 Please join me in a moment, few moments of silent meditation. And now if you would join me for our in-gathering hymn, number 391, the words are printed in your order of service. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. 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 Dorrit Bergen, 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, or wherever you happen to be on 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, which is directly across the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and bring your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for people holding teal, stoneware, coffee mugs. These are members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. These 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 land across the parking lot, please meet near the large glass window on the left side of the auditorium. To welcome children to stay for the duration of the service, however, because it is difficult for some of us to hear in this lively acoustical environment, our child haven and commons are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas. And speaking of noise, this would be a good time to turn off all electronic devices. I'd like to acknowledge now those individuals who help our services run smoothly. Our lay minister today is Ann Smiley. Our greeter was Hannah Pinkerton. The person serving refreshments is Jean Hills. Our tour guide will be Richard Miller. And I would like especially to thank three people who jumped in at the last minute to serve as our ushers. And that would be Gail Bliss, Ann Smiley, and Kathy Hoover. Please note the announcements on the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events of the society and provide more information about today's activities. Again, welcome. We hope today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your hearts, and stir your spirit. We begin our service with the words of the African-American preacher and professor of homiletics at Boston University, Howard Thurman. How good it is to center down. To sit quietly and see one's self pass by. The streets of our minds see with endless traffic our spirits resound with clashings with noisy silences while something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting law. With full intensity we seek air the quiet passes a fresh sense of order in our living, a direction, a stronger sure or purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning to our chaos. Floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence there is a sound of another kind, a deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear. It moves directly to the core of our being and our questions are answered, our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round with the peace of the eternal in our step. How good it is to center down. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Please join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in your program. As we light this chalice may its flame illuminate the inspiration waiting to be discovered in our hearts. As we light this chalice may its light remind us of the hopes to be revealed in the efforts of our minds. As we light this chalice may its warmth renew the dreams brewing in our spirits. May this flame be a symbol of the reality that we can and hope to be. Now I invite you on this fine January morning to turn to your neighbor and extend to them a warm greeting. Enjoy their creations as they march through the auditorium. The parade isn't over yet. Might have been easier if we'd saved the parade till the offering. After all the excitement I invite you now to join me in a few minutes of meditation. So let us be gentle with ourselves just now for a few moments. Let us release ourselves from a world that is too much with us. A world often too noisy, too frantic, too demanding, and too judging. Let us be gentle with ourselves just now. And for a few moments release ourselves into the calm still world that waits to receive us. A world where the quiet is broken only by the sounds of our own making by those of our children chattering, by the ice cracking or the snow crunching in the wintry world outside. And within this welcoming quiet, this personal solitude, let us befriend ourselves where ordinarily we would unfairly and endlessly berate ourselves for our imperfections. For just a few moments let the tongue of harsh judgment be silent. We will do better tomorrow. We will rise to the occasion. We will surprise the world with our goodness and our grace, but for now let us simply rest in the gentleness of this moment. Letting the healing hand of self-understanding and forgiveness touch us with its peace. Let us return to the silence for a few moments more. Blessed be and amen. Please remain seated as we sing together hymn number 90. Been working with and will be working with of solitude was one selected by two members of our congregation, Pat and Charles Stinger. And they purchased this particular topic last year at our annual Cabaret service auction. So I thank Pat and Charles for the inspiration that their idea has provided me. And so this from Henry David Thoreau's classic Walden. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. And nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. Now while I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. And sometimes when I compare myself with other men it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they. I have never felt loneliness or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude but once. And that was a few weeks after I came to live in the woods when for an hour I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential for a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood and I seemed to foresee my recovery. I was suddenly sensible of such sweetness, such beneficent society in nature in the very pattern of the raindrops in every sound and sight around my house. An infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me has made the fancy advantages of human neighborhood insignificant and I never have thought of it since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. No men frequently say to me I should think you would feel lonesome down there and want to be nearer to folks rainy and snowy days and nights especially. And I am tempted to reply to such why would I feel lonely? What do we most want to dwell near to? Not to many men surely. The depot, the post office, the bar room, the meeting house, the school house, the grocery. Here men most congregate but rather we to the perennial source of our life went in all of our experience we have found that to issue as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in all direction. This will vary with different natures but this is the place where the wise man will dig his cellar. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time to be in company even the best is soon weary some dissipating. I love to be alone. I never have found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. In any case, I do have a great deal of company in my house especially in the morning when nobody calls. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs out loud. I am no more lonely than the dandelion in a pasture or a beanleaf or the sorrel or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the north star or the south wind or an April shower or a January thaw or the first spider in a new house. Written 150 years later but in a similar vein Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek. The sun was low in the sky upstream. I was sitting on the Sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skitter schools. And again and again one fish and then another turned and for a split second crossed the current and flash. The sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn't watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else and it drew my vision just as it disappeared. Flash like the sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade a sparkling overdone and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. And then then I noticed white specks some sort of pale petals small floating under my feet on the creek's surface very slow very steady. And so I blurred my eyes and I gazed up toward the brim of my hat and I saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up and roll up like the world's turning mute and perfect. And I saw the linear flashes gleaming silver like stars being born at random down the rolling scroll of time. And then something broke and something opened and I filled like a new wine skin I breathe an air like light. I saw a light like water and I was the lip of a fountain that the creek filled forever. I was ether a leaf in the Zephyr flesh flake feather bone. And when I see this way I see truly as Thoreau says I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in the silence of the empty stadium and I see the game purely. I'm abstracted and dazed and when it's all over and the white suited players lop off the green field to their shadow dugouts I leap to my feet and I cheer and I cheer. The secret of seeing is to sail on a solar wind hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail whetted translucent and broadside to the nearest. In his 1897 short story entitled An Outpost of Progress, a story set like his later novel The Heart of Darkness in Equatorial Africa, Joseph Conrad describes the experience of two European proprietors of a remote trading outpost. Carlier and Kayerts have journeyed deep into the jungle to procure precious ivory from the natives. And despite the many hardships involved in this lifestyle, the prospect of acquiring extraordinary riches proves irresistible to these two men. And yet before long the isolation that they feel in this trackless tropical environment, it begins to wear on them and then to overwhelm them. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life were like a great emptiness Conrad wrote. From time to time tribesmen would appear in their dugout canoes eager to do business, but for long stretches of time Kayerts and Carlier were completely on their own and they find the absence of any semblance of civilization to be unbearable. Stretching away in all directions Conrad continues, surrounding this insignificant cleared spot of the trading post, immense forests lay in eloquent silence of mute greatness. Two years pass and then during a petty argument Kayerts kills his companion and then shortly afterwards he hangs himself. About the stories denouement the philosopher John Gray comments, removed from their habits these men lose the ability to go on living. Society has always taken care of them, forbidding all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine. They could live only on condition of being machines and so when Kayerts and his companion ventured into the Congo, the aliens they met were not the indigenous inhabitants, but rather themselves. They met themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives and stripped of the veneer of European civilization, they had nothing whatsoever to hang on to. Prolonged solitude brings us face to face with ourselves, but what if that self is little more than a hollow shell? As the Swiss philosopher poet Amiel wrote in his journal, the man who has no refuge in himself, who lives so to speak in his front rooms, he is one of the crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. Now human beings are of course quintessentially social animals and for most of our species history on this planet we have relied on our collective strength. Individually our ancient forebears didn't have a whole lot going for them, they were pretty much at the mercy of larger predators and of the natural elements. And so in order to make maximal use of our superior brain power, we had to collaborate, we had to band together. We were instinctually aware of our individual vulnerability, and so our forebears hated the prospect of solitude of being alone. In pre-literate cultures, the only the witches and the shamans felt comfortable spending time by themselves, University of Chicago psychiatrist Mahaley Sikjent Mahai observed. Throughout much of history, the worst fate that could befall the individual was to be exiled, to be ostracized. The Latin locution, the Latin word for being alive, Sikjent Mahai says, was inter hominem essay, which literally means to be among men. Whereas to be dead in the Latin was inter hominem essay decinerate, to cease to be among men. Exile from the city was, next to being killed outright, the most severe punishment for a Roman citizen, no matter how luxurious his country is stayed. Now in more recent times, incarceration has served pretty much the same function. Incarceration was introduced by Quakers and other reformers in the 18th century. And prison was offered as an alternative to the barbaric punishments of mutilation and death. Now prisons did exist in earlier times, but generally they served only as way stations for criminals or heretics who were awaiting execution. But the 18th century reformers had something else in mind besides punishing people. Solitude, they believed, afforded the scoff law the opportunity to reflect upon and repent of his misdeeds. To mend his ways, solitude could be religiously therapeutic. And thus the cells in which prisoners were held resembled those found in monasteries and contact