the ministerial fellowshiping process and I found myself writing board certification essays and I can tell you with total confidence that there are a lot of processes in becoming a minister and proceeding down that path that don't take, it's just evident for a sufficient answer. Oh boy. I spent a lot of time really kind of questioning, why don't I have a theology? Why doesn't this make sense to me? It was awfully easy to pick up a scorching case of imposter syndrome in the face of all those expectations of a rigorously thought through and expressed systematic theology. I brought that concern to my academic advisor at Star King School for the Ministry, the wonderful institution of which Reverend Kelly and I are both proud graduates. I brought that to my academic advisor, Dr. Gabriela Latini one day and her words were another one of those hinge points in my life. She said lots of these people who can express their theology in very thorough and academic ways, they don't always live out what they say and you are someone who has a lived theology, a lived theology. Thank you. And those words were so life giving to me. They gave me the confidence to keep jumping through the many hoops of ministerial formation as I reverse engineered how I was living into committee friendly language. And they gave me the insight that the deep pilot wasn't just aimlessly storing random strings of words away in my mind, rather that I could trust these things that I've picked up without quite knowing why, that I could trust that they are pieces of a larger picture, that they are tiles of a mosaic whose full image has always been present in my heart and whose details are becoming incrementally more clear and defined. I'll share with you some of my favorites of these pieces that come up most often in my life and in my work as a hospital chaplain. And to be clear I'm not offering these as a prescriptive or proscriptive with either those sentiments but rather as examples that might provoke reflection on what some of your mosaic tiles might be and that might encourage openness to the unlooked for wisdom to which your own deep pilot may be steering you in no particular order. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is. I don't know, well first has everyone seen the new animated Spider-Man movie across the Spider-Verse? And I know some of us have seen it twice. So I don't know if this particular line jumped out on anyone else, but at a certain point early in the movie, Miles Morales, Spider-Man, is having a conversation with his father who's a police officer. He's in his Spider-Man costume so they're incognito to one another. But Miles Morales says to him, if this isn't nice what is? And I almost jumped out of my seat in the movie theater. We heard earlier the story behind this particular piece of wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Uncle Alex who thought that the big problem with people is that we don't often recognize enough when we are happy. To see those words pop out on the big screen was such a delightful surprise to me. I first read them in Vonnegut's very odd novel slash memoir Time Quake. And over the years they've become almost a mindfulness mantra for me, a reminder to attend to the beauty present in each moment. The next little piece, in other words, I don't know, it's a mystery. In the 1998 romance comedy Shakespeare in Love, Jeffrey Rush plays theater owner Phillip Henslow who frequently expresses confidence that things will work out with the beleaguered production that they are struggling to pull off. When pressed as to how exactly things will work out, he invariably replies, I don't know, it's a mystery. And to me that while I, my next point, we'll talk a little bit more about this, while we do have power and choice and agency in our lives, there are also things that just work out sometimes. And there are moments when we can lean back into the divine, into God, into however you name that which is more than all of us, that we can lean back and trust that something will guide us through this moment. Too often we think about faith as synonymous with certainty. And in my experience faith is much more closely tied with doubt because faith is knowing that no matter what the circumstances are there will be some way to make it through and you will not have to do it alone. And that's what comes up for me in those words, I don't know, it's a mystery. So from that to a place of more agency and power, one of the most important tools in my chaplaincy toolkit is the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. I came to these words as so many others do through the 12-step work of Alcoholics Anonymous. As I was first getting sober, I would recite the serenity prayer over and over as I wrote the waves of anxiety that were the byproduct of my body finding a new chemical equilibrium. Later I would recite the serenity prayer as I wrote out the waves of anxiety that were the byproduct of being in an educational program that I was poorly suited for and that was just absolutely sucking my soul out through my nose. In any case, the words have been significant for me in terms of a tool that helps me center myself but that also remind me that there's no moment in life when we are without choice. And as a chaplain, I can be part of someone finding a place of acceptance, or courage, or even to be a channel of needed but unlooked for wisdom. Another piece that I pull out that somehow has connected itself to the serenity prayer in a true synthesis of the sacred and the profane are the words there is no knowledge that is not power. These words were inscribed on the side of a video game cabinet in the tiny Oberlin College Student Union arcade. That video game was Mortal Combat 3. I have no idea what art designer connected the dots between fatality moves and frantic button mashing but there they were all the same in big yellow letters there is no knowledge that is not power. Along with another phrase from the Spider-Man movies, with great power must come great responsibility. These thoughts remind me that we have the tools we need to make decisions, we have the agency to do it, and that we are held in community with one another, and that we are obliged to use what we have in accountability with our fellow humans. I will share two more little, almost smooth, small stones that I keep in my pocket as part of this mosaic. You can't fix other people's messy lives. This is a line from the 2001 romantic comedy Amelie, which is a story about an extremely shy young woman in Paris who takes up the hobby of trying to improve what she sees as the places of deficiency in the lives of her neighbors. Near the end of the film, one of her targets admonishes her with these words, you can't fix other people's messy lives. Working in the hospital as a chaplain, they have become a reminder for me of the limits of my work, that I am positioned and empowered to accompany and support, to guide at times, but that the lives and decisions of my patients are their own, and that I am not put in their lives to impose what I see as more as necessary. And finally, as a chaplain, I'm often asked to pray with my patients, and particularly to be with them and their families as they