 If it's all then you can come. I'm going to come up with something for a student. I'm going to take a next session. I'm going to take a second session. Yeah, first you get a question. It's a problem. You need to get that question. We should try to get a question. Yeah. It's a problem. It's a problem. You need to get all the questions. Do you also need the questions? Yeah. When we come down, I'm going to write just a man. Yeah. Do you see a man writing? Yeah. Do you see a man writing? Yeah. Yeah. It's a problem. You can get that. But... Are you done? Yeah. So I don't need anything more. I can get that and you can one up or two up. You can go like a first up. You've got first. You need that. I'll take that one. Yeah. You're going to come up with something. I'm going to come up with something. OK. Let me start there. Yeah. I will start with you. OK. I am just going to take that one up. I'll give you the lead. OK. I'm going to come up with something. You? No. You can just write a question. OK. That's it. I'm just going to start with you. Yeah. You are going to come up with something. Yeah. You are going to come up with something. Yeah. Let's wait for a moment of silence so that we can gather and centre ourselves. 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 Rosalind Woodward and on behalf of the congregation I'd like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We're a welcoming congregation and whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's 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 centre doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions and members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal stoneware coffee mugs. These are members knowledgeable about our faith community and who would love to visit with you. Experience guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service but I don't have anybody signed up for one so I don't know whether there's going to be somebody here or not. If you gather at the corner there and somebody shows up call. Otherwise there are brochures in the across the way in the Frank Lloyd Wright building and you can do a self-tour things are open and you can just follow that around and I apologize that there's no real tour. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service however because it's difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven which is in the far corner there and the commons which is just outside the corridor outside there 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 very good time to turn off all electronic devices that might cause some weird noises during the service. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly and we have a more or less full team today so thank you all. We don't have a sound operator so Dan who is a staff member has taken over. Thank you Dan and so if anybody enjoys sort of techy stuff it's sort of interesting working back there so feel free to volunteer for that. Our lame minister is Anne Smiley our greeter who greeted you as you walked in the doors Karen Hill. Our ushers were Karen Yeager and Vivian Lickitalfield and the hospitality, coffee and things are Sharon Skratish and Jeannie Hills are taking care of those today. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information as to what's going on around here. Again welcome we hope today's service will stimulate your mind touch your hearts and stir your spirit. Someone is referring to them as Ubuntu, an acknowledgement that he or she has this wonderful quality Ubuntu which refers to their actions toward their fellow human beings. It praises how they ignore people and how they see themselves within their intimate relationships, their familial relationships and within the broader community Ubuntu oppresses a central tenant of African philosophy, the essence of what it means to be human. And now please rise as you are able to act for lighting our chalice, the symbol of our human faith in action and as Laws likes playing, please join me in reading the words which appear in your order of service. Playing a copy of yours that born to our successful heart, an agent of life and death, symbol of our life and freedom, we decide to understand ourselves and our living home. And now is our custom, please turn to your neighbor and often have a kind of reason for the sharing of these important matters and we will be assisted by our minister and and suggested I come up this morning. I just wanted to say hello to everybody. I joined about 15 minutes ago and I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Beth Butler and I'm really delighted to be here and quite frankly I should have joined 40 years ago when I came to town but please don't hold that against me. Well my joy and maybe some of you shared it last week with a wonderful wonderful program and so my joy is that we have Dan Brunner who arranges such things and the thing that was so moving to me was that it was the Yin and Yang of my life as well as being a musician. I'm a Tai Chi teacher and so this was this was a little bit of heaven. So thank you and may we we need to thank him for how much hard work he did to bring this conference here. So I have two two joys to share. One is just a remarkable comeback from a cancer treatment a good friend Arlen Kettlebader contracted cancer and was diagnosed BN treatment in February and he really had a rocky road and he's really turned around and come along extremely well. So that's great. The second is one of these overwhelming joys I moved two days ago to a new house and I can't see all the boxes. My name is Vivian Littlefield and I'm one of the proud members of the Unitarian Church for over 30 years. I have both a joy and a sorrow today. My joy is that I'm moving to Colorado to be close to my adult children and grandchildren and grand animals. My son has a ranch with all kinds of horses and beef cattle. They all have names and come up and take treats. My sorrow is leaving this community and the wonderful music and musicians the ministers and the ministry even