 Good morning and welcome to First Unitarian Society. My name is Roger Birchhausen and I'm one of the ministers here today. I'm joined today by our music team and that's Drew Collins, Linda Warren and Heather Thorpe, our video team, Daniel Kearns and Stephen Gregorius, our lay minister worship associate, Brian Rainey and the Pepper Avery family who will lead us in our chalice lighting. It is a joy this morning to kick off a new incarnation of First Unitarian's worship associate program. Members of our worship associate team will be helping to lead services most weeks in June and July. Their opening words each week will invite you to join them in exploring how the theme of the service interacts with your spiritual journey. The vision of FUS is growing souls connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist principles in our lives in this faith community and in the world. We are so glad to have you join us virtually today. We invite you to come to the financial forum immediately following today's service. The financial forum is an opportunity to learn more and reflect on the finances at First Unitarian Society. We affirm that our financial decisions like the budget that we'll be considering in this next week is an opportunity for spiritual and ethical reflections so we really hope you'll join us in that opportunity. You can find information on how to access the financial forum on our home page and that's fussmedicine.org. We will not hold the virtual coffee hour after the service but instead have the financial forum. I invite you now to join in a moment of silence to center yourselves, to bring yourself fully, body, mind, spirit to this virtual gathering. Good morning. I'm Brian and I'm a member of FUS. Most of my time here has been virtual because I joined just a few months before the pandemic started. This past year has been challenging in many ways. It's heartbreaking to think about the millions of lives that have been needlessly cut short by this awful disease. It's painful to remember the images of people storming our country's capital building. And personally, it's difficult to navigate these things in a time of social distancing when I can't spend very much time in person with the people and the communities that I want to stay connected with, including FUS. One thing that I do on the hardest days is I sit down at my piano and I just play. And instead of practicing, I play songs that I might have played a thousand times before. This can go on for hours because I lose track of what time it is. I might even lose track of where I am. So for me, just playing piano is a way to calm myself down. But it's also liberating because it feels like for just a moment I'm stepping away from the challenges of this world. And then when I'm back in this world, I feel like I'm more ready to take on whatever comes next. I'm really grateful that recently it was safe for me to spend a few weeks with my family out of town. And on the night before I came back to Madison, my mom and I watched the new Pixar movie, Soul. I won't give much away, but one thing that happens a lot in the movie is that people get in the zone. And when that happens, their soul goes to another place. So when you get lost in something, like playing piano, your soul goes to this other place that's outside of the physical world, outside of your body. And as I watched those souls go to the zone, I thought to myself, I know that place. I invite you now to light a chalice or a candle in your home as the Pepper Avery family leads us in words of affirmation. We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown. These rise in body and or spirit to sing our opening hymn, number 18. What wondrous love is this? Wondrous love is this, oh my soul, oh my soul. Wondrous love is this, oh my soul, such bliss. And take my soul, we'll sing. To mend a heart, go one stitch at a time. Some hearts need a little bit of thread, and others need the whole spool. If there is a snag, remember there are helping hands all around you. You might mend a heart more than once or twice, so trim the loose threads, try something new, and don't give up. Because the more patches and seams there are, the bigger and stronger a heart can be. How to mend a heart by Sarah Gillingham. I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving, where we give freely and generously to this offering, which sustains and strengthens First Unitarian Society and our work in the world. You'll see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll also see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Today's reading is a poem by Nancy Schaefer called Mending. How shall we mend you, sweet soul? What shall we use? And how is it in the first place you've come to be torn? Come sit. Come tell me. We will find a way to mend you. I would offer you so much, sweet soul. This banana, sliced in rounds of palest yellow atop hot cereal, or these raisins scattered through it if you'd rather, would offer cellos in the background, singing melodies Vivaldi heard and wrote for us to keep, would hold out to you everything, colored blue or lavender or light green. All of this I would offer you, sweet soul. All of it or any piece of it might mend you. Would offer you sweet soul, this chair by the window, this sunlight on the floor, and the cat asleep in it. I would offer you my silence, my presence, all this love I have, and my sorrow you've become torn. How shall we mend you, sweet soul? With these I think gently we can begin. We will mend you