 Good morning. Let's start off with a moment of centering silence and now some musical centering. The words are in your program, and if you'd like the music, it's in your book. In an accepting and unitarian universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Rob Savage. I'm president of the board of trustees here at Christian Utterian. And on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation, so whoever you are, wherever you happen to be in your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library directly across from the center doors. Bring you drinks and your questions and members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding a teal, stoneware, coffee mug. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. Experienced guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service. So if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition to our National Landmark Meeting House, please meet near the large glass windows over here on the left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However, because it is difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively, acoustical environment, our child haven and commons are excellent places to retire if your child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. And speaking of noise, it'd be a good time to shut off all those buzzers and ringers and chirpers that could interrupt our service. I'd like to acknowledge those folks who are helping out with this service today. And for this service, we have David Briles who is the sound operator. Tom Boycott is the lay minister. The greeter today was Trina Shuler. Mary Savage, Tom Dolmich, and Melinda Carr are the ushers. Chip Quaid and Nancy Crosseth are doing the all-important coffee drill in the back there in the kitchen. Flowers were given this morning by John McKevna and the tour guide will be John Howell. And as your president, I would also like to ask each of you to consider how you could help out by volunteering for any of these important jobs. They are not rocket science. I have a script up here, otherwise I wouldn't be standing up here talking to you. The ushers have a job to do, but they talk beforehand. The sound operator does take a little bit of training, but it's a lot easier than it used to be in the old reading house where you had to control the sound depending on how loud the speaker was. So they're all pretty straightforward and it would really be helpful if you contributed that small amount of time and effort to help us make this a wonderful place. Okay, let me find my scripts to see where I'm going next. Please note the announcements in the red floor. I have one announcement here from Scott Prinster and Kelly Crocker. Join FUS ministers past and present as Scott Prinster and Kelly Crocker bring you a program on Transylvania, the land beyond the forest. This gorgeous land, bounded by the majestic Carpathian Mountains, is known less for the growth of Unitarian Universalism and more for its association with vampires, mystery, and magic. Next Sunday at 2 p.m., you can learn more of our rich history in this amazing place. You can find out more in your red floor's border of service. And I also have a special announcement here from James Morgan who's gonna come up and talk for a second. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I too have a script and that's a good thing. Cause I can get quite loquacious, I like saying it. Okay, so my name is James Morgan and I'm a member of the FUS Moles and Subministry team. We are working to fight mass incarceration in Wisconsin. Every year the Department of Corrections revokes or sends back to prison almost 4,000 former inmates revoked not for committing new crime but because they broke one or more rules of supervision. Things like using a cell phone or a computer without proper authorization, missing an appointment or failing an alcohol or drug test. Does breaking some of these rules really mean that the person is now a threat to the safety of the public? Do we really need to lock these people up for years at a cost of $150 million per year? The impact of these decisions in human cost is devastating. Individual lives are destroyed, families are often torn apart and public safety is rarely improved. Our FUS Moles' team invites you to a presentation about the issue of the abuse of revocation in Wisconsin's prison system. One week from today, next Sunday, March 13th, at 10 to 11 o'clock in the landmark auditorium. Here's the good part. Coffee and refreshments will be served. We hope you will join us to learn more about this problem and how we can push for reform. And I thank you ahead of time for the many of you who I know will be in attendance for this meeting. So have a good morning. And I wanna thank you all for welcoming me to FUS, to your spiritual community, and it is a blessing for me to be here. Thank you. Let's turn back and follow up. Again, welcome. We hope you in today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. Let's come from Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist teacher in the Shambhala tradition. We are tempted to think that the point of life is to pass the test or to overcome some problem. But the truth is that things never really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. They come together again. They fall apart again. Life is just like that and the healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen. Room for grief, room for relief. Room for misery and room for great joy. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Rob, what you do with the honors? And as Rob is lighting the flame of our faith, would you please join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in the program. May God, the mind that sees our faults, the tears that sting our wounds, the laugh that soothes our aches, and the love that redeems us all be illumined by the light we kindle in this house of inspiration and healing. And in the spirit of that healing, please turn to your neighbor and exchange with them a warm greeting. Please be seated. I had neglected to instruct the men to be singing the base part for that hymn, but I think some of you already knew that, so that's great. I'd like to invite the children to come forward for the message for all ages. Very good. You know, when I first moved here to Madison, it was in the summer of 1988, long time before any of you were around. And when we got here, it was really, really hot. As a matter of fact, it was over 100 degrees for like seven days in a row. And it was really hot and there wasn't any rain and everything was really, really very dry. All the grass was dying, all the flowers were dying. And so this is a story about something similar that happened a long, long time ago to a group of Indians called the Comanche Indians. And the Comanche Indians live in the Great Plain States, kind of west of here and south of here, and this is the story. So the Comanche Indians were experiencing this very bad drought. And a drought is a time when it's not raining and things get really dry. And it hadn't rained for several months and the crops were all dying in the fields and there weren't any fruit on the trees. And when that happened, people didn't have anything to eat. And so both the animals and the people, they were dying too. And so the Comanche people, they called on the Great Spirit and said, Great Spirit, why is this happening to us? Our land is dying. We are dying. Did we do something to make you angry with us that you won't let it rain? Did you do something to make us suffer this way? Please bring the rain back so that this drought will end. And otherwise, your people are all going to be destroyed. And so the Comanche people, they prayed and they performed the rain dance, which usually helped to make it rain, but it didn't. And they waited and they waited, but no rain came. And both the young and the old were so, so thirsty and they were really suffering. Now in the tribe, there was this one little girl who was very hungry and thirsty too, but she was still very much alive. And this girl had an unusual name. Her people called her, she who sits alone. She who sits alone. And that was because she didn't seem to be very interested in playing with any of the other little girls and boys in the village. In fact, she would just sit and she would watch as her people struggled to find enough to eat and to drink as they danced their rain dance to try to make the rains come. And she held her beloved doll, she had a doll and she held it very, very close to her chest. And this doll was her closest companion. In fact, she thought that that doll was her only true friend. And she had dressed her doll in this very soft deerskin clothing. And on its head, she had put bright blue feathers, the feathers of a bird called a blue jay. Now she who sits alone, this little girl watched as one day the older people, the elders from her tribe went to a nearby mountain and they climbed up the mountain to talk to the great spirit and asked what they needed to do to get the rain to come back. And these elders were gone for several days and for several nights. And when they returned, all the people of the tribe gathered around them to hear what the great spirit might have told them. Well, we're not exactly sure, but this is how it came back. So the elders said, for many, many generations, this is what the great spirit told me. The people of the earth, including you, have taken whatever you have needed or wanted from the earth and you have not given anything back to the earth. And that is why the earth is in such great pain. And that is why there's no rain because nobody's ever giving anything back to the earth. And so the great spirit wants us to make a sacrifice. And so we must build this great big bonfire and everybody in the tribe must go back to their tipi and find that possession, that thing that is the most cherished, that they love the most and bring it to the bonfire and they must throw it into the fire and it will burn up and then we scatter the ashes to the four winds. And when this has been done, when these sacrifices have been done, then the rains are going to come back. Well, the people thanked the elders for their wisdom. They returned to their tipis to search out for their most beloved possessions. And so there was a great hunter and he went into his tipi and he saw his bow and his arrows and he said, I don't think the great spirit probably wants my bow and arrows. And there was a mother who went back into her tipi and she had this beautifully woven blanket and she said, I don't think the great spirit wants my blanket. And the medicine man went back to his tipi and he had all these really, really powerful herbs that he used to heal people and he said, I don't think the great spirit wants my herbs. And so it continued. Every person went back to their tipi and they found a reason not to give the great spirit their most beloved possession. But then there was this little girl, she who sits alone and she held her doll in her arms. She held it very tight and she whispered to it, I know that you are what the great spirit wants and I know what I need to do. And so that night, while everyone was asleep, she who sits alone left her tipi and she walked to the great bonfire that her people had built and when she had reached it, the fire was burning low and she sat down and she talked to the great spirit. Here she said, this is my doll. This doll was a gift from my mother and my father. It is my most precious possession. Great spirit, please accept my doll. And so she stirred the dying father until the fire, until it burned hot again and it made her