the lay people I love and admire. So thank you all for a wonderful time. I'll be thinking about you. I think I'm going to have to listen to you on YouTube. That's our sorrow too. My name is Jean Christeller and my joy is that I'm here. I'm here for a 40th reunion of the Lothlorean co-op group that I lived in while I was back here in graduate school back then and I never have been to this congregation. I'm a very active member of the UU congregation in Terre Haute, Indiana. So this feels very, very special to me. My sorrow and for which I will light a candle is that my 95-year-old dad who lives in Vermont is hospitalized and we're not too certain of how he will be, how he is doing. Good morning. My name is Penny Maureen. I wanted to light a candle for our dad, Teddy, who gave us so much joy and love, playfulness the last 10 years. He died this week and there's kind of a big empty space in our hearts but we were so grateful to have him in our lives. Those here in our community and throughout our world. Now, please stand as you are grateful again for November 6th, just as long as I have breath and if there are any children, we're going to see many, many folks on the phone. Because we live in the browning season, the heavy air and in this time when living is only survival, we doubt the voices that come shadowed on the air that weave within our brains certain thoughts, a motion that is soft, imperceptible, a twilight rain, soft feathers fall, a small body dropping into its nest, rustling, murmuring, settling in for the night. Because we live in this hard-edged season where plastic brittle and gleaming shine and in this space that is cornered and angled, we do not notice wet, moist, the significant drops falling in perfect spheres that are certain measures of our minds. Almost invisible, those tears, soft as dew, fragile, the cling to leaves, petals, roots, gentle and sure every morning. We are the women of daylight, of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two, wrapped around in plastic and steel we ride our lives, behind dark glasses we hide our eyes. Our thoughts shaded seem obscure, smoke fills our minds, whiskey husks our songs, polyester cuts our bodies from our breath. Our feet from the welcoming stones of earth, our dreams, our pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days. Even so, the spirit voices are singing, their thoughts are dancing in the dirty air, their feet touch the cement, the asphalt, the lighting. Still they weave dreams upon our shadowed skulls, if we could listen, if we could hear. Let's go then, let's find them, let's listen for the water, the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers, let's ride the midnight, the early dawn, feel the winds striding through our hair. Let's dance the dance of feathers, the dance of birds. Our cage can seldom see through the bars of this range. His wings are clipped in his feet, our tongue, so he opens his throat to sing. A caged bird sings with a fearful trail of things unknown, but long for so. And his tooth is furrowed and disheveled, for the caged bird sings of rigor. The free bird makes another notice, and the trigger is soft through the silent trees, and the fat bird's waning on the long bright light, and he ends the scoff of his own. But a caged bird stands on the brink of dreams, his shadow shouts on a nightingale's room. His wings are clipped in his feet, our tongue, so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trail of things unknown, but long for so. And his tooth is furrowed and disheveled, for the caged bird sings of rigor. Have you noticed the way Davis quote on the front of your order of service? And it's not an answer to see in the poster any longer from me. And yes, I do have mine's permission. In fact, this is his idea. The statement by anthropologist Wade Davis reads, the world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being new. They are unique manifestations of the industry. Many of us have a tendency, sometimes with diversity or cultural confidence in training, over the years usually in our workplace. This type of training provides us with lots of information, mostly facts, characteristics, and statistics about people from whom we are different. It originated on an early half-year in government and was intended to, quote, enable effective work in a cross-cultural situation, according to a 1989 US VH and HS. And why do you need this? Largely because many people in power, only in the US, were very hesitant to accept legitimate government academic health and medical services because of abuse but because of all of the abuses which had been perpetrated against them by such a big Jim Crow laws that segregated health care and allowed for poor health care for non-violence. The infamous testee study of, quote, uncreated symbols in Negro labels, underline the undue. That testee ran for nearly 400 years until 1972 when whistleblowers stopped. Think government sanctioned forced sterilization. Reportedly, as recently as the early 1970s, 100,000 to 150,000 low-income people were being sterilized annually, including some poor whites and many many people in power. Other groups were less attractive, including the master of ill and, quote, disabled, including deaf, blind, epileptic and, quote, physically deformed persons. Information on the largest state program, which happened to be a platform, was made into a booklet and reportedly used by the Nazis. Cultural competency training was helpful but another approach, cultural humility, takes us much closer to the core issues associated with race violations and cultural acceptance. Cultural humility involves the process by how we see ourselves and others that is in an other oriented state and with, as well, the method to maintaining this approach toward people from whom we are different. Those are phrases that, when I talk verses, several years ago, I encourage students to use this phrase, people from whom we are different, to remind themselves that are too simply different from us. That is, unless we see