 which is laid out too much on one side. Where do you think Michael would like to stand with his guitar when he leaves that song? Over here? Maybe a better place. Opposite your guitar? Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other on this wonderfully crisp Sunday morning. And now to warm up the room a little bit. Please turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you'll find inside your order of service. Good morning everybody and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society. Where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. And as we dread the return of cold winter weather but welcome the return of $3 gasoline. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation and it is a particular pleasure to welcome any newcomers, guests, or visitors today. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society I think you'll find that this is a special place. And if you would 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 and we'll take care of you. And speaking of taking care of you and each other this would be a great time to silence all those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your enjoyment of the service. You simply pull it out of your pocket and do something like this. Thanks for taking care of that task. And if you are accompanied this morning by a youngster and that youngster would prefer to enjoy the service from a more private space we offer a couple options for you. One is our child haven at the back corner of the auditorium and the other is a collection of comfortable seats in the commons the lobby right outside the doors where you and your youngster can still hear and enjoy the service. As is the case every weekend today's service is brought to us by a wonderful team of people called volunteers and I'd like to list their names for you so that you can thank them later on as you see them after the service. Please thank David Briles for being our sound operator. Thank Tom Boykoff and Dorit Bergen for being our lay ministers this morning. Janine Nussbaum actually thanked you for coming because she was the greeter upstairs as you arrived today. Our ushers include a team of Cindy Terrell, Michael Losey, Dara Degnan and Caroline Ben-Ferrado. Andrew and Carly Garner are hosting the hospitality hour after the service. John Tews is responsible for watering the pulpit palms up here and the FUS Women's Alliance generously donated the flowers that you see in memory of all those who have passed before us and our tour guide this evening this afternoon today this morning is going to be John Powell. Just a couple announcements before we begin the service. First of all, this is that time of year, the holiday season and our family to family holiday giving program has a wonderful record of providing gifts and food cards to more than 130 families in Dane County to help make their holidays brighter. Next weekend you'll have a chance to sign up for this annual FUS tradition in the Commons after the services next weekend. Stay tuned for more information especially a short presentation between the services next weekend with one of our family to family elves plus a social worker who has worked with that program. Our second announcement involves death. What happens after we die? That's what the curious youngsters in our seventh grade compass points class are interested in finding out from you. They're going to be conducting a poll in the Commons after today's service and they are curious about your beliefs regarding what happens after we die. They are especially interested if there's any among us who really knows the answer to that question. So please participate in that poll after the service and then one final announcement. As you drive home from today's service I'd like you to keep one number in your head and that number is 166 because that's the number of days until cabaret, 166. So please sit back or lean forward to enjoy this morning service. I know it will stir your heart, touch your spirit and trigger at least one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Between the conscious and the unconscious the mind has put up a swing. All earth creatures, even the supernovas sway between these two trees and it never winds down. Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon, ages go by and it goes on. Everything is swinging, earth, heaven, water, fire and the secret one slowly growing a body. Kabir saw that for 15 seconds and it made him a servant for life. I invite you to rise and body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join with me in reading the words that are printed in your program. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine. I am in it as the butterfly in the light laden air. Nothing has to come. It is now. Now is eternity. Now is the immortal life. And now on this lovely November morning, please exchange a warm greeting with your neighbor. And now it is time for the message for all ages. So if any of our youngsters would like to join me in the front. Oh, cartwheels. Almost a cartwheel. You know the story. You've heard the story before. Oh, okay. In the choir. Okay, I suspect that at least some of you have been to a party. Yeah? Was the party lots of fun? Okay. And then some of you, I'm sure, have played a really fun game. Okay? Had a really good time. And I'll bet by the time the party or the game was over, you were saying to yourself, oh, already? Your parents are there. They're picking you up and they're saying it's time to go and it seemed like hardly any time had passed at all. That's kind of a funny thing because, you know, if you're sitting in class and you're doing mathematics problems, your experience of time probably isn't the same, is it? Okay? It may go a little