 I now invite you into a moment of centering silence. A moment to turn our hearts and minds to the people of Paris. A moment to turn our hearts towards love and compassion for all those impacted by hatred and violence, toward all those who are grieving this day, and toward our dream of becoming a world of justice and peace. And now, if you will remain seated and join in singing our in-gathering hymn, number 1009, we will sing it through twice. Good afternoon, and welcome to First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in a 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 Carol Rowan, 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 and 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 in the commons area of the Atrium Edition. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. In addition to our fellowship, we have our second Saturday potluck this evening, so I invite all of you to join us for that as well. If you are accompanied by a young child, please remember that if they need to talk or move around, the loja area to my right is a good place to retire with them. At this time, we ask that you turn up all beepers, cell phones, and other electronic equipment that might cause a disturbance during the hour. I now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. This evening, Steve Gregorius is working as sound operator. I see Bob Radford is a lay minister this afternoon. Our RE greeter today was Ann Vetter, and our ushers are Becky Burns and Carolyn Sanders. Please note the announcement in the red floors insert in your order of service, which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today's activities. And in addition, I have a few extra bonus announcements. Attention, young adults looking for relationship and community. The FUS 20s and 30s group is looking to foster new leadership and new forms of connection. As a beginning step on this journey, the 20s and 30s group will be hosting new authenticity games on Thursday, November 19. It will be just like the Hunger Games, except the goal is to get to know one another and have fun. So actually, nothing like the Hunger Games. But arbitrary points will be awarded, silly prizes will be given out, and snacks and drinks will be provided. Hope to see you there in the Gables on November 19 at 7 PM. Join us for the annual Thanksgiving potluck dinner at FUS on Thursday, November 26 at 2.30. Plan to spend the afternoon with FUS members, their families, and friends. We will eat dinner at 2.30 PM. Please contact our organizer, Donna Kenjelosi, to talk about what you can bring and offer of service. Her information is available at the welcome information table in the comments. And speaking of Thanksgiving, next Sunday, November 22 is the 24th FUS Thanksgiving food drive. Bring frozen turkeys, frozen hams, non-perishables, and or a check made out to think Vincent de Paul food pantry between 8.30 AM and 11.15 AM on Sunday, a week from tomorrow. Look for the U-Haul truck in the parking lot. Also, next Sunday, is art in the right place. We will be setting up for the art fair immediately after the Saturday service next week. So we'll be asking people who are able to stay after service to help us clear out on the benches. If you're able, please plan to stay for about an hour to help us prepare for this annual event, which is a fundraiser from our Children's Religious Education Program. Finally, FUS volunteers of all ages are important to the Road Home, a family shelter program. There will be a Road Home informational session tomorrow at 10.15, right here in the landmark, for just 45 minutes. So if you're curious, or if you need your first training to volunteer, please meet us here. Again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. A piece of possibility. This is Love's Hearth, The Home of Hope, a shelter for questioning minds and compassionate hearts. When we gather here, we stop. We pause. We center ourselves. We free ourselves from the compulsion of projects to finish, work to be done, things to accomplish. We leave ourselves alone for a time. When we gather, we journey deep down into that quiet center where no voice is heard. We live for a brief time on an island of peace. We apprehend the world from a quiet center. Here is the center of the world. In this fragile moment is the culmination of all that has been and the promise of all that will be. Here in our grasp, in this moment, is the center of the world. And if you will rise now in body or spirit to join in our words of chalice lighting, and if you will join in by reading the italicized lines. As the kindling of this chalice calls us to community, let there be light. As the flame of this chalice reminds us of our dreams, let there be light. As the glow of this chalice encourages us to hope, let there be light. And before we join together in song, if you'll take a moment to turn and greet your neighbor. Poppleton, do you all have you read the Poppleton the Pig books? Yeah, I like Poppleton the Pig books. So this is a story about a time when Poppleton decided to go camping. So one day, it was spring, Poppleton decided that he was going to sleep outside in his yard in a tent. Have you ever done that right in your yard? That's my kind of camping because then you're close to the bathrooms. In the backyard, right, yeah. So Poppleton's friends thought that this was kind of silly. As they watched him set up his tent, they would ask him questions like, why would you sleep outside when you have a house? Asked his friend, Hudson. Aren't you going to get cold? Said Cherry Sue, his neighbor. And Gus, the mail carrier, told Poppleton that he thought he was going to catch pneumonia. But Poppleton didn't listen to any of them. He just kept putting up his tent, even as his friends walked by, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. They just couldn't imagine why he would sleep outside instead of in his warm, cozy bed. So that night, he brought out a whole bunch of quilts and lots of pillows to his tent. He had a flashlight and a journal and some really good books. And long after everyone else was asleep and the world was dark, Poppleton was still awake. Now sometimes he was reading, sometimes he was thinking, and sometimes he was just paying attention. Poppleton discovered that he loved the world at night. Now in the morning, he went back into his house. He had a cup of cocoa and some buttered toast, his favorite breakfast. And then he went to find Cherry Sue. He brought Cherry Sue outside to his tent and he showed her a beautiful yellow flower that had opened up when she was sleeping and he was paying attention. He sang her songs that he heard the insects singing in the night while she was sleeping and he was paying attention. And then he even made funny faces as he tried to show her. That's right, like that. He tried to show her the faces that he saw in the surface of the moon while she was asleep and he was paying attention. And finally he drew her pictures that were made by the shining sparkling stars as they moved across the night sky. He had never quite noticed them moving before and he was really excited to share with her all that he learned. And then Poppleton went back inside to his cozy bed, closed his blinds, pulled his covers up to his chin and slept in his bed all day. Everyone who passed by noticed the dark house. They shook their heads and they said, that's silly Poppleton. Everyone except Cherry Sue. The next night she was outside in the tent with Poppleton so they could pay attention together. Yeah, I like that one. Have you ever paid attention so close that you noticed something happen? Like a flower open or a star move or the moon change? You've noticed a lot of stars except for the north star? Are rocking. Yeah, have you ever noticed anything when you were really paying attention? When we were watching the blood moon rise up, that was really paying attention. You watched the moon move in the sky, wonderful. Well, I hope you get lots of chances to pay attention like that. We're gonna turn now and watch the choirs sing and then when they're done, we'll head on out to classes. For the sounds of spring. My mouth was too full of words to speak. My hands too full of work to do. I took myself away for a walk in the woods which surround my cathedral and my shrine, my prison and my workhouse. The air was cool but not cold, rare and refreshing. The birds had found voice and the sky was blue, interrupted by clouds adding depth. The ground was now firm underfoot, green was forcing its way everywhere, colors blue and gold and rose competed for my attention. It was too beautiful to bear. Life was too intense, too good, too beautiful to be believed. And there I was on a walking meditation in the woods. And this story from Victoria Safford. One morning on my way to a monthly professional meeting, I was companioned on the southbound highway by a man in a pickup truck who was brushing his teeth as he drove. He was in the fast lane, I was in the other one and we were both traveling at about 65 miles an hour. During sharing time with my colleagues, I confessed that this metaphor is an apt one for me in the fall. Compared with the real or imagined lethargy of summer, September is the fast lane. Suddenly there are deadlines again, lots of them and appointments and events. School starts, everyone leaves for college and for some reason every major road and artery downtown is being repaved at once. It is a time of year when if you want your teeth brushed at all, you'd better do it while doing something else of equal importance. It's a time of year when the sound of typing fills the background of telephone calls because the person on the other end is writing letters or answering email while we talk. Understand the impulse and I deeply sympathize. After all, I was finishing a muffin in my lap when my hygienic fellow traveler passed me on the highway. But I know that brushing your teeth while you drive is bad religion. Doing almost any two things at once in the same moment is bad religion. Rushing is bad religion. And so as the leaves turn and the apples ripen, I resolve again to notice and bid you to notice too. I resolve again to go more slowly to do one thing and then another, to watch the sky and hear the geese and greet them as I do everyone I meet one by one by one. There are hawks to see now on the southbound side. There's sumac flaming red. There are skunks, porcupines, shadows of deer and the tender fog that hugs the mountains just off the exit heading west. I'll brush my teeth some other time. And if you will rise now in body or spirit for our next him, which is number 352, she asked, could you carry me across? The current is strong today and I'm afraid I might be swept away. The first monk remembered his vows never to look at or touch a woman. And so without so much as a nod, he crossed through the heavily flowing currents and soon reached the other side. The other monk showed compassion and bent down so that the woman could climb upon his back to cross the river. Although she was slight, the current was strong and the rocky bottom made it a difficult crossing. Reaching the other side, he let the woman down and went on his way. After some hours journeying down the dusty road in silence, the first monk could no longer contain his anger at the second for breaking their vows. How could you look at that woman? He blurted out. How could you touch her? Let alone carry her across the river. You've put our reputation at stake. The first monk looked at his companion and smiled. I put that woman down way back there at the riverbank but I see that