very, very sad. It was very painful for her to lose her doll but she thought of her friends and even her grandparents who had died in this drought and then summoning all of her courage and before she could change her mind, she threw her doll into that bonfire and eventually the fire died down and she gathered the cooling ashes, the ashes of her doll and she scattered them to the four winds and then she was so tired that she laid down and she fell into a deep, deep sleep. The rising sun awakened her and she who sits alone looked around, she was kind of confused. She didn't know what had really happened the previous night. It took her a moment to remember and then she remembered that she had thrown her doll in the fire as a sacrifice and then beside her she noticed something that sitting beside her near the fire was a bright blue feather, the feather of a blue jay. And then as she was bending close to look closer at the feather, what did she feel on her cheeks? Drops of rain. And from then on, she who sits alone was given a new name by the people of her tribe. She became known as she who loves her people for she alone of all the people in the tribe had given that which was most precious of her in order to save others from pain and destruction. Sometimes when there's something really important for us to do for other people, we have to give away something that's really, really important to us and we hope that that doesn't ever have to happen but sometimes it doesn't. This is a good story to kind of remind us that it can be worthwhile. So thank you for listening and we're gonna stay right here for a moment as our team choirs sings for us another song. Thank you choir. And as our children now leave for their classes, Linda's gonna play a little traveling music to accompany you on your way. Our reading this morning comes from a collection of essays, one written for each day of the year by Mark Nepo and this is entitled Being a Spiritual Warrior. It is true that there is much sadness in the world but there is a difference between feeling the pain of things breaking, ending, drifting apart and the sharper pain that comes from measuring the inevitable events of life against some ideal of how we imagine things are supposed to be. In receiving hardships this way, life is always a falling off. Life is hard enough without viewing all of our pain as evidence of some basic insufficiency that we must endure. There is a beautiful Tibetan myth that helps us to accept our sadness as the threshold to all that is life changing and all that is lasting. And this Tibetan myth affirms that all spiritual warriors have a broken heart. Alas, that they must have a broken heart because it's only through the break that the wonder and the mysteries of life can enter into us. So what does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? Well, it's far from being a soldier but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur. And it is by honoring how life comes through us that we can get the most out of living, not by keeping ourselves out of the way. The goal is to mix our hands with the earth, not to stay clean. I remember in getting to know a new friend how over lunch we shared our stories in an increasingly personal way. And as I kept taking my turn, I heard myself telling of loved ones who had died, of my own struggles through cancer, of a marriage that despite the deepest commitment did not last, of years of being rejected as an artist, losing a teaching job that was dear to me, suffering a brutal estrangement from my parents. And just as I was beginning to feel this strength come over me for facing life and being authentic, my friend wiped his mouth and he said, what a sad life you have had. It took me some time to withstand his judgment and his pity, but I looked at him across the table and I kept breathing deeply through the break in my heart. In daily ways, we are judged and discounted and even pitied for the glories that only we can affirm. Because in the end, life is too magnificent and it is too difficult for us to give away our elemental place on the journey. And I would invite you to remain seated as we turn to him number 315. The year was 1982. And I was looking forward to running in my first Boston Marathon. I had qualified for that race the previous fall in Harrisburg with a time well under the two hour 50 minute threshold and I had been training diligently throughout a snowy upstate New York winter. But then six weeks before Patriot's Day, when the race is traditionally held, I strained my Achilles tendon, rather severe injury. Climbing stairs was painful. Running was completely out of the question. Working out on a stationary bike was the best that I could do to try to maintain my fitness and the tendon gradually became less tender. And so by early April, I felt confident that I could run the 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to the Prudential Center in the heart of Boston. Maybe, maybe not. And so with 4,000 others, including legendary Marathoners Joan Benoit and Bill Rogers, I towed the starting line on one of the hottest mid-April days on record in Boston. At 15 miles, better runners than me were cramping up and walking off with a course. I, on the other hand, soldiered on. Coming off Heartbreak Hill at the 21 mile mark, with five miles still to go, my calves and my hamstrings were tightening and huge blisters were forming beneath the sweat drenched racing flats that I was wearing. To this day, I do not remember the last harrowing half-hour stumbling down Commonwealth Avenue and the finish line at the Prudential Building remains a blur. I do recall lying in a cot in the recovery tent surrounded by other depleted runners, many suffering from dehydration, many hooked up to IVs. A masseuse was working on my cramped and painful calf muscles while another