more slowly when you have to sit in class and maybe you're doing something that you don't particularly like to do. Which is not to say that some of you don't like math, I'm sure you do. So anyway, this is a story about time and it's about a woodcarver. A woodcarver who was very artistic. He was extremely good at what he did. And this woodcarver lived in a very ancient city called Kuro. And it had always been the dream of this woodcarver to create an object that was absolutely perfect that did not have any blemishes or flaws or defects in it. It was going to be perfect in every respect. Now, some people would say it's impossible to make anything that's perfect. But this particular woodcarver said, no, I'm going to give it a try. And he decided that he was going to carve a particular object and it was going to be the most perfect staff that anybody had ever seen. What's a staff? What do we use a staff for? You already heard, right? What do you think? For walking, that's right. You use it for walking. It's to help you walk. And particularly today, I've got a really sore hamstring so I could really use this staff. And he also decided, this woodcarver decided, you are right. And if you were going to use it as a weapon, it's called a bow staff because this is actually my son's bow staff. But anyway, to get back to the story, the woodcarver decided that because he wanted this to be perfect, time didn't matter because he knew that sometimes if people get too impatient and too much of a hurry to finish a project, when they get impatient, that's when you make all kinds of mistakes. That's where you miss perfection. And so he said, if my staff is going to be perfect in every way, I'm going to take my whole lifetime to carve it if that's what's necessary. And so he began by walking into a nearby forest to find just the right piece of wood for his purpose. And he picked up and he tossed away stick after stick because it just wasn't quite straight enough. It wasn't quite the right shape to create the perfect staff. And he spent so much time looking for the right piece of wood in the forest that eventually his friends all deserted him. Some of them moved away. Some of them got old and they died. But interestingly, the woodcarver himself didn't grow older by a single minute because he had made no compromise with time. Time stood off to the side and just kind of looked on and allowed him to be forever young. Time just didn't get in his way. Now, before he had found the right stick that was the proper shape and dimensions, the city that he had lived in, the city of Kurus, was in ruins. And so he went back and he said, my goodness, look at this. But he was still determined to carve his staff. So he sat down on a pile of bricks from a fallen house and he began to carve with his sharp carving knives. But before he had given that staff its proper shape, its basic outline, many kingdoms had passed away. And he took his staff and he wrote in the sand with his staff the name of the last king of the last kingdom. And then he resumed his carving, kept on going. And by the time he had given it its proper shape and he had smoothed it and he had polished the staff, the pole star up in the heavens had moved several degrees. And that takes millions of years. And when he had put the finishing touches on the staff, suddenly something very amazing, spectacular happened. The staff grew incredibly large and the astonished woods carver looked on and he could see that it was the most beautiful object that anyone had ever created in all the history of the world. But then he looked down and he could see at his feet there were a pile of wood shavings from his carving and they were still fresh at his feet. And so he realized that in doing his work, the passing of all that time had just been imaginary. It had been an illusion that scarcely more than a few hours had passed since he had begun working on that staff. And then he understood that when the material is pure and when the work you do is pure, when you don't get distracted and you're not impatient, time can seem to expand and reach eternity. And when time no longer matters, when we don't get impatient with our work, something truly remarkable can happen and the creations that we make can be truly wonderful. So the next time you're working on a project, remember that and even if you can't reach perfection, you're probably going to be able to do something a lot better than you've ever done before. So that's my story, but we're going to stay right here because our team choir is now going to sing another song for us. ["Tik Nhat Hanh"] Linda's going to play us a little traveling music and we invite you to now go to your classes and we hope you have a good time today. And so we continue with a selection from the book that introduced many Western readers to the Vietnamese Zen master, Tik Nhat Hanh, the book, Miracle of Mindfulness. A little story that comes from that book. Yesterday, my friend Alan came over to visit me with his son Joey. Joey has grown up so quickly. He's already seven years old and he's fluent in French and in English. He's even using a bit of slang that he picked up on the street. Now raising children here in France is very different from the way that we raise children back in my home in Vietnam. Here, parents believe that freedom is necessary for a child's development. Well, during the two hours that Alan and I were talking, Alan had to keep a constant eye on Joey. Joey played, chattered away, interrupted us, make it get impossible for us to carry on a real conversation. I gave him several picture books for children but he barely glanced at them before tossing them aside and interrupting our conversations yet again. He demands constant attention from