with a rocking chair, some raisins, a cat, a field of lavender beginning now to bloom. We will mend you with songs, remembered entirely the first time ever they are heard. We will mend you with pieces of your own sweet self, sweet soul, with what you've taught from the very beginning. What is the soul? There's not a common Unitarian Universalist definition of soul. A good number of Unitarian Universalists, including no doubt some folks at FUS, don't believe that such a thing as the soul exists. That's okay. The essential nature of our faith is pluralistic. If you don't find the term useful, I invite you to do some translating. We all do that all the time in UU congregations. This keeps us spiritually flexible and limber. I define the soul as the essence of who a person is. Their body, mind, and spirit uniquely packaged into a beautiful whole. So I am a unique combination of body, mind, and spirit. This combination is called Roger. I believe that this whole, my soul, came to be when I was born and I believe that it will cease to be when I die. Well, there might be something, in fact I know there'll be something left of what was Roger. At the least, my body will return to the planet, the solar system, the universe from which the elements of my body emerged. Maybe something else happens to my spirit. I don't know. I actually don't much care. The big news for me is that at the moment of death, this particular combination of mind, body, and spirit will no longer be. Now it may be strange to some of you that I include body in my definition of soul. That's not sort of the usual view in the West. Often the body is not included. I include body because I truly believe my body is part of the essence of who I am. Western spirituality has devalued and denigrated the body to the detriment of our bodies, especially black, brown, female, and trans bodies. This has also led us to denigrate things that we call bodies, that we associate with bodies, the earth, for example. All of this is why I believe in a soul that is embodied. I value the body as well as the mind and spirit. Well there's a lot wrong with the world today, and there's a lot of soul sickness. Certainly after this ongoing challenge of global pandemic, the upheaval around race in our country, the insurrection, and the ongoing efforts to destroy our democracy, a lot of us have weary and even sick souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the remedy of what ails the world is first soul, second soul, evermore soul. A lot of ailing souls mean an ailing world. Healthier souls mean a healthier world. So how do we help souls become healthier? How do we mend souls? Well it's important to recognize that it is inherently difficult to make someone else's soul healthy. So the place to start is with the one soul each of us has at least some control over, that is namely our own soul. Each of us has work that we can and must do to tend our soul. Muhammad Gandhi summed this up in the context of British rule India, when he noted that home rule begins with self rule. To be successful, the work of freeing India from the British had to begin with each Indian tending to their own soul. That's where Gandhi began his work, intending to his own soul. So the first step in tending to your soul is to know your soul. This takes time, intention, attention, and practice. Good vehicles for knowing your soul include journaling, meditating, prayer, walking in nature, deep sharing with others about your spiritual journeys. This is why having a regular spiritual practice is helpful and there's not a one size fits all spiritual practice we should all do. Instead, find the practice that works for you, the practice that nourishes you, the practice that you actually want to do regularly, and then do it regularly. I love Brian starting the service today with how he tends his soul in the same way that the characters in the movie soul tend their souls by losing himself in plain music. In losing himself to the music, he finds his soul. Once you get in touch with your soul and hopefully keep in touch with your soul on a regular basis, then comes the next crucial step in tending the soul. Be yourself. So many of us waste too much of our lives trying to be what we aren't. More beautiful, more intelligent, more accomplished, more grounded, or more whatever else we imagine to be a deficiency. This perhaps more than anything else is the recipe for soul sickness. Once you know who you are at the core, be that person, be that soul. Knowing your soul, being your soul, that's not the end of the journey though. There is one final crucial step and that is reaching out to other souls. Not to fix them, but to be with them, to journey with them, to accompany them and be accompanied by them and to help all souls flourish, especially souls which are devalued, marginalized, and oppressed. I believe that every soul is sacred. Therefore, every soul deserves the opportunity to flourish. Every soul has a basic right to food, shelter, healthcare, education, equality, and love. Every soul deserves to be treated with dignity and to have the soul's inherent beauty recognized and celebrated and loved. Effective action to build a better world can only begin with tending our own souls, but that tending of our own soul is not the whole point. It is not enough, not nearly enough to tend our own soul and then watch or choose not to watch your family or your friends or your neighbors or strangers near and far suffer. Reaching out to other souls in need and building