 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. Wet Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers can 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, charming member of this congregation, and it is a particular pleasure to extend a happy hello to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. We know that we have a few because we're welcoming a few new members today. If this is your first time visiting First Unitarian Society, I know you're in for a real treat. It's a special place, and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we conduct guided tours after every service. Just meet over here by the windows after the service. We'll take care of you. And speaking of taking care of each other, you know the drill. This is a perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your enjoyment of the service. And this admonition goes for those of you watching at home as well. Thanks for taking care of that. And if you're accompanied this morning by a youngster at the service, and you think that your companion might prefer to enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer a couple alternatives for you, including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium, and some comfortable, authentic Frank Lloyd Wright benches just outside the doorway in the commons. As is the case every weekend, our service is brought to us by a dedicated group of people whom we call volunteers with a capital V. These people deserve our thanks, our hugs, our handshakes, maybe even offer them a chance to borrow your umbrella today. So their names, operating the sound system, thank you to Mark Schultz. Our lay minister is Roz Woodward. Our greeter upstairs whose smiling face welcomed you as you entered the building a few minutes ago, Karen Hill. Douglas Hill, Sam Bates, Elizabeth Barrett, and Melinda Carr are ushering today, thanks to them. Jean Hills, the person we always like to thank because she hosts the hospitality and coffee hour after the service. The flowers that you see behind me were lovingly donated by Coe and Paul Williams, Richard and Sally Builder. And Richard Miller will be our tour guide after the service. Just a couple announcements. I think we all know that during this special time of year, First Unitarian Society is a very generous congregation to help those who might otherwise not be able to enjoy this magical time of year to the fullest. So today, remember to drop off your wrapped, labeled gifts if you were participating in the family to family gift program. You can drop them off over at the landmark building entrance after the service. Thanks for helping other people enjoy a brighter holiday. And speaking of brighter holidays, some of you are familiar with our family holiday gift giving program, which collects gifts for families in need. But it takes a little bit of money to do that. And we have been very generous, but we just learned about 10 new families, 10 extra families, who could still use a little help with their holiday shopping fund. So if you would like to contribute to that, please see the elf who will be in the commons after the service, and he or she will take care of that. Any money left over after the gift giving program expenses have been completed, will be donated to our Eviction Prevention Fund. And the final announcement, we know that cabaret is going to be sometime in the spring, and as soon as we know how many days that is, we'll begin the countdown. Meanwhile, speaking of countdown, please sit back or lean forward to enjoy this morning's service. I was here for the nine o'clock, the music, the message, everything, very, very wonderful. You'll enjoy it. We know that it will touch your heart, stir your spirit, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. We continue with the words of the great romantic poet John Keats. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and asleep full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, we are breathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth, spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, of the gloomy days, of all the unhealthy and or darkened ways made for our searching. Yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty moves away the paw from our dark spirits. 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 of affirmation printed in this morning's program. Each morning we hold out our chalice of being to be filled with the graces of life which abound, air to breathe, food to eat, companions to love, beauty to behold, art to cherish, causes to serve. They come in ritual procession these gifts of life. Whether we deserve them, we cannot know or say. They are poured out, and ours is the task of holding steady the chalice of being. And now I invite you on this fine warm December day to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated, and any children that are here would like to join me in the front for the message for all ages. If we jump, our shoes light up. Your shoes don't light up. They'll do something about that, but they're fast. Fast is just as good as bright. So this is a story, this is a story from China. Many years ago there lived in China an emperor. He was the head of the country, and he lived in a very, very fine palace. In fact it was the most fine palace of any palace in the whole world. And the gardens that surrounded his palace, they were very fine