was treating and bandaging my oozing blisters. It was well over a half hour before I could even stand up and hobble to the place where Trina and I had agreed to rendezvous. Now, in addition to the foot and the leg pain that persisted for several days, I lost four toenails in the wake of that race. It was a month before I could even jog again, several months before I was able to run a five kilometer race. And yet, 12 months later, I was back in Hopkins as the starting gun released racers for the 87th Boston Marathon. In his book, Long Distance, the environmental writer and advocate, Bill McKibbin, describes his own passion for endurance sports, cross-country skiing in his case. And if anything, skiing 30 or 50 kilometers in the dead of winter is, I believe, more challenging than marathon running, but the experience is in many ways comparable. To finish means running through what athletes call the wall. That point in the race where the tank is just about empty and the pain from overexertion is intense, but mustering every ounce of willpower, we press on. Rich Kenna is a former American track champion in the 800 meters, one of several athletes and trainers at McKibbin interviewed for his book. Kenna described for McKibbin the mindset of runners competing at various distances. The thought process he says of a 400 meter runner is, I want to get around the track as fast as I can. By the 800 meters, it's I want to get around the track as fast as I can without slowing down in the middle. The longer you go, Kenna says, the more time you have to think, to think about stopping, quitting partway through. And that he says is why the battle for 250 third place in the marathon can be just as gripping as the battle for first in a 400. Now I ended up running 10 marathons before calling it quits. None was as agonizing as the first of five that I ran at Boston, but each and every one of them produced its share of pain and those endless internal arguments about whether to call it quits to spare myself and to simply drop out. I never did. But then our son Kyle was born and I no longer had the time or the motivation to train properly for those long races. And so in that important sense, my son saved me from myself. I still run, but today I cannot imagine making a comparable effort, subjecting myself willingly to so much discomfort. But back then, you know, back then it felt important. It felt like a meaningful compliment to my professional and my personal life. I was stretching myself physically, which in turn bolstered my self-confidence and my ability to face difficulties in other aspects of life. Now you know at one time, but not so much more recently, it was commonly believed that peak physical and athletic performance demanded pain, painful preparation. And this was true whether one was preparing for a marathon, a triathlon, or enduring the Army's boot camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one-time world-class bodybuilder, former Mr. Universe, governor of California. Schwarzenegger began training with weights when he was 15 years old and he was taught that pain means progress. And so he said, every time my muscles grew so sore from a workout, I knew that they were growing. But this relationship, this association of pain to progress, is hardly confined to the athletic arena. David Mason teaches literature at Colorado College. He's a former poet laureate of Colorado. And he says, of the suffering I have experienced in my life has been so intense, I would not wish it on another person. Going through a divorce, he writes, I felt at months, for months, as if I was living with an ax buried in my heart. I had weeks at a time when I was suicidal, but by God I would not give that up for anything. It has fueled my writing. It fuels my empathy for other people. It increases the joy that I feel when I come through it and I'm still alive. And so it is a mistake, David Mason argues, to avoid this pain, to anesthetize ourselves. Although this is what Americans are typically want to do. Sweeping pain under the rug, he says, it seems to me to be kind of a living death. Mason's perspective was shared by Benjamin Franklin, who once wrote, those things that hurt, instruct. And for others, it not only instructs, pain redeems. For instance, the Roman Catholic monastic tradition features countless saints for whom self-imposed physical pain had become a sacred obligation and for them a daily discipline. Saint Teresa of Avia fasted for days and weeks at a time. She whipped herself. She rubbed her body with stinging nettles. Henry Suso carved the name of Jesus into his chest. He had an iron cross studded with nails pressed into his back. Peter Damien, an 11th century Christian bishop, said, what a joyful, unique spectacle if the heavenly judge looks down and a man flogs himself to his depths. And a 19th century spiritual handbook described pain as the purest and most ideal form of happiness. Such seemingly masochistic behavior emulated by our own saintly mother Teresa still practiced by members of the church's stricter orders. Such painful practices were regarded as distinctive marks of extreme holiness. The motto of such people might well have been no pain, no celestial gain. As the Harvard historian Stephen Greenblatt explains, this was a central part of the eschatological drama performed within human life, aiming at the bodily presence of the suffering of Christ. What sure method of imitating Christ than turning oneself into the limping image of the scourged and crucified Lord? And such practices were hardly confined to Christianity. In observing a Muslim holiday known as Asura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, frenzy devotees will whip themselves and they will cut themselves until they bleed profusely. The Sue Sundance also includes a physically painful component because in its traditional form, the skin of the dancer's chest is pierced with a rawhide thong, which is then tethered to a central pole around which the dancers move. And prior to developing a more moderate approach to spiritual development, the so-called middle way, the Buddha had himself adopted the severe ascetic practices of a Hindu yogi. But he then became convinced that the physical body and the senses did not have to be completely subdued for the spirit to be liberated. Eventually those yogic practices practically killed the Buddha and he reconsidered this whole notion that self-inflicted pain somehow hastened the enlightenment process. And yet, the Buddha also taught that pain and suffering, dukkha, are constants in the unfolding of human existence. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward is the way that the author of the book of Job put it. But if suffering is inevitable, as the Buddha taught, we certainly don't need to add more to it. A more sensible approach the Buddha believed is to come to terms with it, to figure out how best to manage it. And we can begin that process, the Buddha suggests, by looking at our lives more objectively, which means recognizing that pain is part and parcel of conscious, sentient life. But that pain, whether emotional, physical, or spiritual, is compounded by the desire for things to be other than they are. Unable to accept the terms of existence, we may say to ourselves when we're experiencing pain, this can't be it, this is wrong. But if we step back from ourselves and from our personal preferences about the way we think life should be, we might say to ourselves, wait a minute, what if this is it? And then we can begin an honest and an earnest search for antidotes. Now it goes without saying that not everyone's experience of pain is going to be the same. Some of us have a higher threshold for physical pain than others, a requirement perhaps of marathon running. Likewise, we are not all equally susceptible to emotional pain. Empaths experience another person's pain almost as acutely as their own. Sociopaths, on the other hand, seem completely inured to it. But whatever our personal level of sensitivity, we are all indiscriminately familiar with the sensation of pain. And one of the ways of managing effectively is to prevent that pain from rising to the level of suffering or as one writer describes it, wretchedness. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. An old adage reminds us. So what then constitutes suffering? That species of pain that can truly make our lives miserable, if not unendurable. Well, according to some schools of thought, the crux of the problem is not the pain itself, it's what the mind does with it. When we make pain the enemy, refusing to acknowledge that it is a part of us, then, as Rabade observes, then we add to that pain this layer of negative judgments, add that to the basic foundation of physical or emotional discomfort. John Kabat-Zinn is a mindfulness teacher who has worked for decades in pain management. And he says that pain, really, when it comes down to it, is not a simple thing, it has three dimensions to it. The sensory, the emotional, and the cognitive. Kabat-Zinn's work convinces him that if the emotional or the affective and the cognitive aspects of pain, if these can be dealt with, if they can be neutralized, then the physical sensations will themselves become less acute and one's suffering reduced accordingly. Now it strikes me that at the emotional and the cognitive level, three factors contribute to and exacerbate the pain that produces suffering. One is a lack of acceptance. Two is isolation. And three is the inability to extract any meaning from that experience. With respect to acceptance. Kabat-Zinn counsels us to put out the welcome mat rather than bar the door when pain comes to visit. You change your relationship to pain, he says, by opening yourself to it. And Mark Nepo offers the example of someone who having stubbed his or her toe suffers for several days from severe foot pain. And as a result, he says, oftentimes that person's entire orientation toward the world will shift. The problem, he says, can become everything and the miserable individual then becomes oblivious to the same beauty and the same blessings that were so readily apparent to him or her before that accident occurred. The whole world is now reduced to my poor little toe. And this is typically what happens when we aren't able to accept that a certain measure of pain is simply part and parcel of living. We chafe against it. We feel ill-used, victimized, which contributes then to making our lives more unhappy, more fearful, and more contracted. Isolation, the absence of concerned caring individuals, that also compounds the discomfort. Job, he's sitting there on his dung heap all alone. His children are all dead. He's covered with painful sores. His wealth is gone. And rather than sympathize with his plight, the three friends who remain to him convince Job, try to convince him anyway, that he must have done something to deserve his wretched fate. And so Job feels utterly alone, even God seemingly deaf to his entreaties. All suffering has one thing in common, Christian Wurtenbaker writes, separation, isolation from the world. Some of you may have read Atul Gawande's new book, Being Mortal. Gawande is a surgical androconologist, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and he recently wrote in this book about his father, also a physician, and his father's struggle with terminal cancer. He had a disabling tumor in his spinal column, and both Gawande and his father were anxious to find some kind of medical relief. And so they consulted with two specialists in the field. The first person they talked to was very informative, briskly professional, and also somewhat impatient with