with other inmates was strictly limited. Now solitary confinement or administrative segregation continues to be used today, perhaps in excess in today's prisons. Security staff will remove inmates from the general population either as punishment or in order at times to protect them. For most of these men and women, however, the results have not been as salutary as positive as those early Quakers had hoped they would be. Anthony Stor writes, beyond a few weeks in solitary, many detainees become completely apathetic. Others lose control of their emotions to the point that they believe that they are going utterly mad. And I can testify to the accuracy of Stor's observation because when I was a third-year seminarian, I spent a summer working as a chaplain intern in a northern California prison. And as a chaplain, I was one of the very few staff allowed on the segregation units, the isolation floor of that facility. And the men that I encountered in those cells, some of whom had spent years there, they could barely communicate. Many of them were incoherent, but they were always grateful for the cigarettes that I was allowed to provide them. Now not all inmates suffer from enforced solitude. For instance, Jean Harris. She was the headmistress of a prestigious girls' academy in northern Virginia. But she was convicted of murdering her ex-lover, a prominent physician, in the early 1980s. Harris declared near the end of her 12-year confinement, I am one of the lucky ones, because solitude is my friend. I can think when I'm alone. With people, I'm more likely to react. In here, she says, I get my space where there is the least of it, in my six-and-a-half by 10-foot cell. Neither Anthony Gray, a British journalist detained in communist China for two years, nor the writer Arthur Kessler, who spent time on death row in fascist Spain, neither one of them regretted the years that they spent in solitary. Both said that they preferred not to live in a cell that they had to share with another prisoner. And each felt that being alone put them in touch with something truly profound. Both had intense experiences of some higher level of reality, Anthony Storr says, and their solitude enhanced their appreciation of, and their sympathy for, their fellow men. These two men discovered in their prison cells what the trappist monk, Thomas Merton, learned in the deep solitude of the monastery, that here I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. And yet most human beings have great difficulty adjusting to solitude, whether it's the solitude of a Spartan prison cell, the solitude of a desert, or a deep jungle, or even the strange streets of a large city. Even as children, we dreaded being told, go to your room, as punishment for misbehavior. And probably we spent the hours in that room feeling horribly sorry for ourselves. But what about the exceptions? Why can some take advantage of an experience that repels so many others? Well, according to Mahay Jixxent Mahay, much depends on the richness of the individual's inner life. The intellectual, the imaginative, the emotional resources that we have managed to acquire over the years. A disciplined mind. The cultivated ability to process emerging thoughts and feelings systematically in a coherent fashion. That is absolutely essential if we are entering into the solitude. Otherwise, the result is likely to be mental chaos. Thrown back on ourselves, denied access to a lot of outside stimuli. Other people, entertainment, the mass media. And denied of these things, our attention begins to waver. The mind wanders, distressing thoughts and images surge out of the unconscious. And we enter a state described by Jixxent Mahay as psychic entropy. One can survive solitude, he suggests, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention in order to prevent entropy from destructuring the mind. Now, there are those who've learned how to do this, and they not only survive, but they make extraordinarily good use of their time alone. Robert Stroud. He was a man when young who was given to murderous rages. He was sent to prison for murder. And while he was in prison, he then murdered a prison guard. He spent 42 of his 54 years in prison in solitary. Ten years into his sentence, he was out in the prison yard, and he noticed three fledgling sparrows, their nest had dropped to the ground. He rescued them and took them to his cell, and he raised them, and the rest is history. Robert Stroud, the bird man of Alcatraz. Subsequently, he became a recognized expert in avian diseases and was described near the end of his life as a model of rehabilitation and personal improvement. Stroud's passion for his discipline and the way that it ordered his consciousness that redeemed his time in prison. Outliers like this, Robert Stroud, Gene Harris, Arthur Kessler, outliers like this aside, the fact is that despite our distaste for it, solitude can enhance the quality of anybody's life. And those who have sought it out and those who are able to abide calmly within it will testify to the value it has added, the hidden resources that it has revealed to them. And so, for instance, the well-known essayist, Pico Eyer, spoke recently in the New York Times about his introduction to this unfamiliar experience. He went for a visit to his doctor, his annual physical, and he was informed that he needed to begin limiting his intake of junk food, get up off the couch, and do 30 minutes or so on the treadmill three times a week. Well, having been told this, the 58-year-old Eyer began to consider something else. All the junk that he'd been putting into his undisciplined mind. And he recognized that his need for this constant stream of outside stimulation in the long run, that wasn't doing him much good. And he confided as much to an older friend, and the latter said, Pico, just sit still for a few minutes every day and give your imagination a chance to take a walk. Eyer gave it some thought, and he took his friend's advice a step farther. He had planned to go on this exciting vacation over the holidays, but decided instead to spend that time alone in his mother's house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And so he says, as others hurried off to the airport bound for Rio or Hawaii, I sat in my little room and watched the sun burn on the water below. And the light flooded into every space every afternoon, and then at the magic hour the whole place began to glow. And moments carried a depth and a weight, both of emotion and association, that I knew they'd never have in Las Vegas. It's not so much that we lack food. I remember Simone Weil once suggesting, it's that we will not acknowledge that we're hungry. At the end of this brief