a better world, a fairer world, is integral to the spiritual journey. A healthy and grounded soul helps enable us to do this work of justice. Emerson and many of our other transcendentalist spiritual ancestors like Margaret Fuller had a lot of wise things to say about the soul. There is a balance between the individual and the community and transcendentalism that often gets overlooked when the spiritual journey is misinterpreted to be only about the individual. This often happens especially when people misinterpret Emerson's idea of self-reliance. Part of the rap against Emerson and other transcendentalists is that they tended to hang out on the sidelines discussing and ruminating rather than rolling up their sleeves to do the work of justice. There is, for example, this great story about a Mrs. Brackett, a Bostonian abolitionist who told Emerson to his face in 1841 that she would rather hear that a friend died than became a transcendentalist. She said this because transcendentalists, in her words, are paralyzed and never do anything for humanity. Mrs. Brackett was particularly angered that most transcendentalists hadn't yet done much about slavery. A lot of them, including Emerson, were slow to take up the cause. Emerson was habitually slow to act for justice. He insisted always on taking lots of time to contemplate the issue and the various options for action. I will not move until I have the highest command, he declared. This is probably a good example of white supremacy culture, the need for perfection in avoidance of mistakes at all costs. Determining that slavery was an abomination that needed to be stopped probably didn't really need a couple years of reflection and rumination. Emerson did eventually get to action and once finally on board, he was not overly temperate either. In one famous speech in 1844, he said, if any cannot speak or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence and creep into the grave the universe has no need of you. He also chose the 4th of July then and now, a patriotic holiday, as an occasion to make a major speech attacking slavery and the US government's support and tolerance of slavery. Following his fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau's lead, he supported civil disobedience and also like Thoreau, he went further and came out strongly in support of John Brown's violent raid at Harper's Ferry during Brown's treason trial. The principal reason that most transcendentalists eventually belatedly worked against slavery and for other just causes was their passionate belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every soul. They believed that every soul needs to be freed from the constraints of convention, persecution and oppression so that every soul might flourish. Okay, so now I've talked a lot about a word that probably isn't comfortable for all of you. I'm going to use a term now that I think is probably not comfortable for most of you and that word is salvation. I can sense a lot of you shifting uncomfortably in your dining room or living room or kitchen or outdoor chairs as you hear me use this word. I like the word salvation. For me it's not about what happens after I die. As I said earlier I think the soul is no more after we die. Salvation for me is about our souls flourishing in the here and the now of this world. This is how we mend our soul and other souls. This is how we save souls. We tend our souls. We reach out to other souls. We support other souls. We connect with other souls. We work toward the health of all souls. Reverend Callie and I shared a wonderful poem from Linda Underwood called All This Talk of Saving Souls earlier this year. I love this poem in the sentiment she has about saving souls and so I'm going to give her the last word in the reflection today. All this talk of saving souls, souls weren't made to save like Sunday clothes that give out at the seams. They're made for wear. They come with lifetime guarantees. Don't save your soul. Pour it out like rain on cracked parched earth. Give your soul away or pass it like a candle flame. Sing it out or laugh it up to the wind. Souls were made for hearing breaking hearts. For puzzling dreams remembering August flowers forgetting hurts. These men who talk of saving souls, they have the look of bullies who blow out candles before you sing happy birthday and want the world to be in alphabetical order. I will spend my soul playing it out like sticky string into the world so I can catch every last thing I touch. I invite you to join me now in a time of meditation, a time to pay attention to our souls and the joys and sorrows within our hearts. I'll read a poem by Tess Bomberger and then we'll share some silence together. The poem is called Stirred by the Spirit. We exist within this interstitial surface tensed between past and future. This violet veil undulating between health and illness. This filmy membrane polished between body and spirit. This alert eardrum reverberating between human and divine. We are sunrise with a remembrance of dusk. We are soul with a patina of soil. We are stillness with mere veneer of words. We are smooth surface of water stirred by the spirit. Amen and blessed be. Rise and body and or spirit and sing with me hymn number 1002. May each of you tend and mend your soul. May you pour your soul out like rain on cracked parched earth. May you give your soul away or pass it like a candle flame. May you sing it out or play it out on the piano. May you spend your soul. May you go in peace.