 Now, I'm sitting over here, it's pretty long on the other side. I should tell you, let's go take a quick peek at that, and I'm going to show you a little bit. I have no idea what you're doing. I have no idea what you're doing. I just want to do the other side. Yeah, I want to do the other side. And now, I'm going to sit in the back and say the name of the patient. I've got a great intention to sit in the back. No, no, no, no. And I want to do this, uh, I want to do the other side. I want to make this a little more fussy. Maybe I'll do it better, and then I'll do the other side. Oh! To get that out, so you can put it on your base. It's not that big a deal. Yeah, it's sad. I mean, these are the way for me. Yeah, and I'm just… Yeah! And, in the state, it's completely like business. Yeah. But like that, those are some of the two things that I'm going to tell you about. Yeah, I bet it has two things. It has to be the right guy, because they're just not on my radar. And then somebody says, I've seen the most wonderful met opera thing to do in my life. Oh, great. Oh. You know, I'm curious to see what the show has to say. They're usually on my show. It's kind of fun. Two, one, two, and then two, three, four. That's what we need to do until we start to do it. Yeah, these are awesome. So, that's the artist on the next page. Yeah. OK. Let's remember number two. He's a great photographer. He can learn to sound like you know when you're talking about how important it is. Yeah. It's a great opportunity to be on this show. And it's very well done. It's like, everything's really good. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. I'm sure that's a good thing. But, yeah, I'm excited to see what the show has to say. I mean, the school is going to be on. I can't believe I was on the stage with that. I didn't even think about it. I was just once in the club. I was thinking about why I'm going to go again. I was thinking about it. I was like, what's up with you? I was like, sure, I'm going to take you to the airport. Yeah. I'm going to take you to the airport. Yeah, I'm going to take you to the airport. Oh yeah. I'm going to take you to the airport. I'm going to take you to the airport. Yes. Okay. Unitarian Society of Medicine. 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 they seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Rosalind Woodward and on behalf of the congregation I like to extend a special welcome to visitors. With a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey we celebrate your presence here. We trust that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. I'm going to ring the gong and after that I invite you into a few moments of contemplation, meditation, prayer as we settle in and come fully to this time and place together. Now if you rise we'll sing hymn number 34 together. That they save me from the hope of myself in which I have goodness and discernment and never hurry through the world but walk slowly and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay awhile. The light flows from their branches and they call again, it's simple they say and you too have come into the world to do this. To go easy, to be filled with light and to shine. And if you'll now rise and join me in the reading of the words for the lighting of our chalice this morning, Ros, we'll light our chalice. Come into this place of peace and let its silence heal your spirit. Come into this place of memory and let its history warm your soul. Come into this place of prophecy and power and let its vision change your heart. And now I invite you to turn to your neighbor in an exchange of friendly summer greetings. Here today that would like to come down to the front to read our most magnificent story this morning, grown-ups can come too, come some. I'm going to switch the order. We're going to do this first and then Joyce and Saras, all right, a little out of sync. All right so our story this morning is a book by Ashley Spires and it's called The Most Magnificent Thing and we're going to have the pictures up there as I read along. So here we go. This is a regular girl and her best friend in the whole wide world. They do all kinds of things together. They race, they eat, they explore, they relax. She makes things. He un-makes things. One day the girl has a wonderful idea. She is going to make the most magnificent thing. She knows just how it will look. She knows just how it will work. All she has to do is make it and she makes things all the time easy peasy. First she hires an assistant. Next they gather their supplies. They set up somewhere out of the way and get to work. The girl tinkers and hammers and measures while her assistant pounces and growls and chews. When she is finished she steps back to admire her work. She walks around one side, her assistant examines the other side. It doesn't look right. Her assistant picks it up, gives it a shake. It doesn't feel right either. They are shocked to discover that the thing isn't magnificent or good. It isn't even kind of sort of okay. It is all wrong. The girl tosses it aside and gives it another go. She smooths and wrenches and fiddles. Her assistant circles and tugs and wags. When she is finished she stands up and takes a long look at it. Her assistant gives it a nudge with his paw. The thing is still wrong. She decides to try again. The girl saws and glues and adjusts. She stands and examines and stares. She twists and tweaks and fastens. She fixes and straightens and studies. She tries all different ways to make it