grown-ups. Well, later, Joey did put on his jacket and went outside to play with a neighbor's child and so I had a chance to ask Alan, do you find family life easy? Alan didn't answer directly. He said that during the past few weeks since the birth of their second child, Anna, he had been unable to sleep for any extended period of time. During the night, his wife, Sue, would wake him up and because she was so tired herself, she would ask him to check on Anna to make sure that she was still breathing. And sometimes that ritual happens two or three times a night, Alan said. Well, is family life easier than being a bachelor, I asked? Again, Alan didn't answer directly. But I understood and so I asked another question. You know, a lot of people say that if you have a family, you're less lonely, you enjoy more security. Is that true? Alan nodded his head slowly and mumbled something softly and I understood. And then he said, you know, I've discovered a way to have a lot more time than I used to. You see, in the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts and one part of the time I would reserve for Joey. Another part was for Sue. Another part was to help with Anna and another part was for necessary household tasks. And the time that was left over after all of that, I considered that to be my time when I could write or do research or read or just go for a walk. But now something's different. I don't divide my time into parts anymore and I consider my time with Joey and with Sue. I consider that to be my own time. And so when I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own. I go through the lesson with him sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we're doing during that time. And the time for him therefore becomes my time. And the same thing goes for my wife Sue. And the remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself. Alan smiled as he spoke. I was surprised because I know that he had not learned any of this from reading a book. This was something he had discovered for himself in his own daily comings and goings. And then the second reading is a poem entitled Patience by Mary Oliver. What is the good life now? Why look here. Consider the moon's white crescent rounding slowly over the half month to still another perfect circle. The shining eye that lightens the hills that lays down the shadows of the branches of trees that summons the flowers to open their sleepy faces to look up into the heavens. I used to hurry everywhere and leaped over the running creeks. There wasn't enough time for all the wonderful things that I could think of to do in a single day. But patience comes to the bones before it takes root in the heart as another good idea. And I say this to you as I stand in the woods and study the patterns of the moon's shadows or stroll down into the waters that now late autumn have also caught the fever and hardly moved from one eternity to another. And so now something a little different. Apropos of the topic today, I thought to give you a chance to share with me one of my favorite songs by Joni Mitchell. The Circle Game and the words of the refrain are printed in your program. And if you know the words to the verses, you can certainly join in if you've had the chance to memorize those in your life journey. Yesterday a child came out to wander and caught a dragon fly inside a jar. Fearful when the sky was full of thunder and tearful at the falling of a star. Join me. And the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the Circle Game. Then the child moved ten times round the seasons and skated over ten clear frozen streams. And words like when you're older must appease him and promises of someday make his dream. And the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the Circle Game. Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now and cartwheels turn to car wheels in the town and they tell him take your time it won't belong now till you drag your feet to slow the circles down and the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the Circle Game. And the years spin by and now the child is twenty though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true. There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty before the last revolving year is through. And the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't return, we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the Circle Game. Can't return, we can only look behind from where we came in the Circle. So among many of the plains and southwestern native peoples, Coyote is characterized as being a very clever and sometimes an unscrupulous character. But among the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest, those characteristics don't belong to Coyote, who is a southwestern creature, but rather to Mink, the small furry forest predator. And in one Salish legend, Mink is credited with stealing the sun itself and bringing it to his people because previously the sun had only illuminated one side of the world, the other side. And so Mink's half of the planet was swathed in perpetual darkness. It was hard for people to find their way around and they were always cold. And so it was Mink, the thief, who placed the sun high up in the heavens so that people on both sides of the planet could share in its warmth and its light equally. Now everybody was very happy about this and they praised Mink for his resourcefulness. And he was quite pleased with himself and he thought, perhaps there's something else that clever Mink can steal for the people. A very long time passed and Mink saw nothing that was worth his trouble, nothing worth stealing. But then the Europeans came, a new people with lots of power. What do these people have that I do not have that my