this stream of questions that the older man was asking him. Look, the specialist said at last, look this tumor you have is dangerous. If you want to proceed, I'm an expert and I'm here to help. If you don't, well, that's your choice. So they went to a second specialist. The experience was rather different. He exuded no less confidence, was equally competent. But Atul Gawande said, he had this way of looking at people to let them know he was really, really looking at them. He was a rather tall fellow. He made a point during the appointment of sitting down so that he and the Gawandis were talking to each other at eye level. He didn't fidget. He didn't turn around to look at his computer monitor. He patiently answered all of the questions that were posed. And then the specialist asked the afflicted man, what do you hope for here? What are you the most afraid of? And even before the visit was over, Atul Gawande says, my father had decided this is a man that I can trust. The point is, is that we can feel very much alone even in another person's presence if that person seems to be indifferent to our individual humanity. Suffering is in part existential, Sally Tisdale notes, made worse when no one seems to care. If nothing else, and often it seems as if I do nothing else, I at least try to see the other person. And then finally, there is the problem of meaning. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, he who has a why to live can endure any how. And it is true that suffering is easier to bear when it doesn't seem purposeless, when it doesn't seem gratuitous. And some religious traditions like Christianity offer guarantees to the faithful that their pain is meaningful because it will bring them closer to Christ, it will reinforce their faith. And for his part, the Jungian psychologist, James Hillman suggests that our soul grows and is fulfilled through our pain and suffering. That's what makes us fuller, stronger human beings, Hillman writes. As a general rule, I might propose that pain experienced on behalf, not of ourselves, but of some external cause can be born more easily than pain that simply compromises one's own comfort. When that pain is incurred in the pursuit of some worthy external objective, we may well conclude that, hey, the pain was worth the price, it feels somehow legitimate, it is less of a burden. We may not be happy about that pain, but because it is meaningful in some sense, it doesn't feel like suffering. Sacrificing her most cherished possession for the sake of her people was painful for she who sits alone, but did she suffer? The legend would indicate otherwise. Now, this being the time of year when we ask all of you to spend a little time thinking about this institution, the First Unitarian Society and your commitment to it, I'd like to end by asking you to remember. Remember what? That this is a place of connection, it is a place of community, where we discover others who will look at us, who will bestow their attention upon us, who will give us a piece of their caring. And this is a place that we can come to when life feels somehow a little thin and we hunger for deeper meaning. And it is true that we do not have a one-size-fits-all answer to the riddle of existence, but we have resources that you can draw upon, open-minded people you can dialogue with, fellow pilgrims who will walk beside you in your own quest for richer and deeper understanding. Now, I don't know that pain is always to our advantage. I doubt that it does. I do not think that it always leads to personal gain. Sometimes pain is just pain. But I do know that here at FUS, there's always something to be gained, no matter how much pain you might happen to bring here with you. Blessed be, and amen. Your order of service indicates that this would be the time for sharing cares of the congregation, but there were none entered in our book, so we will proceed directly to our offertory and we hope you will be generous with your gifts to Madison Urban Ministry. There is a table outside in the comments that describes the wonderful work they're doing in our community. Please be generous. This is Alyssa Ryan joint FUS for about nine years. My husband, Mike, joined a couple of years after me. Our daughter, Winnie, was born into this community a little over four years ago, and the little girl here who's been kicking me throughout the service is set to arrive next month. As most of you are aware, FUS is in the midst of our annual campaign, and as you've probably figured out, I've been asked to share with you why my family chooses to give of our time and money to FUS and to encourage you to reflect on how to do the same. And while I hope my broader message is relevant to everyone this morning, I especially hope that it resonates with some of our younger families, which are often busy with the work of raising children, perhaps not always feeling entirely established in their careers, maybe even foregoing some income to allow a parent to be at home and looking for ways to connect to a community, but unsure how much to put into that commitment. Let me take a couple of minutes to tell you how I grew into our FUS community. First of all, I love church services. I know not everyone does, but I've always really enjoyed them at every age, at pretty much any church I've attended. I love to sing hymns, and I really value the meditative atmosphere of that special time each week. So it's fair to say that when I first joined FUS, I found everything I wanted from church in the auditorium each weekend. But after a few years, I wanted to meet more people in our community and be more involved. So I started teaching RE classes. With this added involvement, I started having more questions about the organization of FUS and how it functions. Why did they do this? Why don't they do that? Why do they put