article, Pico Eyer predicts that someday, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, the same sober physician will come into the examining room bearing news that no fitness regime is going to cure what ails him. And then Eyer says, the only thing, the only thing I'll have to turn to will be all that I've done while going nowhere, everything that I might have stored in some less visible account. The capacity to make solitude a profitable experience, a positive one, is indeed a sign of maturity. Here we are able to get in touch with our truest and most essential selves. Here we are able to ascertain what it is that feeds our soul, what we need, what not what someone else has told us that we need. It's important at intervals to put some distance between ourselves and the madding crowd, the surrounding culture that's continually goading us to dance to its own tune. Solitude, John O'Donohue writes, is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. And it's different, he says, from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely aware of your separation. And solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. Only in solitude can you discover a sense of your own beauty, a beauty frequently concealed behind this dull facade of routine. In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure that you have always sought elsewhere. Even if it is as desirable as O'Donohue describes, solitude has become harder and harder to find. Most of us live far from the worlds that Henry Thoreau and Annie Dillard occupied, and most of us are firmly tethered to one or more electronic devices whose pull on our attention is almost irresistible. With a disciplined mind, it is possible to experience genuine solitude even in the midst of a crowd. But with those smartphones in our pockets and the tablets in our backpacks, who among us is still open to the possibility of a little private reverie? Walk into a public park, sit on a public bus, count how many, including yourself, are surfing the Internet, reading email, or writing a text message. Today, Michael Harris laments, claiming silences of our lives are all filled and the burning solitudes are extinguished. This is not entirely a matter of personal choice, I regret to say. For like the proverbial sorcerer's apprentice, technology has now assumed a life of its own and is programming us to live in a world of unremitting connection. Perhaps some of you have heard of teams. T-E-M-E-S. That was a word coined by the British psychologist Susan Blackmore. Teams are technological replicators analogous to genes that are copied, varied, and selected as digital information. And in the manner of human genes, the most successful teams give rise to more sophisticated and more addictive technologies. And so over time, the ability to limit our exposure to and control over these technologies, it progressively weakens. We push technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive outcomes, Michael Harris writes, which means that it requires a real effort of will to put those devices back in our pockets. In the end, you may find that it's well worth the effort. Now, let me just say, this has never been an either or proposition. The experiences of solitude and community complement each other, each contributing to the quality of the other. We have much to learn from within, Parker Palmer says, and we have much to learn from others. So we need community and solitude simultaneously because what we learn in one mode can check and balance what we learn in the other. Together they make us whole just like breathing in and breathing out. And so despite his lavish praise for solitude, Thoreau himself was hardly a hermit during the two years he spent at Walden Pond. He died frequently with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family. He could often be seen strolling the streets of Concord, chatting with the shopkeepers. There is, as the Buddha would say, a middle way between these two poles, a middle way where life fulfills itself and we reach our full maturity. Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, they were public figures, but they prepared themselves for their respective ministries by spending extended periods by themselves. And even the ancient desert monks of Egypt and Syria, the wandering sannyasa of India preoccupied with their solitary prayer and meditation lives, even they needed each other. At intervals these athletes of the spirit would meet to share their meager resources to discuss their struggles and to reinforce each other's discipline. As the Roman writer Seneca put it, our distaste for the crowd will be cured by solitude and our boredom with solitude will be cured by the crowd. Although Seneca's words may sound rather archaic to the citizens of today's wired world, that doesn't make them any less valid. May we each take the time to test the validity of those words for ourselves. May it be so. This is the second week that we are sharing our offertory with the UW Odyssey Project. They have a display out once again where you can learn more about the wonderful work that they are doing with students to prepare them for gaining their degrees and achieving a better vocational future. Please be generous. 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 selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. So now we would acknowledge FUS member and former church administrator Susan Koenig who informed us of the death last Tuesday of her mother Shirley Jean Koenig. Shirley passed away peacefully at a Grace Hospice Center at the age of 92. A memorial service in Illinois is planned for next Saturday and in the meantime we hold Susan in our hearts during this difficult time, this time of loss. And in addition to that just mentioned we would also acknowledge any unarticulated joys and sorrows that occurred to you as I was speaking we hold those with equal compassion in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a few moments more 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 invite you now to rise in body or in spirit as we sing together our closing hymn number 352. We have lost the ability to be profitably alone. We have lost it through disuse. If we retire to be alone it is no delight our minds do a hop, skip and jump and we find ourselves unable to concentrate. The bed's unmade, the letters unwritten they set up a clamoring demand and we experience none of the tranquility that we had come apart to enjoy. But this is only to say that the discipline of solitude is difficult and so the only remedy is to learn the art anew. Like swimmers we must learn not to thrash about but entrust ourselves to the buoyancy of the silence. Blessed be.