people do not have? Mink asked himself. And then he saw what it was. The Europeans had something called time which gave them their power. Mink decided that he would steal time. He waited until it was dark. He sneaked into the Europeans' house and there in the biggest room they kept time up on a shelf in a shiny box that made strange noises. And as it tick-tocked away, two arrows on the front of the box moved in circles. Mink could see that this was a very powerful thing and so he took it and he carried it off. And so now Mink and his people had time but they soon learned that it was not the easiest thing to manage. He had to watch the box all the time to see what time it was. He had to keep this key tied around his neck to wind up the box full of time so that it would keep on working. And worse, now that he had time, Mink was no longer able to do all the things that he liked to do, that he used to do. There was no time to fish or hunt. He had to get up at a certain time. He had to go to bed at a certain time. He had to go to meetings and to work when the box told him it was time. And so he and the people were no longer free because Mink stole time. It now owned him and the people and it's been that way ever since. I like that story because it does seem to sum up the human predicament with respect to time. How do we deal with it? How do we use it to our advantage rather than to our detriment? Now we know that an abundant literature exists on time management. And I suspect more than a few of you have participated in time studies, tracking and recording your activities over the course of a week to get a clearer picture of how you are allocating your hours. Opinion polls conducted in industrialized countries show that people complain more about a lack of time than a lack of money or any other given resource. Could this be the evil of our age? Jean-Louis Servin-Schreiber asks, time, he writes in his book The Art of Time, is life much more than it is money? And so can we work with it? Can we cultivate an attitude toward time that reduces our anxiety and enhances our overall quality of life? Well, we must begin by acknowledging that this is a problem that has both a practical and an existential dimension to it, each of which calls for its own unique solution. So we will start with the practical idea, the practical level, because that's perhaps the easiest for us to wrap our minds around. Now, for most indigenous peoples, time is not perceived as being a limited commodity to be precisely doled out according to some predetermined set of priorities. And thus, pre-modern people feel less pressure to accomplish a task, to complete a project within an allocated space of time. And although they certainly do possess an awareness of time, their approach is much more relaxed, much more casual. And sometimes in our own country, because of this, a distinction is drawn between European and Indian time. And I learned in Upstate New York many years ago that there is a certain grain of truth in that comparison during my involvement with an Iroquois cultural organization, I discovered that the value that we Europeans attached to punctuality, getting to the meetings on time, was not always shared by the council's Native American representatives. The meeting began when it began. There are obviously good reasons to be punctilious about time, as anyone knows who has arrived at an airline gate moments after the cabin doors have closed, or failed to meet an important deadline. But if we become time obsessed, as many of us are, tension builds, our stress level goes up, and not infrequently, our performance declines. We don't come anywhere close to perfection. This is a distinctly modern malady because as servant Schreiber notes, our desires have increased much more quickly than the available time. And when it comes to desire, the Buddha teaches, the sky for us humans is the limit. Time, on the other hand, cannot be stretched. It is of a finite quality. Every person has exactly the same amount of time available, servant Schreiber writes, and it's clearly a precious resource because it is also a non-renewable one. But if it is so valuable, why are we so careless in our use of it? We fret, we worry over time, but we also waste a whole lot of it. And even if we make it a practice to compose a to-do list in order to make better use of our time, it seems to dribble through our fingers as we become distracted by the other claims on our attention. In contemporary culture, people struggle with time clutter in much the same way as they do with physical clutter. Our houses and our offices are packed with objects that we hardly ever glance at much at use. They just sit there for years, those objects in all their irrelevance, gathering dust, taking up space. One day, we look around, our eyes are open, we take notice of that. We get a big box, and with a renewed sense of purpose, we start clearing all of that out. And servant Schreiber says that we should treat our days, our weeks in the same way because if we look at our time objectively, it is simply littered with routines and trivial pursuits that contribute precious little to the overall quality of our lives. Out of habit and lacking real insight into our daily behavior, we allow so much of this precious time to simply dribble away. So if we cannot actually gain any time in our lives, we can in fact rearrange it and thus achieve a measure of mastery over it because ultimately, servant Schreiber says, to master one's time is to gain mastery over oneself. And the key here, he says, is similar to the one that governs good business. To make money, you have to spend money. And likewise, to have the time to do the things that really count, we must give time to time, to creating a timetable