too. And they were very, very famous for all their flowers and the walkways through the garden. And beyond the garden and the palace there was this thick forest that stretched all the way to the ocean. And in the forest there lived lots of birds, but one of them was a very special bird. It was a nightingale, and the nightingale song was declared to be anybody that had ever heard it. The most beautiful song in the world. And books were written and they were read all over the world about the palace and the gardens. But none of them failed to mention the bird and its song. But the emperor who lived in that palace, not that far from where the nightingale lived, had never heard the nightingale, never read any of these books, didn't know anything about the bird. But one day the emperor got a gift from another emperor from Japan. And the gift was a book that described in glowing terms the palace and the gardens. And as the emperor of China read the book he said, yes, that's all very right. I'm just so pleased that this book is describing my gardens and my palace in such fine terms. But then he got to the very end of the book and the author said, of all the loveliest treasure in all of China, nothing surpasses the nightingale. The emperor was startled and he called to his servant, why haven't I heard of this bird? The nightingale must come to my chambers tonight and sing for me. Well, the servant had never heard about the nightingale either. So he ran all through the palace asking about the bird. Well, nobody else who worked for the emperor had heard of the nightingale either. And then finally the servant came to the kitchen and he went in the kitchen and here was this young woman who was busy scrubbing all kinds of pots and pans and she said, I know about the nightingale. I've heard it sing. I hear it every evening when I walk through the forest on my way home. Come with me and I will show you him. And so the servant and practically half of the emperor's court traipsed out into the woods, entered the forest. But when they heard the nightingale begin to sing, everybody was completely quiet. No one had ever imagined that a song could be as beautiful as this bird's song. And so they were looking around up in the trees trying to spot that bird and one of the servants said, it must be a gorgeous, beautiful bird to be able to sing in such a lovely way. Well, the kitchen maid pointed up into the forest into the branches and said, there's the nightingale. And of course it was a small, gray, drab little bird. Didn't look all that pretty at all. Never imagined he would look like that, said the servant. The kitchen maid went up to the bird and spoke to him very softly. The emperor wants to hear you sing, she said to the nightingale. It would be my pleasure, said the nightingale, thinking that the emperor was in the forest with everybody else, but the emperor wasn't there. He was back at the palace. No, no, said the kitchen maid, you have to come back to the palace to sing for him this evening. Well, said the nightingale, it's really best if my song is heard here among the trees. But in the end, he followed everybody back to sing to the emperor in his palace. But even indoors, the song of the nightingale was so beautiful that it brought tears to the emperor's eyes. And the sight of those tears made the bird sing even more lovingly. And the emperor ordered that a golden perch should be made for the bird to sit on and he ordered that the bird must stay with him at all times. Well, the nightingale wasn't too happy about this, but the tears of the emperor had moved the nightingale so much that he agreed to stay in the palace. Everyone spoke about this remarkable bird and its beautiful songs, but then one day another package arrived with a gift for the emperor. It was a mechanical nightingale. It was made to look like the real one, but it was made of gold and silver and was covered with precious jewels. It could be wound up and made to play a single song over and over again like a music box. It is simply marvelous, said everyone in the emperor's court. And the people believed that the mechanical bird was so beautiful to behold and, well, more dependable than a real thing. You could wind it up any time and it would sing for you. Same song over and over again, but without any mistakes and without any variation, everything was completely predictable. And so the mechanical nightingale was wound up 33 times a day to sing for the emperor. Until finally he said, I think that our mechanical friend needs a little rest. Then he put the mechanical bird on a silken pillow and put it in a cabinet, but they would bring it out every day to sing again until what usually happens with things that are mechanical? It broke. That's right. It broke. And so it broke and the emperor said, well, bring the real nightingale back. He must sing for you. But of course the real nightingale had been ignored. And so he just flew back into the forest. And so the mechanical bird sat there silently, not doing anything. And a few years later, the emperor became very, very sick and the doctors diagnosed him and they thought, you know, your highness, I don't think you're going to get well. And so he was just lying there in his bed waiting to die. And one night he was asleep and he had these horrible, terrible dreams and he woke up and shouted for someone to come and play him some music that would comfort