you're still carrying her. This tale is ancient and timeless because it points to a very real struggle in our lives. Learning how to live in the here and the now when most of the time our minds and our attention firmly rooted in the future or in the past. We live in these spaces without the realization of all that we are carrying with us. Like that second monk, there's much that we still carry way past the time when we needed to have set it down and let it go. It seems like everywhere you look these days that you are being asked to come into the present to pay attention, be here now. Be here now. Ram Dass, beloved spiritual teacher, wrote that famous book with that title in 1971. In it, we find the story of his journey of transformation from Dr. Richard L. Part to Ram Dass. And we hear his exhortations to learn how to live in this moment. How to be truly present for our lives. This moment, this precious now, he tells us, isn't something you can put off for a hoped for future. It isn't allowing ourselves to get stuck in the past. It's an acknowledgement that we don't want to live life as a flashback and we can't fast forward through the difficult or the painful or the boring moments to get to the really good parts. It is the realization that this is the only moment we have and the place to be if we are to be fully and authentically human. Educator and author Math Dewar shared in a recent TED talk the story of a time in his life when he was 17 years old and he was spending time with his grandfather who was in his final days. He recalls watching his grandfather's struggle with his mortality and confronting the reality that he had an infinite amount of time left to him. He remembers the day when he walked into his grandfather's room and he found the elderly man sitting in his favorite chair staring out the window and weeping. He asked his grandfather if he was okay and when the answer was no, he was quick to ask if he needed to call the doctor or someone else for help. No, said his grandfather, I don't need medical help. What I've realized is that I have lived 84 years and I don't know what this life is about and I don't have time enough left to fix it. After his grandfather's death, Matt found an old black and white photograph of his grandfather fishing in Florida when the man was in his early 20s. In the picture, he stands tall and proud at the end of a pier and behind him the Atlantic Ocean stretches on and on into the horizon. The Florida sun is beating down on his face and the look on his face makes it clear that he is right there in that moment, living life, nowhere else he would rather be. As Matt stared at the photograph, he became disoriented by the contrast between the youthful man in the picture and the image he held in his mind of the weeping elderly man. The more he looked at that photo, the more he couldn't reconcile how one reality became the other. What happened in between? Where was the disconnect? Any of us could have one of these moments with a childhood photograph. I have one of my own, an image of me when I was about five. My father was taking a photography course for fun. He needed to do a portrait. So what he did was take a photo of me lying down on this bright red and pink blanket that clearly screams 1970. And he told me funny jokes and stories. I have the biggest smile on my face. All is right in my world. That moment is the only one that matters. This is a gift of childhood. I notice the disconnect when I'm with my own kids. They're in the present, fully aware, fully alive, attention on one thing and one thing only. I'm a million miles away remembering something that I believe went wrong, trying to figure out how to fix it or planning for the week or the month ahead. They notice the disconnect. When Sam was small, and he would be telling me a story, he would often say, Mom, listen to me. And over my shoulder, I would say, I am honey, I'm listening. And he would come over and put his little chubby baby hands on either side of my face and look right in my eyes and say, no mom, me, I need you to listen to me. My small child could easily tell that my body was present, but my mind was somewhere else. It happens to us all the time. Right now you might be thinking about an interaction that you had with another driver on the way here. You might be thinking about a child or a friend who was in crisis. You might be very anxious about what will happen in the future. We are thinking about how much we have left to accomplish today and we're hoping service doesn't run long. You might be thinking about the salad that you need to make for potluck. You might be wondering if anybody notices it about you or you might be judging this or that about someone else. Gloria Steinem once said, I've always had two or more tracks running in my head. The pleasurable one was thinking forward to some future scene, imagining what should be planning on the edge of some fantasy. The other played underneath with all two realistic fragments of what I should have done. There it was in perfect microcosm, the past and the future coming together to squeeze out the present, which is the only time in which we can fully be alive. These past and future tracks have gradually dimmed until they are rarely heard. More and more there is only the full glorious alive in the moment caring for everything sense of right now. I wish I could stand here and tell you that I have mastered this skill of being in the right now. Yet most of the time I live in the land of debating the past and attempting to predict the future. This means as Mark Twain said so well, I have lived through many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. So we live in the past, we live in the future and we wish time away. We say things like, I can't wait until this week is over. I'll be so