ourselves as the ultimate gold standard. C.S. Lewis wrote, humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less. I believe this is similar to what President Obama means when he says he hopes the Americans will learn to see themselves in each other. For us as a society, perhaps cultural humility may even hint at the opposite of American exceptionalism. As we do section two, the French writer de Tocqueville said he had a point in the term American exceptionalism in the late third out of 1930s appeared so to have used it in characterizing American democracy as, quote, unusual. Rather than a seemingly exact, but latter being the recent term of the phrase. During this tunes, human rights defenders were posted at a new bar from President Jimmy Carter. One of the major discussions involved the global and growing threat to human rights in the name of national security. In summary, they wrote, quote, regard for human rights as the most effective antidote to violence and extremism and is the best guarantor of sustainable security. As many scholars seem to be saying, so then it is quite privilege at the core of these issues that this invisible map set as a Macintosh first referred to when about in 1988, will we all need to get last nor bother me, did she? Of course the concept is very limited, but Dr. Macintosh simply gave it a name, a term to help us discuss the idea that white people and in some cases only white men can come on certain societal, societal prejudice, which for more than a century went without notice. At this point, de-gracing only an individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems, conferring dominance on women, her subsequent academic work, she came to understand that she should actually, quote, have the wisdom which I enjoy on the firm skin privilege, as she called it, and have it conditioned into a blame about its existence. She created a list of 50 such privileges on which people of color cannot necessarily do that. You may have seen probably just a very few to me, and I'm the indication of another. When I'm told by a national heritage or about, quote, civilization, I am shown that people of my color may know what it is. I can go shopping all the most of the time, pretty well sure that I will not be followable or relaxed in the sun. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my state of not to work against the appearance of my financial reliability. If a track police officer pulls me over, or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be pretty sure that I haven't been signaled out because of my risk. And here's a very pertinent one said, I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily, visible protection. And one more, I will feel well and normal in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social. Indeed, most of us in this room can take these things for granted, some of us not. Many are there for their anger, justify itself. In his second speech from the 2016 Black Inner Chamber's Humanitarian Board, popular TV actor Jesse Loewens spoke out forcefully. Receiving a standing invitation from the largely Black audience of his fears, he said, in his life, this award is not for me, or a standing list of others for a group that was deserved. At the end of the statement, he said, also for the students who are realizing that a system built to bother and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. And then just close in your arms, he said, we're done with watching and waiting for this invention of whiteness, uses us and uses us. Now Mr. Williams is not a fringe artist, but a respected man of color. And his feelings, apparently, reflect most of thousands of other people of color, in addition to his famous counter-colors. We're in that light. This is a bit surprising to many of his fans to watch where he's in that character. This reference to invention of whiteness makes me think of Auburn Atlantic magazine correspondent, Thomas Poults, in his highly popular New York Times press up between the world and me. He writes, Americans believe in reality at risk as a fun, indubitable feature of the natural world, rendered as an innocent daughter of nature. And from his left to the core of the middle passage and the trail of tears, the way of the forest of earth or a tornado or any other phenomenon that can cast us on any word of man. Race is the child of racism, he says. Not. Central Poults' book cannot hold, this is a letter to his 15-year-old black son for whom he's very worried. The central story is how Poults himself was stopped by police for no apparent reason, and the release of that is months later when an old college friend of his was stopped by the same police force under similar circumstances. He was killed by a robster. Poults almost lost, he says, and they've seen what it was that was there. This is the primary cautionary tale of this book, yet the many historical and cultural descriptions woven throughout it are the reason they created such a confoundingly for the rest of us. Statements like each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, many many is possible. The dreamers, as he calls five people, accept this as a cost of doing business, accept our body's currency, okay, these strong words give me a new tool to puncture that. Yet that feeling of collective gut is an essential insight into the thoughts and feelings of many Americans. Thoughts and feelings, we have no way of knowing unless we listen and listen without judging others' truth in order to make ourselves aware of others' truth. The stories of people in most of the rest of the world, people from whom we are different. Those of us who began our lives in small towns or enclaves of saneness, especially over to ourselves, our children, and our world, to break loose from those bonds we grew up with, to embrace the other worlds of color, sound, taste, smells, traditions, and religious practices that fill most of our planet. Now I want to emphasize that all is certainly not intended to imply that you use our unifying embraces. But