him. The mechanical bird was brought out of storage and wound up, but all it made was this kind of ugly, worrying noise. The room was still, tears of frustration came to the emperor's eyes, but then the silence was broken by this beautiful song. The bird, the nightingale, had heard the emperor's cries from out in the forest and come back to sing outside his window. Dismissing everyone, the emperor looked lovingly at the nightingale and said, thank you, thank you so much. With pride and foolishness, I ignored you and now you come back to give me comfort. How can I thank you? I asked only one thing of you, said the nightingale. Do not force me to sit on a golden perch and live in this palace. Let me remain in the forest and I promise you that not a day will go by that I don't fly back and sit on the limb outside your window and sing for you. You must only sing when it is your choice, said the emperor. But the nightingale was true to his word. He flew back every day and visited the emperor and sang for him. And you know what? The emperor started getting stronger and the doctors scratched their heads. They couldn't figure out why he was getting well. The emperor just smiled at them and said that he had found the songs of this little done colored bird to be better for the soul than any medicine that they could provide. So that's the story of our nightingale and I forgot to bring a recording so you could actually hear what he sounds like. But if you ever have a chance to hear a nightingale song, you'll probably agree that it's a very, very beautiful song. So now we are going to sing you out with perhaps a little bit less beautiful song as you go to your classes. Enjoy yourselves. And so we continue with this selection Lincoln Perry, who is proficient in many different artistic media and has shown throughout the United States. This was an essay that was published in the American Scholar last spring. Herbert Hoover commissioned John Flanagan to create a Silver Washington Quarter Dollar in 1932 during the depths of the Depression. Now from 1885 to 1890, Flanagan had worked as a studio assistant to our greatest American sculptor, Augustus San-Gaudens. He was the creator of many things including a monument to General Sherman in New York City and the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw in the Boston Commons. Flanagan's apprenticeship served him well to judge from the quality of his Quarter Dollar. Look at that coin as a tondo, that is, a circular work of art. And then notice how comfortable old George is in his round setting. This tiny object is a jewel to be held lovingly in one's hand. And now look very carefully at a more recent redesigned Quarter. The one I'm holding is from 2004. George resembles a fallen souffle. His head is a series of unrelated marks fighting with each other with no sense of harmony. He has no volume, no presence, certainly no potential psychology. Now I can sympathize with the artist's plight, being told to cram in all those extra words on the face of the coin. The new coin adds Quarter Dollar and the United States of America to, in God we trust, liberty and the year of issue. But that does not excuse or explain that horrible head, that truly grotesque coin. Now turn each coin over. Old George's accompanying eagle is grand. Its full chest logically placed in the center, its wings nicely echoing its curved cage. The new Quarter happens to represent the state of Florida. With a sailing ship, some palm trees, a space shuttle all floating free of one another. The images fill the circle indifferently with no real poetry of call and response. They remind me of cheap carnival tokens. I am not a numismatist, but I like to think that I am sensitive to beautiful things and that my distress over our new coins is more than peak or pickiness. It's a sense that we are perhaps unknowingly making our civilization more callous, more disembodied, less about contemplation than instant gratification. Perhaps the little chunks of metal that we carry in our pockets soon to be replaced by newer versions or by chips embedded in our hands should remind us of a choice, a choice between two approaches to life. If only we would pay attention. The second selection is a poem entitled Singapore by Mary Oliver. In Singapore, in the airport, a darkness was ripped from my eyes. In the women's restroom, one compartment stood open. A woman knelt there, washing something in a white bowl. Disgust argued in my stomach, and I felt in my pocket for my ticket. A poem should always have birds in it. Kingfishers say with their bold eyes and gaudy wings. Rivers are pleasant and, of course, trees. A waterfall, or if that's not possible, a fountain rising and falling. A person wants to stand in a happy place in a poem. When the woman turned, I could not answer her face. Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together and neither could win. She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this? Everybody needs a job. Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough. She's washing the tops of airport ashtrays as big as hubcaps with a blue rag. Her small hands turn the metals, scrubbing and rinsing. She does not work slowly nor quickly like a river. And her dark hair is like the wing of a bird. I don't doubt for a moment that she loves her life, and I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and fly down the river. That probably won't happen. But maybe it will. If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? And of course, it isn't. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life. I mean the way that she unfolded and refolded that blue cloth, and the way that the smile was meant only for my sake. I mean the way this poem is filled with trees and with birds. Thank you, Robin. Music to grace today's theme. I was leaving the meeting house the other afternoon, in the sun that just slipped below the horizon, and the sky was simply awash with color. Wispy red and orange clouds stood out against the fading azure field as I paused to acknowledge and to admire this spectacle, rather unusual, for the month of December. And although I still had responsibilities to attend to the hunger for beauty, so characteristic of our species, prevailed for at least a few precious moments. As Howard Gardner notes, the pursuit of experiences that are beautiful constitutes a crucial part of life, particularly once one's basic needs have been satisfied. But beauty's power to inspire can be felt even in conditions of extreme deprivation, even as one teeters on the edge of existence. Victor Frankel survived the rigors of a Nazi concentration camp, and for him and his fellow prisoners just staying alive was an all-consuming task. But one evening, Frankel recalled, when we were already resting on the floor of our hot, dead-tired soup bowls in our hands, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run to the assembly grounds to see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside, we saw the sinister clouds glowing in the west, and the whole sky was alive with color. The desolate gray mud huts provided us sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. And then after a few moments of moving silence, one prisoner turned and said to the other, how beautiful the world could be. Experiences like these can, in fact, help any of us to get through a difficult day. An encounter with beauty can compensate for disappointments and hardships that otherwise would leave us despondent and spiritless. This is as true for auditory as it is for visual beauty. The reclusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein confided to one of his true friends at one time that the slow movement of Brahms's third quartet had pulled him back from the brink of suicide. Here in the West, beauty has generally been highly esteemed. In the Platonic tradition, it, together with truth and goodness, has enjoyed a transcendent status, life's sumum bonum, truth, goodness, and beauty. These are the ultimate ends, the pursuit of which make life meaningful, whose acquisition renders it complete. Moreover, these three ideals are intertwined. What is true is also beautiful, and what is beautiful is also good. Recall these memorable lines from Emily Dickinson. I died for beauty, but was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one who died for truth was lain in an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed. For beauty, I replied. And I, for truth, the two are one, we brethren are, he said. Now the ancients were quite clear about what constituted beauty. Whether the object under consideration was a temple, a statue, a coin, an amphora, or the human form itself, it had to possess a certain balance and symmetry and proportionality. An artist like Lincoln Perry, when we heard from earlier, still uses standards similar to these, engaging the beauty of a quarter dollar piece. And a structure like our own meeting house fulfills these standards in many respects. And in addition, a certain number of signs, sights and sounds seem to have near universal approval, the song of a nightingale, or the colors of a sunset. And yet, for all of this, we have hardly reached a consensus on what constitutes beauty, and any given era may recognize beauty where previous or later ones clearly do not. Today, the works of the great impressionist painters fetch astronomical prices, but 19th century critics dismiss them as amateurish and ugly. During his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh did not sell a single painting. And of those he gave away, many were discarded. The arts Howard Gardner writes, Proceed along unpredictable historical, cultural and individual tracks. We can marvel at works of art, but we will not be able to come up with an algorithm that explains their meaning or accounts for their appeal. Nor are beauty, truth and goodness as closely related to one another as philosophers and artists once insisted. Certain expressions of beauty are notoriously deceptive. Take glamour, for instance. We are drawn to and we admire glamorous stars of the stage on the screen. But what attracts us is often a beauty that is quite literally skin deep. Atomologically, glamour derives from a French word that means enchantment to be placed under a spell. Glamour does not exist in and for itself. Jenny Disky writes, it consists of yearning and of lies. Similarly, a word that Steve Goldberg used to describe himself in his announcements. Charming. Is often used to describe a beautiful and winsome personality, which of course we know Steve possesses. Those who possess this particular attribute have a talent for making other people feel good. They are positive, upbeat, engaging, well-spoken. Steve to a letter. But they aren't always trustworthy or well-intentioned. He could charm the hind