die, as they approach the ends of their lives, as the breathing tube is, as they are extubated, as they are taken off life support measures. And over the years, as I've been called to pray extemporaneously with folks, a phrase has kind of crept its way into those end-of-life prayers. Often I'll say, you know, we pray that this beloved grandfather who is returning to you now, God, we pray that his journey home be as natural and as effortless as a river that flows downhill to meet the ocean, and that those of us who are walking or moving with him along that journey, that you help us to care for one another as we journey with him as far as we are able. And it wasn't until last year when we got out our Christmas ornaments and decorations for the season, and I got out the special box of Christmas vinyl records that I realized that those words come from a song in a treasured album in our family, The Muppets' Christmas with John Denver. And I encourage you to track down that album. There's a beautiful song called When the River Meets the Sea. It's written by Paul Williams, the great songwriter who wrote so many of the classic Muppets' songs, and that image of the river that flows downhill to meet the ocean, without even me realizing it, became the core of my wishes for my patients as I walked with them and their families as they breathed their last. You just never know. And so as I draw to a close, I do want to, I don't want to be a downer, but I do want to offer some cautions and some caveats. I'm thinking of another story about intuition, about that act of impulsively or without clear thought, acting on what seemed to be the voice of necessity in the moment. But this is a more recent and destructive story. Now, you may have read about this a few days ago. A young man who was overcome with a spirit of love as he toured the Colosseum in Rome and was moved to carve his and his fiance's name in those ancient Travertine blocks. And I'm sure that in that moment, that act felt like an entirely congruent addition to his life's mosaic. But in context, in context it was clearly an act of solipsistic self-focus, an expression of meaning-making at the expense of a historic architectural treasure and at the expense, even in a small way, at the expense of every future visitor to that place. In all my talk about intuition and the deep pilot and theology, I hope that it's clear that even though this is a story of how I came to better understand myself, that this did not happen in a vacuum. Relying solely on one's own intuitions is a recipe for catastrophe, for inscribing your preconceptions and biases and prejudices into the network of mutuality within which we are all held. Keeping in relationship with one another as we grow, as we discover new details in the mosaics of our lives, we share with others what new small, smooth stone we found to hold in our pockets. Keeping in relationship enriches our understanding of the world and our place in it, helps us to navigate issues of appropriation and patterns of colonialism, and helps us to better know and connect with others. After all, as the old man in the cave at the start of the original Nintendo Entertainment System game Legend of Zelda reminds us, it's dangerous to go alone. Take what you're offered, but hold it and evaluate it in good company as you continue to piece things together. We gather each week carrying with us all the joys, the losses, the celebrations and sorrows of our days. We bring them here knowing they are held in love and in support. We light a candle in mind of the wildfires that continue to burn the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. We think with gratitude of those working and in some cases risking their lives to confront the blaze, with concern for those whose health has been put at risk by their far-ranging smoke, and with grief for the countless non-human animals at hazard from the fires. Making our home together all on the same world, we bear witness to the hardship of its heating. We light a memorial candle for Bonnie Anderson, grandmother of Logan Walsh, who passed from life this past week at the age of 95. Logan tells us that Bonnie was a lifelong Unitarian Universalist and a ferocious free thinker, the person that Logan wanted to be when they grew up. Our hearts go out to them and to all who knew and loved Bonnie. May her memory be for a blessing. We light a candle to mourn the violence in our world, here in our nation and around the globe. We know there are never enough candles to symbolize the pain, hold the anger, and cradle the tears. May this light fuel our passion for change and our hunger for justice. I invite you now to turn both inward and outward and join me in an attitude of meditation and of prayer. 93 million miles, that is the rough average distance that the light from the nearest star, our sun, must cover in order to fall upon the earth through the windows over and around us and onto each of us below. 93 million miles that light has yet to travel to make the conditions for life here possible. To allow a world on which trees can blossom and rain can fall and you and I may live. And the trip it takes across the gulf of space to reach us lasts about eight and a half minutes. 93 million miles seems like an impossible distance to beings such as ourselves with bodies that are infinitely heavier than light and dramatically more slow. But eight and a half minutes is a unit of measure we ourselves can make use of. It is time enough to break a heart with careless cruelty to ruin someone's week or shatter someone's dreams. And it is also long enough to write an email to an old friend or to lose a game of checkers to your seven year old child. In that time you could sing three songs, walk down the hall and introduce yourself to your neighbors in the next apartment or call up your brother and tell him you're sorry. Eight and a half minutes might not be enough time to say everything we want to say but it is enough to start the conversation. It might not be enough to do everything we want to do but it is long enough to begin to do what we must. With the same seconds it takes for the sun's light to reach us. We give the world or some small piece of it a new chance to flourish and grow. In every moment, day and night, light from the sun touches somewhere on the earth. Our world depends on this. We could not be here without it. We could not be here without the moments of kindness and mercy on which our world also depends. Now let's rise and body into our spirit to sing our closing hymn together. Number 22, Dear Weaver of Our Lives Design. Our closing words today come from Dr. Rachel Naomi Rehman. Here's learning how to fix life only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken. There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. And we serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act. In befriending life we do not make things happen according to our own design. We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it. Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness, always struggling against the odds. Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment. Blessed be. Go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.