much happier next month, next year when school is done, when this project is complete, when the house is clean, when the kids are grown, on and on and on until the day comes, when all we wish is to have those hours, days, years we wished away back and available to us. We are distinguished from other living beings by our ability to remember the past and our ability to project, imagine into the future. Over millennia we have developed this thinking brain, but this way of thinking can be a double-edged sword. Consider, for example, that a zebra runs for its life when chased by a lion, but once the chase is over, it shivers and quickly returns to grazing. This is seldom the case for humans because we constantly think, analyze, fantasize, predict, anticipate. These new brain capacities can cause us to spend half of our day dwelling on how terrible it would have been if the lion had caught us. We might run all kinds of images and fantasies through our minds, which are terrifying. And then we worry about whether something similar might happen tomorrow. What if we don't spot the danger next time? What if our loved ones are out there? What if, what if this is the downside of this thinking brain? Indeed, we might be so caught up in our self-terrifying stories and be so distracted that the next time the lion can have us as an easy dinner, here is what we need to remember. We are more than what has happened to us in the past and our interpretations of it. We are so much more than our plans and anxieties about the future. Learning how much more truly requires that we experience our lives in the present. Now one of the reasons we distract ourselves from this moment is that life is at times painful. Suffering exists and some days we can't face it. It is easier to distract ourselves with screens or long to-do lists or retail therapy or anything that will keep ourselves from feeling the pain, the discomfort, the negative feelings. But as the psychologist Carl Rogers wisely said, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself and my life just as it is, then I and it can change. When we resist or push away or try to ignore this moment, whether joy or pain, it will only return and movement, growth, it isn't possible. The key is to learn how to hold ourselves and hold our very experiences, all that we are, all that we've done, our choices, our actions, all of who and what has brought us to this moment. Hold all of this in a cradle of compassion and kindness. The call to presence is a call to the recognition that the only moment we have is now and that we must make the most of it whatever it is. Matt Dewar tells us that what he learned from his grandfather is that we need to learn how to harness the passing of time instead of hiding from it. Learn how to use its passing as an opening to ourselves as a means of finding well-being and depth. We do this, he says, by becoming aware of the moments when we are truly here, aware of what he calls focal moments. These are the moments that bring into focus the meaning of our lives, moments in which the distance between who we are and who we want to become shrinks. Notice these focal moments and create openness, space, empty time in your life to create room for more and more of these moments to happen. What is worth your time? What is central and what is peripheral? What is your life about? And how can you spend more of your precious time truly being in it? When we open ourselves to the present moment, we open our ability to be responsive, creative, live with less grasping, less judgment, less fear. We learn how to look on our own lives and the lives of others through a lens of kindness. We recognize that change is the only constant and we are at peace with growth and with change. Then we can tap into the well of wisdom that lives inside each of us. Then our ability to enjoy and appreciate this exceptional life we have been blessed to have is truly possible. So I'll leave you today with this poem from Roger Keys, which was inspired by the paintings of an 18th century Japanese artist whose name was Hokusai. Hokusai says, look carefully. He says, pay attention, notice. He says, keep looking, stay curious. He says, there is no end to seeing. He says, look forward to getting old. He says, keep changing. You just get more who you really are. He says, get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself as long as it's interesting. He says, keep doing what you love. He says, every one of us is a child. Every one of us is ancient. Every one of us has a body. Every one of us is frightened. Every one of us has to find a way to live with fear. He says, everything is alive. Shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees. Everything has its own life. Everything lives inside us. He says, live with the world inside you. He says, it doesn't matter if you draw or write books. It doesn't matter if you saw wood or sit at home and stare at the shadows of the trees in your garden. It matters that you care. It matters that you feel. It matters that you notice. It matters that life lives through you. Contentment is life living through you. Joy is life living through you. Peace is life living through you. He says, don't be afraid. Turn and face the life before you. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand. Let life live through you. And I now invite you into the giving and the receiving of today's offering. It is an outreach offering. The recipient is Dry Hooch of Madison. You can find out more about them in your order of service. We thank you for your generosity. You will rise now and body your spirit and join in our closing hymn number 350 because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing, live your way into the answer. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the post loop.