better. She makes it square. She makes it round. She gives it legs. She adds antennae. She makes it fuzzy. She makes it long, short, rough, smooth, big, small. One even smells of stinky cheese. But none of them are magnificent. Her work attracts a few admirers, but they don't understand. They can't see the magnificent thing that she has in her mind. She gets the angrier. She gets the faster she works. She smashes pieces into shapes. She jams parts together. She pummels the little bits in. Her hands feel too big to work and her brain is too full of all the not right things. If only the thing would just work. The brain starts in her finger. It rushes up to her brain and she explodes. It is not her finest moment. I'm no good at this. I quit. Her assistant suggests a walk. It's not much help at first. But before long, she starts to feel different. Bit by bit, the mad gets pushed out of her head. As they stroll along, she comes across the first wrong thing she made. The bad feelings are about to start all over again. Then she notices something surprising. There are some parts of the wrong things that are really quite right. The bolts on one, the shape of another, the wheel to seat ratio of the next. There are all sorts of parts that she likes. By the time she reaches the end of the trail, she finally knows how to make the thing magnificent. She gets to work. She works carefully and slowly, tinkering, hammering, twisting, fiddling, gluing, painting. Her assistant makes sure there are no distractions. The afternoon fades into evening. Finally she finishes. She alerts her assistant. See what her assistant is doing? He's tired. It's been a long day. The pair take a good long look. It leans a little to the left and it's a bit heavier than expected. The color could use a bit of work, too, but it's just what she wanted. They climb aboard and take it for a spin. They are not disappointed. It really is the most magnificent thing, the end. So since I made a mistake about joys and sorrows, I would ask you guys to go back to your seats right now and we'll do joys and sorrows and then you'll go to summer fun after that. And Anne Smiley, our lay minister, will be coming forward. The sharing of joys and sorrows is our time in the spirit of acceptance and support to share with one another some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of a loved one in recent days or weeks. So for the next few moments, anyone who wishes to can come forward, light a candle, or not light a candle, use the microphone to tell all of us your message. You may also come forward to wordlessly light a candle and return to your seat. If you're unable to get to the front of the room, we're happy to light a candle for you and bring you the microphone. So I now open the floor for the sharing of our joys and sorrows. Hi, my name is Ellen and my joy is mixed in with a little tinge of sorrow. So next week, my brothers' families and my family, we're all going to be gathering to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday and she has been a great joy in my life. And there's a little tinge of sorrow with my dad's passing 12 years ago, but it's going to be a wonderful occasion. I'm looking very forward to it. So we'll light one last candle for all the joys and the sorrows that may be too tender to share that live in the fullness of our hearts. So let's join together in the singing of our hymn as the children leave for summer fun. Number 142, Let There Be Light, Reflections, just a few weeks ago and I decided given my topic, I needed to avail myself of that work. So this is from Catherine Schultz, Being Wrong. She says, if it is sweet to be right, then let's not deny it. It is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong. As any food scientist can tell you, this combination of savory and sweet is the most addictive of flavors, we can never really get enough of reveling in other people's mistakes. This for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifled the urge to say, I told you so. The brilliance of this phrase or its odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it, derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was also right about being right. In the instant of uttering, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right at any rate, really extremely right and really extremely delighted about it. It is possible to refrain from this sort of gloating and consistently choosing to do so might be the final milestone of maturity, but the feeling itself, that triumphant ha, can seldom be fully banished. Of course, parading our own brilliance and exalting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exalt in other people's errors is not very nice, although it's certainly very human. This is where our relationship to wrongness begins to show its stakes. Of all the strife in the world, strife of every imaginable variety from conflict over crumb cake to conflict in the Middle East, a staggering amount of it arises from the clash of mutually incompatible, entirely unshakable feelings of rightness. Granted, we find plenty of other reasons to fight with one another as well, ranging from serious and painful breaches in trust to resource scarcity to the fact that we haven't had our coffee yet. Still, an impressive number of disputes amount to a tug of war over who possesses the truth. We fight over the right to be right. Likewise, it is surprisingly difficult to get angry unless you are either convinced that you are correct or humiliated and defensive about being wrong. Our default attitude toward wrongness then, our distaste for error and our appetite for being right, tends to be tough on relationships. This applies equally to relationships among nations, communities, colleagues, friends, and, as will not be lost on most readers, relatives. Indeed, an old adage of therapists is that you can either be right or be in a relationship. You can remain attached to team you, winning every confrontation, or you can remain attached to your friends and family, but good luck trying to do both. The next reading is from Ram Dass. Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you're not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others just to be without separation. Good morning's reflections. I want to take a look at what seems to me to be an increased cultural reliance on judgment, which in my lexicon means specifically thinking and perceiving through the binary oppositions of right and wrong, good and bad. And how that thinking and perceiving affects each of us in our inner and our relational worlds. Like the character Aunt Lydia in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, who works at the Red Center and serves as the indoctrinator of the young women into a chilling theocracy in which their role is merely as vessel. We all seem to be a little too in love with either or these days. Several years ago, I remember seeing a segment on a news program in which an issue was raised and then the exploration of the issue had long since forgotten the issue, but the exploration of the issue was framed thusly. Is this good or is it bad? And just a few weeks ago, in a rare circumstance of seeing some commercials during a television broadcast, I usually and fairly religiously avoid commercials by liberal use of the mute button. One commercial for some brand of yogurt ended with these words which I hastily scribbled on the back of a Wisconsin public television program guide. The words were, it feels right to do things right. These are hardly pithy examples of my thesis regarding a cultural reliance on the framework of judgment of good, bad, right, wrong, but I would say that none of us needs to look terribly long or hard to find others. So my definition of judgment articulated a few minutes ago, departs from definitions found in dictionaries I consulted. Here is a definition of the word from Miriam Webster. Judgment, the process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing the capacity for judging, discernment, a formal utterance of an authoritative opinion, a formal decision given by a court, capitalized the final judging of humankind by God. There's nothing terribly objectionable in the proffer definitions here, and yet what I've found in the deeper teaching work I do with folks every day is that there is a need for greater clarity and a more pointed discernment. I make a distinction between judgment, which I define narrowly, thinking in right, wrong, good, bad, and assessment. Assessment in my lexicon requires discernment. It requires taking a look at the what and the how and noting complexity, contradiction, conditions, causality. Assessment is not reducible to binary oppositions. Assessment is also essential to self-care, whereas judgment is entirely extraneous to it. So let me give you an example of what I mean here. Say I was walking into a crowded nightclub in some other life that I lead. For the purpose of attending to self-care, I might note the crowd, the nature of the crowd. I might tune into some semblance of discomfort with the size of the crowd or the noise, the heat. I might think about strategies to ease that discomfort perhaps by finding a spot on the periphery, or perhaps I would consider removing myself altogether. If I was operating through the lens of judgment, thinking in right, wrong, good, bad, however, I might think that the owners of this nightclub made a bad decision to allow this many people in the door. I might start feeling angry and righteous toward the owners whose decision is now impinging upon my pleasure. I might start writing an angry letter in my head to those owners expressing my outrage. I might then leave in a huff. Well, maybe some of you are now thinking, aren't you just splitting some hairs here, Beth, and your orientation to these words? And what's wrong with thinking in right and wrong and good and bad? How can you have morality without these words and concepts? Philosophers, ethicists, theologians all have wrestled with this subject for millennia and you're just gonna leapfrog over all those discourses and dissertations and dialogues and say that good, bad, right, wrong thinking is wrong? No, no, no, a thousand times, no. I'm not saying it's wrong for as Audre Lord writes, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What I am saying is that I've become increasingly convinced that right, wrong, good, bad thinking, or judgment keeps us trapped in dualisms, trapped in the toxicity of the inner critic and serves as a force of divisiveness and separation, as Ram Dass says in the reading from today. And operates as such, as such a force both within us, intrapersonally and between us, intrapersonally. So I wanna spend a few minutes now exploring how a judgment framework might affect the inner workings of an individual. Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, begins an examination of the journey beyond yourself by looking unsparingly and humorously at the voice inside your head, which by chapter two he identifies as his roommate. He writes, in case you haven't noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say, and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you're hearing, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a voice inside my head. That's the voice we're talking about. In Singer's view, the voice inside your head is part of the human condition, part of the self that is watching and constantly narrating, and is distinct from the aspect of your inner being, Singer describes as the awareness. Singer goes on, if you would like to meet your roommate, just try to sit inside yourself for a while in complete solitude and silence. But instead of finding silence, you're going to listen to incessant chatter. Why am I doing this? I have more important things to do. This is a waste of time. There's nobody in here but me. What's this all about? Right on cue, there's your roommate. You may have a clear intention to be quiet inside, but your roommate won't cooperate. And it's not just when you try to be quiet, it has something to say about everything you look at. I like it. I don't like it. This is good. That's bad. It just talks and talks. For some people, maybe even some of you in this room, that inner roommate can turn vicious, excoriating the self for being wrong and bad, and thereby setting up a desperate search for ways to be right and good. Ironically, some of the clinging to right, wrong, and good, bad frameworks comes from a desire for certainty. If we can be certain that something is right and good, perhaps we can finally rest there. And our inner voice, our roommate within, will be satisfied and our inner dilemmas relieved. But like the sufferer of an extremity of anxiety known diagnostically as obsessive compulsive disorder, the achievement of a rightness through compulsory ritual, which finally releases the individual from moments or hours of torment, gives way to doubt. A toxic doubt rather than a useful doubt, the foundation of which is bad, good, right, wrong thinking and perception. Right, wrong, good, bad thinking is more like being on a seesaw. Rather than stability, there will be wild swings up and down. And dilemmas remain unsolvable, unresolvable. Or another metaphor might be ping-pong. Back and forth, the ball goes right, wrong, right, wrong, good, bad, good, bad. For the anxious obsessive person, this seesawing and ping-ponging will mean redoubled efforts to establish rightness and thereby goodness in order to ward off the terrible immanency of wrongness and badness. Perhaps your inner roommate and nearest critic lacks the viciousness and vitriol that animates the level of anxiousness and despair I just mentioned. Perhaps your inner critic and judge fosters what Tara Brock, psychotherapist and teacher of the Dharma, defines as the trance of unworthiness in her first book, Radical Acceptance. She writes, feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong? It's a vicious cycle. The more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel, underneath our fear of being flawed is a more primal fear that something is wrong with life, that something bad is going to happen. Our reaction to this fear is to feel blame, even hatred, toward whatever we consider the source of the problem, ourselves, others, life itself. But even when we have directed our aversion outward, deep down, we still feel vulnerable. The binary oppositional terms of right, wrong, good, bad inherently begin to foster and substantiate yet another binary, and that is of subject and object. As Tara notes, our fear generates blame and hatred, and blame and hatred become the source for othering. And othering, as we know, opens the door for distrust, dehumanization, and domination. Othering is not simply an interpersonal phenomenon. I work with people who struggle with a subject-object split is internal, leading to a divided self, full of shame, self-loathing, self-attack. So in the book from which the reading for today was excerpted, Catherine Schultz uses the terms making a mistake, making an error, and being wrong interchangeably. I make a distinction between those terms in order to facilitate the healing journey for people. The distinction is between doing and being. To make a mistake, to make an error is something a person can and inevitably will do. I made one today. But to be wrong is a statement of a different order, and one which a person with a template from childhood of interpersonal or developmental trauma, as Bessel von der Kolk has named in his brilliant book, The Body Keeps the Score, that person will hear that as an ontological pronouncement. The self is experienced as essentially and profoundly bad and wrong. And this badness and wrongness is either often deeply embraced and enacted in behavioral choices or resisted through the embrace of high achievement, perfectionism, in lifelong attempts to recuperate rightness and goodness. So rather than reclaim rightness and wrongness as Catherine Schultz is proposing in her book, Being Wrong, through what she humorously describes as an investigation into wrongology, I propose moving away from a framework that causes the kind of harm I've already described and which Schultz illustrates somewhat breezily in the excerpt from her book I shared with you today. I see intimately and every day how a fervid attachment to rightness causes harm in intimate relationships. And I offer the caveat my version of the therapist's axiom Schultz noted is this. I say to folks, you can be right or you can be close to somebody, but you can't be both. If our starting point is a premise of