resources into this instead of that? And my curiosity about what they do gradually grew into the feeling of investment and eventually the realization that they was me. I am them. We're all them. We are the people who make decisions about this congregation and put in the work and the financial support that allows FUS to thrive. I can't say why it took me so long to make this realization of my own role and responsibility. I grew up watching my parents give generously to their church, maybe it was just difficult to grasp that I'm approaching the age that I remember my parents being when I was young. So with this newfound sense of investment, I started attending more parish meetings and thinking about how my pledge each year makes a difference. Last year, I joined the growth task force, which explores new ways to grow our congregation. And I'm learning more and more about how FUS functions. And I have to say that I'm increasingly satisfied that we're doing a pretty darn good job. We've built a wonderful community and we're served by an outstanding staff. As Michael said, today is the day of promise and our annual campaign committee has asked each of us to make a financial commitment by today to allow FUS to plan and make the best use of our contributions in the coming fiscal year. In my own view, I don't think every religious community strikes the right balance when asking for funding from the congregation. Speaking of pain, some put excessive pressure to give beyond a level that families feel comfortable with. Others are so afraid to approach the topic of money that they can barely create a spiritual community for their congregants and certainly don't have the resources to make an impact in the greater community. I think FUS asks our members to give in a thoughtful and responsible way. So as you consider the amount that you'd like to commit to our community this year and in the spirit of thoughtful and responsible giving, I just wanted to share a couple of my own families' experiences but of influenced our giving. Two years ago, we made a pledge that fit our family's budget right up until I had to leave a job. My husband was at home with our daughter and so we temporarily went without income for a few months. I hated to do it, but I called and asked to cancel a portion of our pledge that year and my request was met with only support from FUS staff. The next year with our family in a more stable position, we increased our pledge. This year I'll be taking some unpaid time off to get to know this little one. So our pledge will stay the same and we hope to increase the next year. Life doesn't always throw you a steady predictable income increase but if you did see your family's income increase this year, consider whether there may be room for an increase in your pledge. Like many, we also increased our pledge after a couple of years of testing the waters most of us probably don't dive into a new organization giving as generously as we could without knowing what that organization's significance is to ourselves, our family, and our community. So it's been important for us each year to reflect on how our relationship with FUS has changed when deciding on a pledge amount. There are lots of different ways to think about pledging. I'm always tempted to add up all the things that I get from FUS, a high quality service with inspiring reflections and music each week. The opportunity to sing in a wonderful choir. Weekly children's choir and RE classes for Winnie. Fantastic lectures and workshops throughout the week and high quality childcare for all of it. The list goes on. And I don't think that's a bad thought experiment but I know that FUS is not just the things that I personally take from it. It's a spiritual home for over 2,000 people. It's an important participant in social justice movements in our local community. And it's also one of the biggest congregations in the country that supports the important work of our larger religious community. We've all chosen to be part of this church and contrary to assumptions outside of it, sometimes about UUs, I don't think that's just because we get to believe whatever we want. In fact, I think our religious principles are some of the most challenging to actually follow. And our community at FUS challenges us to think, discuss, and take action based on these principles in order to make the world a better place. If you've already made a pledge this year, thank you. If you haven't had a chance to yet, like me, you can join me in doing so today. I'll be at the annual campaign table right out there after the service, first making a pledge and then available to answer any questions about the annual campaign along with Monica Nolan, one of our newest staff members. Please come fill out a pledge form or share your thoughts and ideas about the campaign or the FUS community with us. Thank you. Now I would invite you to turn to our closing hymn in the teal hymnal. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. We close with these words from the poet Alejandra Perez. The journey is long and treacherous, the roads narrow, the cliffs steep, the rocks jagged, the hills soft and the answers few, the questions many and the hands are many and strong. Strong hands to shelter and to catch me as I fall as I make mistakes. So many hands to shelter and catch and clap and touch and slap and hold. So many hands to shake and take and hold and let go and fall through the fingers of the hands, so many strong hands. It's good to be on this road. It's no longer a maze. It's no longer a search. It's a road and I'm traveling on it and learning and feeling as I go. I know there's no cheese at the end. There isn't any end just as there was no beginning but I do have hands to touch and to hold and to let go to clap, slap, tap and give me shelter. Blessed be and amen.