in other words. And so servant Schreiber says that I make an appointment with time each morning before breakfast, a moment when nothing and no one can distract me, and then in the calm of the early morning, according to a ritual and with the proper tools, I live my day for the first time mentally. So being more systematic is certainly a part of the answer. But a second key to coming to terms with our time-challenged lives is to reframe our experience, the way that Thich Nhat Hanh's friend Allen did. And in their conversation, you will recall, Allen admitted to being oppressed by all of his family obligations, not having sufficient time for himself to meet his own needs. It was as if his wife and his kids were stealing his time, which left him feeling vaguely resentful. But then one day, he woke up and he saw things differently. Instead of dividing his time into all these little parts, giving it away to other people, he was able to look at time holistically. He reclaimed all that relational time, making it hours rather than theirs. And the remarkable thing he said is that now I have unlimited time for myself. But coming to grips with it at a practical level doesn't resolve the existential dilemma that time creates for all of us. Every tragedy we can imagine, Simone Vile observes, comes back to just one thing, time slipping away. We are transient creatures. We know in our bones as the lyrics to one of our hymns puts it, that time like an ever-rolling stream soon bears us all away. We fly forgotten as a dream that dies at the opening of the day. It is at the existential level that religion makes its entrance into our lives. For all the major religions agree that time is at the root of human suffering. And religion claims that it can liberate us from the constraints the time imposes and the fear that it arouses. There is, they say, a higher state of being in paradise, nirvana, in some other rarefied realm where time shall be no more. Now, can we even imagine what this timelessness would look and feel like? Can we even begin to grasp its implications? Because without time, the religion scholar James Kars says, experience is impossible. And without experience, life is impossible. Time is indispensable. And echoing that thought-servant Shriver points to the inextricable relationship between time and change, the latter being defined as simply time-made concrete, change, time-made concrete. And change is the defining quality, the defining feature of the entire physical universe. But here it's important to draw a distinction between time as objectively understood, nature's time, reflected in the grand procession of physical events and changes that can be traced back 18 billion years to the Big Bang. This kind of time plays an important role in mathematical equations. It can be measured by geologists, paleontologists, astrophysicists. That's one way of looking at time, the scientific way. And then there are also the social conventions that we have come to agree upon with respect to time. Rules, shared assumptions that allow us to coordinate our activities and avoid social and economic chaos. But these are culture relative. One civilization parses time according to lunar cycles, while another one chooses solar cycles. And then there's a third way of apprehending time. And that is completely subjective, which is why one person will find a given activity to be completely tedious while for another, the time that they are engaged in that activity simply flies by. And so duration here depends on the individual's degree of interest, the quality of their attention that they bring to the activity, and pain and pleasure. These also play a role in subjective time. Time can pass extremely slowly if you're suffering from a crushing headache, much more quickly in an evening of budding romance. And the experience of time varies with age. When we were six years old, the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas proceeded at a snail's pace. Not so at the age of 60. In some uncanny way, time seems to accelerate as the years pile up. But the very fact that our experience, our subjective experience of time, is so variable, so contingent on our emotional state and our mental attitude, that suggests that there's a way out of this, that we do not need to be time's slave. And so in his book, Flow, University of Chicago's psychiatrist, Mahaley Sikjentmahai, discusses the kind of optimal experiences that can light up any of our lives. At such times, in these optimal experiences, Sikjentmahai says, we are possessed by this deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished in our memory that becomes a landmark for what existence should really be like. And he says, one important feature of optimal or flow experience, one dimension of that is temporal. Often the hour seemed to pass by in mere minutes, he says, and our sense of time bears little relation to the passage of time as measured by the absolute conventions of the clock. And this freedom from time adds to the exhilaration that we feel during these times of complete and utter involvement. Optimal feelings arise when we are engaged in an activity that absorbs our attention, challenges our abilities, and is felt to be supremely worthwhile. And when all these factors come into play, time is foreshortened, at least in our awareness. But even in the pleasurable grasp of flow, we are still operating within time, significantly freer from its oppression but not entirely liberated. And that only happens when we join the company of history's great contemplatives and mystics who suggest a possible solution to the existential problem that time presents. As the Unitarian author Philip Simmons wrote shortly before his death from ALS, we all have within us