legs off of a donkey, the familiar saying admonishes. Charmers know that they can influence other people and gain their confidence. But charm is not a reliable indicator of either truth or goodness. The line between a charmer and a sociopath is very fine indeed. Benjamin Schwartz warns, charm is charming, but just don't be charmed by it. Steve and I talked about this, by the way. These observations about glamour and charm are consistent with what the late Unitarian Universalist Minister Forrester Church had to say about the devil. It is a mistake, church argued, to think of the devil as this repulsive being as medieval commentators once did. The devil's trademark is not evil dressed as evil, church writes, but evil dressed as good. If we were to sketch the devil's nature and personality, he is beautiful, he is proud, he is brilliant, he is wise to the ways of the world, and he is a liar. The habit of associating ugliness with evil and beauty with goodness can leave us exposed, vulnerable to exploitation and seduction by maleficent forces. Forest Church did not harbor a literal belief in Satan. The latter, Satan, served as a legendary and literary stand-in for especially diabolical human beings, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen, for instance. Now, Hitler was not trained in political science. He was trained as an artist, and he was, as Martin Filler points out, fully aware of the propagandistic power of the arts, colorful torch-lit choreography, grand architecture, stirring music, arresting poster art, handsome uniforms, all of these things factored into the Nazi's rise to absolute power. They did much, Filler writes, to support authoritarian might through the consistent artistic projection of strength, order, unity and beauty. The point is, as edifying and as elevating as beauty might be, we must remember that it is not always trustworthy and it isn't always true. And on the other hand, because something strikes us as ugly, does not mean that we should treat it with contempt. To emphasize only the beautiful seems to me like a mathematical system that only concerns itself with positive numbers, the abstract artist Paul Clay once said. Indeed, by linking beauty with truth and goodness, we end up establishing something close to a false dichotomy, which then causes us to devalue certain other aspects of life a priori. If the ugly is devoid of truth and goodness, why should we bother with it at all? The concept of beauty is itself based on a hierarchy that labels some things as undeniably beauty and other things as irretrievably ugly. Now, a fair amount of contemporary art and music has pushed back against our more traditional assessments of what is beautiful. Violating previous canons of taste, it deliberately presents itself, our contemporary art oftentimes as unbeautiful, as discordant. Now, traditional notions of beauty still prevail, but as Howard Gardner points out, more and more of our physical and psychic space is now open to works and experiences that could be better described as interesting, sometimes even awful, but also memorable in their mode of presentation, inviting us to further exploration. And so writing last August in his native land, the Indian novelist Atish K. Tsar commented on the illusory image that he and many others retained of their own country. India is a beautiful country, we tell ourselves. But any honest appraisal would conclude just the opposite. Yes, there are splashes of beauty in India, but today in India ugliness prevails. Our environmental problems are among the grimace in the world, Tassir laments, and abject poverty is simply everywhere. And as a writer, Tassir has found it very challenging to address the ugliness of a place that he cares about so deeply. Like Mary Oliver, his impulse is to focus on the beautiful India of his imagination. But he says that the greatest aesthetic discovery of my life has been to see the ugliness to find a way to write about it and to discover a lexicon for the ugly. In the West, we too are biased in beauty's favor. However, Western literature includes a number of cautionary tales that cut against the grain. The princess and the frog, beauty and the beast. In the Arthurian legends, the story of Gallant Sir Gawain and his liaison with the repugnant Dame Ragnel. And in each of these instances, that which is initially characterized as repellent, shelters and intrinsic beauty that will remain hidden until its carrier is seen and accepted in his or her wholeness. As Trev Johnson puts it, daring to touch the unbeautiful, we realize that not only are we not dragged down into something loathsome, but that just the reverse occurs. We feel empowered and joyous and connected with the other. To give beauty to another person, to a group of people, even to a damaged place on the earth, is to move past the fear and the revulsion that keeps us separated from life itself. So Johnson goes on to describe certain activities that were undertaken in conjunction with the 2010 Global Earth Exchange. As part of this event, teams of people throughout the planet visited areas that had been made ugly, made ugly by clear-cutting, mining, pollution and other indiscriminate forms of industrial activity. And teams would go to these areas, they would survey the terrain, take it all in, assimilate its ugliness. And then those same team members would engage in small acts of beauty. And one of