our first beauty principle is the inherent work and dignity of every person. A person at home as most essential to our beauty core and for social justice work, which we both do and support. I also believe we want to learn as much as possible about ourselves and about others. I grew up in a small homogenous Indian world town, and the first time I attended a traditional African American church was just before I became an adult. This church was on a sausage plow. And when I went indoors, I stepped into an entirely immoral, but I was silent and embraced by kind people whom I never had before. At that time, this was the most cruelly spiritual moment I had ever experienced. And yet, only 19 years before my birth, and about 40 miles up a highway from my childhood home, a lynching had heard in there in Indiana. The lynching of two young black men hatched in Acomycola, which later became the basis for Belly Holiday's jazz-classic, strange fruit. The ropes from our town, but I didn't know about it until I was an adult. Eight years after that, I went home from a traditional Indiana. What can we do to better understand the collective memories of others who were sacrificed for their race, creed, and religion? The indigenous peoples of America who were robbed of their lives and traditions were forced to come to the Americas as slaves, Jewish people who were massive out of ignorance and hate. And of course, altogether, different people. But how can we begin now to live with a new view of the world, one which pledges to see the world from an other oriented stance? If we can accept that cultural humility is a practice which, in the fall, could change the world for the better, still have one we hope to take ourselves from here today? And there's no simple answer to this question. Nonetheless, I strongly believe in order to have any hope or success in this endeavor, we, every one of us, must engage in a long-term learning process and practice it daily. Of course, I have a few suggestions. The first is to become more familiar with people from whom we are different. Their lives don't work. What they think and feel. What religions say practice. How do you do this? First, by rewatching and simply living. Of course, I'm easy going to look at the other person. I don't mean textbooks. I mean novels, biographies, and historical fiction which puts us in those people's shoes if only for a few hours. Additionally, we have lots of newspapers and magazine publications starting towards people of color reading them. Madison is a support unit welcoming people of many racial ethnic backgrounds and especially during the summer, we have many ethnic festivals and celebrations. That very word. Our staff have been kind enough to set up a table for us out by the stairs of the commons and after the service, I'll be there to discuss when I'm going to talk with you and share some ideas from books and periodicals that I feel are important for us to take a look at just so we have some idea what's going on outside our own homes. If I would like to introduce you to or remind you of what I consider to be an outstanding way of dealing everywhere developed by Dr. Thomas Hicks, it is called the dignity model and it is so straightforward as to seem obvious. Of course it requires a lucid human quality. That is saying one another as worthy of the can I imagine for our tutus, Ubuntu. I want to redirect the Dr. Hicks Declaration of dignity, which is also a post in that take on the commons. She wrote, imagine what the world would be like if we drew in each other as if we mattered. If we all valued each other's dignity, if we did, we would have to believe that we are all worthy of having our densities accepted no matter who we are. Recognition of our unique qualities and ways of life and knowledge to be seeing and heard and responding, belonging and feeling improved, freedom and independence and life of hope and possibilities, being safe and secure, being treated in a fair and even way, being given the better, being understood, someone that has a strong future to the entire world where she distresses this idea and it's out of the table as well. I have seen it do a wonderful job of working with, quote, different people as one of my students introduced it to her clinic where they see adults with developed mental disabilities. It's changed that for us, all the staff who are with it. The clients have learned. This works. And finally, I'm pretty sure all this change will ultimately require a lot of things called a paradigm shift, meaning one conceptual goal of the use replaced by another. Of course this actually is much more than and is rather a very, very big deal. I personally believe culturally known and the reduction, not elimination, but reduction of racism in our world is a paradigm shift now occurring in America. Those reasons change are certainly going to kick in and scream in this unconscious. I doubt I will see this change come to general acceptance in my lifetime, but I do believe it will come. Don't know if you've noticed yet, our love, we are reflections in July. I am a full angel of love. And on top of that too, my body general brand reference Dr. Daniel Horses' words. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but the images we have put in the place of radical. To discern a version will not solve the problems of the world, but it may help us to discover that we cannot make the world an average. And the place we co-founded WPV Voice is credited as saying Either our average voice will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. May we please pledge ourselves to do everything possible to replace ignorance with self and cultural humility, so that our love of a lot of community may flourish with dignity and respect among all. Bless us all. And now please be generous with your financial contributions as the ushers collect our all, which benefits our faith community and the good works we do. I am with me in a free stash version of our closing hand number 407. We're going to sit in the hall for a while.