this capacity for wonder, the ability to break the bonds of ordinary awareness and sense that though our lives are fleeting and transitory, we are part of something larger, eternal, and unchanging. Our journey takes us through suffering and sorrow, but there is a way through all of that to aversion of ourselves that can live outside of time. So what exactly is eternity? Here in the Western world, many people think of eternity as endless time. We use the expression, oh, God, it seemed like an eternity when we describe being trapped in an unwanted conversation or an unrewarding activity. But if we think of eternity in this way, in durational terms, as time stretching out into an indefinite future, and if we apply that understanding to the afterlife, it makes no sense whatsoever. What would we possibly do with ourselves over an infinite stretch of time, James Kars asks? And so the mystics tell us that eternity lies outside of time entirely and that it can be apprehended, in fact, it can only be apprehended in this immediate instant. If you want to know what eternity means, the Zen Master Seppo says, it is no further than this very moment. And according to the mystic poet and philosopher Rumi, the Sufi is the son of the moment. And the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein agrees, saying that eternal life belongs to those who live in the moment. So mystical awareness is accompanied by a new and radically different understanding of time and eternity. But the logic of our own human experience supports the testimony of the mystics. Nothing that we do, if you think about it, happens anywhere, but in the present, in the moment. We cannot touch, we cannot see, we cannot feel anything that resembles a past or a future. And even when a memory surfaces, we are still looking at a trace of the past within the present. And so Ken Wilber says that time is not a problem to be rid of, it is an illusion which doesn't exist in the first place. If you direct, in your direct and immediate awareness, there is no time, no past, no future, only an endlessly changing present, shorter than a millisecond, yet never coming to an end. All direct awareness is timeless awareness. So important and as practical as they are, the social conventions that we have developed around time, these obscure that fundamental reality. As does our acute awareness of the inexorable aging process and of life's impermanence. And so to quell our existential anxiety, an intellectual grasp of eternity is never going to be enough. We need to feel eternity in the depth of our being. And for that, for that to happen, a spiritual practice is absolutely necessary. A proven technique which faithfully applied has the power to pull us out of our fixation with past and future and back into the present. As Father Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk and a teacher of Centering Prayer has said, eternal time is present in every moment and this is what makes every moment of ordinary time extraordinary. In actual fact, everything is happening in every moment and that's what awakening is really all about. From the standpoint of physics, time remains a paradoxical phenomenon and a clear understanding of it continues to elude even the most brilliant scientists. But that does not prevent any of us from taking certain practical steps in which we can gain mastery over time in our own lives and with patient practice we may even find our true home in the timeless, that place of existential security and comfort that humankind has always been searching for. Blessed be and amen. This is the second week in which we will be splitting our offering with the local organization Vets Journey Home. You can read about their good work in our program today. Please be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope to this time and place. We bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves carrying with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. At this time we would like to note that long-standing member of First Unitarian Society and of Prairie Unitarian Society, Bill Burns, passed away in his sleep on Monday night. He had been in significant discomfort in recent years but had remained alert and in good spirits and the memorial service will be held in his honor in the Landmark Auditorium on Saturday, December 6th at 1 o'clock p.m. with a reception to follow. We join Bill's wife, Joan, daughter, Becky and the rest of his family in lamenting his loss. And then plans are afoot to celebrate Henry Hart's 98th birthday in the Arboretum Center next Sunday from 3 to 6. Please come but note that his health has been declining the last week so we hope that you will keep him in your thoughts. So Henry Hart is a celebration of 98 years in the Arboretum Center next Sunday from 3 to 6. And for any joys or sorrows that remain unarticulated that occurred to you as I was sharing these other two, we hold those with equal concern and compassion in our hearts. Let us join now in just a moment of silence in the spirit of empathy and hope. So may our coming together today for this brief time may it serve to lighten our burdens and expand our hopes. I invite you now to join with me in singing our closing hymn number 94. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. The Mississippi River empties into the gulf and the gulf enters the sea and so forth and none of them emptying anything, all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow. It is the great circulation of the earth's body, like the blood of God's, the river in which past is always flowing. Every water is the same water coming round. Every day someone is standing at the edge of this river staring into time and whispering, only here, only now. Blessed be and amen.