these teams in Great Britain visited a dump in a forlorn industrial park. No evidence whatsoever of plant or animal life. It just felt dead. After an hour or so of contemplation, the women and men spread out and they began collecting pieces of trash and out of those pieces they made a sculpture. And as the late afternoon shadows lengthened, no one wanted to leave. After spending time in this place in such an intimate way, Lucy Hinton wrote later, it felt as though we had given something of ourselves to the place and it had given something to us. And so by the time we finally left, we felt like pioneers who had begun the process of breaking an invisible barrier that until now had held this wounded place in a kind of soulless imprisonment. We dreamed of returning, helping to break up the baked hard topsoil so that seeds could emerge from the surface crust and that birds and color might return once more. It is true that philosophy and religion have historically advanced the aesthetic of the beautiful. For instance, Christian iconography has invariably presented Jesus as handsome, Mother Mary as comely. But what we need to remember in the same Christian tradition is that Jesus himself was drawn to lepers and persons with disabilities, those considered unclean and untouchable by polite society. Because Jesus was able to recognize an inner beauty that eluded the myopic religious establishment. And likewise, Buddhist statuary is meant to draw the subject in a serene beauty. Buddhism, Friyaf-Schwan writes, acknowledges the existential power of beauty and uses harmony and symmetry of form as a skillful means to strengthen the individual's aspiration and to enhance his or her practice. But Buddhism doesn't stop there, because it also warns about adopting fixed views, our habits of thinking and judgment become fixed, inalterable. But in order to obtain a clear and accurate view of reality, we must be alert to those fixed views, those biases that color our outlook. As Gina Sharp, founder of the Insight Meditation Society of Manhattan puts it, the basis of a beautiful life is a beautiful mind, and beauty comes from a mind that is capable of seeing things just as they are in the moment. And being able to repose in that. The state of mind that we are calling beautiful is not possible if it is busy excluding. Joyce Cornblatt is an Australian Buddhist teacher and she speaks in a similar vein of the wilderness mind, a mind that recognizes change as the only constant. And so oriented, wilderness mind is able to appreciate the ephemeral beauty in things that are aging, things that are decaying. It is a turning toward rather than away from impermanence, she said, which then fosters a closer and more honest relationship with the world and with one another. This isn't always easy, because we are culturally conditioned to turn away from, to reject the old, the damaged, the misshapen. Cornblatt says that she herself is subject to lapses, as when her daughter's raggedy Anne doll, given to her in infancy, had become threadbare, its facial features practically worn away. This is the time to get you a new raggedy Anne, Cornblatt suggested to her daughter. The youngster was aghast, scolded her mother. If I had an accident and got my face ruined, would you get a new child? I love raggedy Anne just as she is. My child's wisdom humbled me, Cornblatt wrote. What aversion could withstand such clear-eyed devotion to the truth of how things really are. So yes, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, but is that little girl new at a more profound level and in a much more significant sense? Its true home is in the soul of the beholder. Blessed be. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope, and to this time we bring our whole, and at times our broken cells, our un-beautiful cells. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. We would pause now to acknowledge Lloyd and Pat Egan. Lloyd Egan's father at the age of 88 passed away in Milwaukee this last week after a rather long struggle with disability and decline. We would also keep our thoughts with Lorna Aronson, whose brother Earl Banks of McKinney, Texas, died due to complications of a massive stroke that was suffered earlier this year. And then we had a note from Dory Lightfoot, whose father-in-law died in Columbia last Friday, December the 4th, and her husband had traveled there for the funeral, and Dory was staying with the family. And so our thoughts again are with Dory and with her loved ones. And then lastly, Patricia Leonardi died several weeks ago, and a memorial service for her will be held next Saturday in the Landmark Auditorium at 1 o'clock p.m. So those of you that knew and admired Patricia, we hope to see you there. In addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys and sorrows that remain among us. As a community, we hold those with equal concern in our hearts. Let us now sit silently together for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. And so by virtue of our brief time together today, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. I now invite you to participate in the giving and receiving of our offering, and as you can see from your program, a portion of your gifts will be shared with Briar Patch Youth Services, which does important work in our community on behalf of our young people. Please be generous. As part of our services this weekend, we