do no harm, then our choices and behaviors will have an ethical base. We will need to investigate deeply what constitutes harm and debate and discernment about harm without resorting to right wrong good bad thinking will facilitate deeper and more spiritual responses to the human condition. In my own practice of unhooking Pema Children's term from the framework of judgment, I've challenged myself to replace the words good and bad and right and wrong from my language in the day to day. I challenge each of you to do this for a week and see what happens. I'll share with you though that there is one exception to this practice and that's in relation to my dogs. I am constantly saying to them, you're such good dogs. Further, we all need means and mechanisms by which to assess and evaluate to respond to the questions and challenges in life. I'll offer the use of an essentially pragmatic approach and that is to ask these two questions. What would be useful and what would it be in the service of? Let me illustrate how these questions might work by relating an experience I had while I was doing my practicum for the counseling psychology degree at the University Health Services 25, I think 25 years ago. In the fall of that year, some of you may remember that there was a stampede at Camp Randall at the conclusion of a football game. The football game concluded within the last three seconds the University of Wisconsin somehow scored and it was like a very exciting win. So what happened was the student section sort of moved en masse down the bleachers and forcibly encountered a barricade that prevented further movement on the field and several students were injured in that crush. In fact, there were five pulseless non-breather on the field at first and luckily no one perished. The counseling center prepared for the aftermath of this event with trainings on post-traumatic stress and we practicum interns began to see students coming in struggling with anxiety related to the traumatic event. One student with whom I'd already developed a therapeutic alliance came in for a regularly scheduled appointment and I asked, as we were coached, to ask if that student had been in the stadium. She affirmed she had been and then she related to me the story of her experience. She told me that she felt herself moving down the bleachers without any intention on her part. She noted that her arms were pinned to her sides by the terrible proximity of others around her and she thought how with her arms pinned to her side she would not be able to access her inhaler, unnecessary even for her a life-saving accoutrement for she had severe asthma. She told me she thought about how stress can aggravate an asthma attack so she decided she was going to focus on keeping herself as calm as possible and that's what she did. Psychologically, she was one of the most intact people that I counseled in the weeks after this event. Unwittingly, she put into practice the questions I posed above. She thought about what would be useful, staying calm and what it would be in the service of, warding off an asthma attack. Had she thought in the framework of judgment, perhaps she would have escalated her anxiety as she searched for the right way to respond to this crisis, feeling her predicament to be even more perilous if she guessed wrong. Finally, recognizing the harmful effects of clinging to judgment frameworks and practicing differently facilitates movement toward a spiritual path of healing. We let go of judgment then in the service of a larger purpose than that which is implied in the biblical passage serving as the title of this reflection. We let go of judgment not simply to avoid being judged by others but because we recognize the terrible limitations and the deleterious consequences of that framework itself and we do so in the service of healing. As Carolyn Mace notes in her wonderful book Defy Gravity Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason, healing does not require that you master the unreasonable side of your reason nor does healing require inner perfection of any order. A common trait shared by people who have healed is that they cease being unreasonable in ways that no longer matter in the greater scheme of life. Against the scale of life or death, how important is winning an argument? How important is holding a grudge? How important is anything other than how well we love others? How deeply we regard the value of the gift of our life and what we do with our life that makes this world a better place? Blessed be an Amen and now I invite you to participate in this morning's offering. Lovely music, their gifts as well as the gifts of others who help us with our service. We want to acknowledge our greeter this morning was Kareen Perrin, our ushers and smiley Stan Imhaub, sound Mark Schultz, hospitality Richard DeVita and Jeannie Hills, our lay minister this morning and smiley and John Powell should be meeting with anyone who is interested in a tour right over here and then I direct you of course to the red floors insert for any other announcements on behalf of the society. Let's all rise as we're able and join in the singing of our final hymn, Amazing Grace, to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English or Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not at all nothing. Before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness can molecules recall it what once was before anything happened no I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is, is, is, is, all everything.