recognize those individuals who have formally and officially joined First Unitarian Society since last May. Overall, 26 individuals have taken that step and some are in attendance at this service. Becoming a member of this congregation is on one hand fairly straightforward. One generally attends a series of orientation classes, signifies their intention, professes agreement with our UU principles and FUS's bond of union, and then enters their name in our membership registry. In terms of actual preliminaries and mechanics, that's all there is to it. There's no immersion, no anointing with oil, no doctrinal tests. That's pretty good. But then we would want to ask why would someone want to do this? Well, we join in the first place because we believe that the promotion of liberal religious values will make a difference in the world. The strong Unitarian Universalist movement will help to make our community and the planet a more peaceful and enlightened place. And we make this commitment because we do believe in the transformative power of this tradition. We join because we want to be part of an enterprise that can elevate us ethically and at a personal level fulfill us spiritually. And we also join because we hunger for a relationship with people who like us regard religion as an open-ended, ongoing quest for deeper meaning and for a more honest and authentic religious connection. And as members, we are all responsible for strengthening this institution so that it can form these life-affirming tasks. We agree that religion is as much a public as a private affair and intensely communal as well as an individual commitment. We honor our responsibility when we do the following things. Make an effort to learn about our tradition, its history and its theology in order to understand what it really means to be a Unitarian Universalist. Make a generous and ungrudging contribution of time, talent and treasure. Trusting that when we give from our heart, we grow in spirit. Make a good faith effort to participate in the open democratic process by which this community orders its affairs. We should be prepared to become active citizens, not just passive consumers of services in keeping with our denominations long-standing commitment to congregational empowerment. And Michael, if we have congregational polity and the denomination follows the congregations and the congregation follows its members, aren't these people agreeing to be the highest seat of the religion today? That's true. This is not a casual commitment that we ask people to make. And that is why we do take the time twice a year to recognize and to celebrate those who have accepted these responsibilities for themselves. And now Lynn Scobie will call out the names of the people who said that they would be here this morning. Good morning. In just a moment I am going to name all of our new members and as you hear your name would you please come and join me in a line up here on the front carpet? Davis Chattala, John Mix, Jenna Hansen, Tim Hansen, Carol Angel, Jan Moore, Susan Nelson, Diana Rodham, Michael Hoon, Tori Nelson, and if there are any other new members who would like to come and be recognized please join us at this time as well. Do you accept the responsibilities and freedoms associated with membership and a Unitarian Universalist congregation? Do you pledge to support this religious community with your words, your time, and your substance? Are you willing to join the members of First Unitarian Society in a common quest for religious and spiritual understanding and for the common purpose of living relevant and compassionate lives? Fellow members, do you accept these people into this community as companions in the spiritual journey? Do you pledge to rejoice with them in times of happiness, to grieve with them in times of sorrow, and to share with them all the blessings of our free faith? We do. Then I invite you to join me in reading our continuing bond of union. We, the members of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, desire a religious organization in the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, which shall make the integrity of life its first aim and leave thought free, associate ourselves together, and accept to our membership those of whatever theological opinion who wish to unite with us in the promotion of truth, righteousness, reverence, and charity among all. And now March will offer the right hand of fellowship to each of our new members, an ancient ritual that connotes full acceptance into the body of First Unitarian Society. And let's give our new members a warm welcome. And now, my friends, we will sing you back to your seats. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. Our concluding words are from the Navajo tradition. In beauty may I walk, all day long may I walk, through the returning seasons may I walk. Beautifully will I possess again beautiful birds, beautiful joyful birds. On a trail marked with pollen may I walk, with grasshoppers about my feet may I walk, with dew around my feet may I walk, with beauty may I walk, with beauty before me may I walk, with beauty behind me may I walk, with beauty above me may I walk, with beauty all around me may I walk. In old age, wandering on a path of beauty, lively may I walk. In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again may I walk. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty.