 Hi, everyone! It's so complete. It's definitely a nice top top. Yeah. That's all. Sure you can do this. It's pretty, it's solid. I know. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's good. Yes. You're gonna see what he did with the second hand. I don't know. I don't know. You're gonna have to do it. You're gonna have to do it. Your service. Oh, he's doing it. Yeah. It's okay. It's the first reference. First, I'm gonna say, we are all just performing the first ceremony of the service. So it's very solid. We are all just doing it. It's a great job. It's a great job. I think it's probably the first time. It's like the first time. Yeah, it's probably the first time. We're all doing it. Yeah, it's probably the first time. It's like the first time. So, this is a simple, two-man group, and with the decision-making, I say, let's just stick that into the front. Look at the screen on the right. The side is for this group. Oh, the armor that we saw, the big ball on the wall. That was a separate group. That's what we did at the same time. That's what we did. Please join me in a moment of centering silence. And now we will sing our in-gathering hymn number 90 verse 2. Welcome to the first Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Dorrit Bergen and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whoever you are 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 and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. 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 FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. Generally experienced guides are available to give a building tour after each service so if you would like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our National Landmark Meeting House please meet near the large glass window on the left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service however because it is difficult for some of us to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven and commons are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from those areas and speaking of noise this would be a good time to turn off all electronic devices that might cause a disturbance during the hour. I now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly and this morning they are Greeter was Janine Nussbaum. Our ushers today are Gail Bliss and Bob Ault. Your coffee and assorted other beverages have been prepared by Nancy Kassaf and our lay minister is Tom Boykoff. Please note the announcements on the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events of the society and provide more information about today's activities and I have two special announcements. There will be a carpool from FUS to the downtown pride parade that will leave at 12 30 p.m. Meet up in the commons next to the standing on the side of love table after the 11 a.m. service if you can give a ride or you need a ride. The parade begins at 1 p.m. You'll find the 12 foot long standing on the side of love banner on the 600 block of State Street which is the last block before library mall. We're yellow or purple. We will have more standing on the side of love shirts for sale Sunday after both services. Also service Sunday is coming up on August 23rd after today's service the service Sunday team will be in the commons outside the library ready to help you volunteer for project and answer any questions. We have community service projects for all ages abilities and interests. This year we're excited about some brand new projects including working at the Arbor read him the loose the lusher community education center. Oh and village with the tiny houses project labeling neighborhood storm drains and helping set up a new and innovative preschool. We'll also have some old favorites like building our signature benches baking cookies for a homeless shelter visiting patients at the veterans hospital and preparing a mailing for a nonprofit. Let's make this the biggest service Sunday yet and show the community how much we care. Come see us in the commons to get signed up and get excited to do some community service. Again welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. Our opening words are from Dana Foltz who is a master yoga teacher and a poet. There is a quality of stillness so rare that the air shimmers in its presence. It's there between our eyes it vibrates with the music of life dances in the wind breaks forth from the trees into a clearing just as the sun rises and then settles into silence again. There is a quality of stillness so rare that I am bared to the very marrow of my bones before it may I choose never to be clothed again and now I invite you to rise and body or spirit for the lighting of our chalice. Please join me in the words of affirmation printed in this morning's program. We light this chalice for all who are here and for all who are not for all those who have ever walked through our doors and for those who may yet find this spiritual home even for those we cannot at this moment even imagine for each of us and for all of us may this flame burn warm and bright and in the spirit of that warmth I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with Emma warm greeting. Take this too and any children who are with us this morning I invite you to come forward for the message for all ages. Kelly was telling me last week that the kids are kind of shy this this summer that's probably because there's not so many of you that'll change in a couple of weeks it's going to be full up here so this is a story called the seeds of peace and you'll be able to see some of the illustrations up on the screen high up in the mountains an old hermit lived in a rocky cave you know what a hermit is hermit is someone that lives all by themselves they don't live around other people the hermit's home was colored by the end of a rainbow rainbow stopped at his cave and every day the hermit would sit on his rock and watch the colors play over the valley and disappear into a land far far away one day a young man appeared riding a silver horse he stopped beside that old hermit and said old man I am looking for the end of the rainbow the hermit smiled at him and said where the rainbow touches my cave that's where it ends the young rider was shocked he looked at the hermit's barren home and said I live at the other end of the rainbow but over there there is this big mansion that is full of treasure what treasures lie here on the other end of the rainbow peace and happiness said the hermit peace and happiness well the young rider was disappointed in the hermit's answer not finding the treasure that he had expected he followed the rainbow all the way back to the other end of the valleys now over the years as the years passed this young rider became very very wealthy he became a very successful merchant and now he lived in that rainbow mansion at the other side of the rainbow and he filled up the mansion with even more treasures but although he was very very rich he was not happy one day he was sitting alone in his big office and he remembered the hermit and what he had said years earlier perhaps he thought to himself he can bring me the happiness and the peace that I really need well the hermit did not want to leave his cave but when the merchant sent a message and summoned him to come he put on his best rags and walked to the other end of the rainbow the merchant was pleased now to have the old man in the comfort of his mansion he gave him the best room in the place with a bed with silken sheets but the old man he wasn't comfortable sleeping in that wonderful bed and so each night after the lights were out he would slip away into the garden and he'd sleep between the roots of a big gentle tree well the merchant the next day offered his guest the richest food and the finest wines that he had in his wine cellar but the old man didn't like these instead he crept out to the garden and he picked the fruits off the trees and he drank from a little stream of clear running water and the merchant also invited to his mansion great thinkers and important teachers to converse with the old hermit but the hermit was a simple man and he crept away back to the garden to talk to the creatures who visited there the great thinkers and the important teachers were so busy trying to impress each other that they hardly noticed that the hermit was gone well one day the merchant went for a walk in the garden and he found the hermit sitting under the gentle tree and chattering away with the animals old hermit he asked why do you not sleep in the room that i have given you on that wonderful soft bed with silk and sheets the hermit said all of my life i have slept in the arms of nature i do not fear her darkness and her nighttime whispers they give me good dreams the merchant didn't understand what the old hermit was saying but why don't you eat the excellent food and drink that i offer you he said and the hermit smiled and said by eating just a little bit of simple foods like fruit i can taste the goodness that grows out of the earth and the clear spring water does not make me feel kind of giddy in the head so that i say foolish things the merchant was puzzled by these answers and he asked again why do you talk to all these these silly creatures out here and ignore the wise men that i have invited to converse with you the hermit looked at the animals gathered around him and said all the creatures of the world have something important to say it does not mean they are fools simply because they like to live a simple life after this last answer the merchant went back to his office and he said to himself i asked the hermit to come here to bring me peace and happiness but instead he speaks to me in all these words that i simply cannot understand then after a while he called the hermit into his office can you bring me peace he asked the hermit i cannot the hermit replied can you make me happy said the merchant no i cannot said the hermit why not ask the merchant with a sad expression the hermit looked very closely at the merchant and said peace has to come from within you peace is like a seed you cannot force it to grow you cannot shape it into something that you want it to be you must give it love and freedom so that it can grow from inside of you into something pure and beautiful only then are you going to know true happiness the merchant was silent for a while and he asked how do i start how do i start planting that seed the old man said well the first thing you must do is let me go back to the cave that i love and where i belong and so the hermit was allowed to go back to the cave to sit beneath the falling colors of the end of the rainbow and with a satisfied smile the hermit would look out across the valleys to the other end of the rainbow and know that the seeds of peace were beginning to grow there so that's the story about the seeds of peace i hope you enjoyed it this morning and now we're going to sing you out to summer fun and i hope you have a good time there and so we continue our service with this selection from annie dillard's classic pilgrim at tinker creek learning to stalk muskrats took me several years but what happened that particular night was not only the ultimate in human intrusion the limit beyond which i am certain i cannot go i would never have imagined that i could go that far actually to sit beside a feeding muskrat as beside a dinner partner at a crowded table when i first spotted him he was busily engaged in harvesting reeds and swimming with them back through the stream to his den and having apparently caught the reeds he repeated the same routine in a very business-like fashion swimming back again with a hefty mouthful but then i lost sight of him for a minute when he went under the bridge he did not come out where i expected him to be but suddenly and to my utter disbelief he appeared right there on the bank next to me there i was and there he was right by my side i could have touched him with the palm of my hand without stretching out my elbow he gathered mouthfuls of grass and clover less by gnawing than by biting hard next to the ground locking his neck muscles pushing up jerkily with his forelegs in the 40 minutes that i watched him he never saw me smelled me or heard me at all when he was in full view of course i never moved except to breathe only once when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away from me did he suddenly rise up right all alert but then he immediately began foraging again he never knew i was there i never knew i was there either for 40 minutes that night i was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate i received impressions but i did not print out captions my own self-awareness had disappeared it seems now that almost as though i if i had been wired with electrodes my eeg would be flat i have done this sort of thing so often losing self-consciousness moving slowly halting suddenly that it's become almost second nature to me and i have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating you know i wonder if we don't waste much of our energy just by saying hello to ourselves over and over again now martin buber quotes an old hasid master who said when you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy then from all the stones and all the growing things and all the animals the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you and then they are purified and they become a holy fire in you now i've tried to show muskrats to other people but it very seldom works no matter how quiet we are the muskrats they just stay hidden out of sight maybe they sense the hum of our consciousness the buzz from two humans who in the silence cannot help but be aware of each other and so also of themselves can i stay still how still it's astonishing how many people cannot or will not hold still i could not or would not hold still for 30 minutes inside my cabin but down by the creek i slow down i center down i empty out in my brain i'm not saying muskrat muskrat muskrat there i say nothing i go calm i find balance and repose i retreat not inside myself but outside myself so that i am a tissue of senses whatever i see out there is plenty abundance i'm skin of the water that the wind plays over i am petal and feather and stone the second selection is from the beat poet allen ginsburg too much industry too much eats too much beer too much cigarettes too much philosophy too many thought forms not enough rooms not enough trees too much police too much computers too much high-fi too much pork too much coffee too much smoking under gray roofs too much obedience too many bellies too many business suits too much paperwork too many magazines too much old murder too much white torture too much one stammerheim too many happy nazis too many crazy students not enough farms not enough apple trees not enough nut trees too much money too many poor turks without vote guests do the work too much metal too much fat too many jokes not enough meditation Jeremy as some of you know has been gracing us with his music for years both as a soloist and also as part of our string band and we're hoping that he will return on his vacations when he comes back to madison from juliard where he will be studying this fall congratulations our family took few real vacations during my childhood in her profession as an occupational therapist my mother didn't have a great deal of time off in the 50s and the 60s and as an independent farmer my father and we kids had fields and livestock that needed near constant attention and so in most years our summer treat was a day trip to the south side of chicago for a sunday doubleheader at old comiskey park i retained fond memories of those trips there was lunch in the sheltered picnic area beneath the left field bleachers it was watching legendary white socks players like mini minoso and early win who's hitting and pitching records i practically knew by heart there were those hot dogs with mustard ballpark is where i learned to like mustard and then there was of course luxuriating in a day in which i was utterly free of responsibilities so fast forward to father's day 2015 trena and i were spending a couple of nights in the twin cities where our son kyle lives and works and the two of us usually planned some sort of father's son activity on father's day and a few weeks earlier it had struck me unexpectedly that what i'd really like to do was take in a baseball game i checked the schedule and yes the minnesota twins were in the midst of a home stand and as luck would have it their opponent that night chicago white socks now we had not been to a major league game since kyle was 12 and we went to see the brewers a time or two in no walkie's venerable county stadium now the twins these days play a target field an impressive new park in the heart of downtown minneapolis and we enjoyed ourselves enough that night that i bought tickets for another game six weeks later george vexie is a former sports rider for the new york times and he has written that baseball has a timeless feel to it as if it had always been there and that is because he says the game is unfettered by the tyranny of the stopwatch what else can you do at a ballpark but chatter for two or three or four hours you know in rural america people sat on their front porches and whittled with their knives and talked to each other in ballparks fans players commentators still have time to play with words and ideas and good memories now traditionally baseball has featured a fair amount of vacancy time during which nothing particularly engaging or riveting is happening out on the field and one of the things that i relished about the games that we witnessed when i was a child was the spaciousness the opportunity the game afforded for us to engage in some deeper connection whether it was with me and my son or with me and my siblings and my parents when i was 10 and 12 years old but regrettably this unique and for me at least highly attractive feature of baseball it's relative serenity that may be threatened with extinction reflecting on our experience at target field a few days later i was suddenly struck by the change that the game has undergone since i sat in comiskey park a half century ago back then baseball was baseball between every pitch between every inning little if anything happened apart from the vendors hawking the beer and the peanuts and the hot dogs there was nothing to distract you from what you saw and heard or didn't see on the diamond that target field however practically every inch of surface space is now lit up with led displays one's visual field is bombarded continually with promotions player information announcements snippets of entertainment little spectacles unfold on the diamond between innings comical foot races performed by costume runners instant replays are now projected on huge screens in the outfield and for the ears there is little relief from the non-stop music and instructions from the pa announcer to stand up and to cheer don't get me wrong i still enjoyed the games at target field but baseball seems to have succumbed to that larger cultural imperative to cram all kinds of stimulus into every nook and cranny of modern life so wherever we go these days and la claire writes we will be overwhelmed by the noise and the onslaught of information and distraction surrounded by clamor meaningless conversations all buttressed by our society's supposition that action is preferable to non-action busy work to idleness we harbor today the conviction that the void must be filled at whatever cost as alan ginsberg's poem that you heard a moment ago indicated some days it's just too much but we humans are remarkably adaptive and we become habituated to all the clutter and the clatter that presses in upon us almost every waking moment after a while we don't know what we would do without it begins to feel so familiar that without it we feel naked exposed and yet all this plentitude does exact a toll physically emotionally and spiritually increasingly we turn to sedatives and sleep aids to quell the low-level objectless anxiety that has become a near constant feature of modern life tethered to our smartphones we cannot be alone with ourselves quiet and self-contained for more than a few minutes at a time at increasingly unaccustomed to introspection we find it difficult to search our own hearts how then can we discriminate between what the marketers and the influence peddlers want us to be and who we need to be and we seem to be passing on this troubled pattern as a legacy to our children in an editorial that appeared recently in the new york times columnist frank bruny cited recent research out of stanford university in studying a large sample of 14 to 17 year olds researchers found that fewer than half of these teens are sleeping more than seven hours a night not good for a child's physical and emotional health the study warned these are bright ambitious kids from affluent homes who are trapped in a juvenile rat race and for kids like these bruny writes childhood has been transformed into a highly programmed status obsessed and sometimes spirit sapping competition a lifestyle made all the more frenetic by the tablets and the smartphones that keep kids connected and distracted long after lights out we need to give our kids more wiggle room bruny suggests we need to give them minutes and hours and days of freedom from the pressure that our hyper competitive culture is placed upon them claire massad's message to parents is similar writing in harper's magazine massad recalls that as a child she had plenty of resources lots of activities and interests to keep her busy but she also remembered stretches of time when she was utterly unoccupied and she admits a little bored just like many of us were as august wound down and the school year approached as a mother observing her own children massad observes that they lack for nothing even more than i did and as a consequence they know nothing of nothingness they know nothing of nothingness was that a bad thing to be unequated with nothingness with vacancy well it could just be that as the old hermit told the young merchant in the story you heard earlier it could just be that this nothingness is where the rich soil of peace and happiness must be planted and so massad says i want my children to embrace doing nothing to experience the slowing of an afternoon to a near standstill they need to learn to lie on the lawn and watch ants scale the grass blades they'd have to stop be still and then to wait and wait and wait allowing time to fatten around them like a dew drop on the tip of a leaf and then and only then who knows what they might imagine what they might invent so think of the amazement the transcendence that annie dillard experienced as she sat silently and selflessly on the bank of tinker creek while a muskrat that notably shy creature went about its business scarcely in arms length away and experiences like this are available to us only when we have trained ourselves to be alone and still and empty and insensible even to the hum of our own consciousness i have tried to show muskrats to other people dillard wrote it rarely works because most people cannot be still they cannot slow down they cannot empty themselves but there's more at stake here than the opportunity to observe wildlife for instance effective listening hinges on our ability to pause long enough to absorb and to understand at a deeper level what is being conveyed to us it's only by stepping back from a conversation that we can become aware of and put aside all of our preconceived notions personal biases and unwarranted assumptions a quick retort isn't always what is called for it may move the conversation efficiently forward but it also preempts a more thoughtful appraisal of the issue at hand and so one thinks of our conversations around race relations and of the dominant american culture's reluctance to see and to acknowledge implicit bias and white privilege our outlook is so bound up with this white racial frame that we need time we need to give ourselves space to pull all of that apart leaving an open canvas on which a different picture can be impressed and we are hardly the first generation to face this particular challenge i remember reading that even back in the early years of this country settlement europeans would quite often attribute indian silence during conversation to stupidity or lack of understanding they just don't get it but in reality our european forebears didn't understand native american patterns of speech because indigenous peoples distrust opinions that are arrived at too hastily with too little time allotted for serious reflection and if our ancestors were uncomfortable with the absence of words people in today's culture seem positively fearful notice what happens in daily conversation kay lindall writes in the sacred art of listening it's as though there's an unwritten rule that whenever there is a hint of silence someone must fill that vacuum with a rush of words and think about the last time someone called for a moment of silence and a public gathering the first 10 or 15 seconds usually pretty comfortable but after that 15 seconds people get restless and they cough and they rustle their orders of service and they uncross their legs and they clear their throats it could well be that our uneasiness with silence with solitude with vacancy is founded on a deep-seated fear it's not just that we want to avoid boredom or the sense of being unoccupied and at loose ends yes our culture does demand that we should always be doing something and that it's far better to be active than to be idle because after all that's how we are taught to justify our existence but the fear goes deeper than that in the silence when our usually dependable defenses are down self-recrimination self-doubt can begin to creep in stillness and mclare writes brings us face to face with our complexities and our contradictions with all those hidden aches and anguishes and so now even the Sabbath is no longer exempt from the demands of an over busy and anxious culture our society used to enforce Sabbath observance with closing statutes and blue laws so most of these are gone now maybe they still exist in Kansas but now what was once mandated by the state is entirely a matter of our own individual initiative but how many of us appreciate the Sabbath's value which as Wayne Mueller explains is its unflinching uselessness nothing will get done on the Sabbath not a single item will be checked off any list no goals will be realized and the ancient jews appreciate it for anyone's life to be healthy and balanced it has to include this vacancy this fallow time it had to be informed by emptiness otherwise like a field that is sown too often forced to produce too much our lives to lose their vitality there may be exceptions but most of us cannot make the best decisions do our best we work or to sustain good health if we are always in the thick of things nor when we're in the thick of things can we grieve properly Steven Jenkinson a Canadian noted for his work with hospice patients and with their families lectured here in the landmark auditorium a few days ago and Jenkinson in his remarks said that grief must be learned it does not come to us naturally but how does one learn to grieve by observing others who have figured out how to do it well Jenkinson said and those who grieve well resist the temptation to distract themselves they do not fill up their hours and days with a constant round of activity in mental chatter so that they don't have to deal with what the philosopher Bethany Vakaro calls the presence of absence those who grieve well know that avoidance only delays the inevitable it does not let us bypass it in a recent column in the New York Times Liz Rosenberg reports that after her outwardly healthy husband died unexpectedly in his 50s from a heart attack she was tempted to do what survivors in our society so often do as she put it cover the abyss with trance something in the world has been lost she wrote we instinctively move forward to fill the gap you think that you can escape the agony of absence and for a while you do but then at some point the whole house of cards begins to collapse Belden Lane learned this lesson sitting beside his mother's bed in her final weeks of life unlike Liz Rosenberg who was taken unawares and unprepared Lane maintained a lengthy vigil at his mother's bedside and he says that she was working at as hard at dying as I have seen her work at anything in her entire life and there were long periods when nothing passed between them I listened for the wisdom that she was weavering from the gathered threads of that life Lane writes but I valued our time together in silence even more the opportunity for prolonged grief was somehow good inviting me to a letting go of other things in my own life I experienced a keen sense of immediacy in that silence a vulnerability that sharpened life's intensity a capacity to discern what was and wasn't important in the end the struggle to recover some of the spaciousness that we have lost in our crowded world a world where inarticulate cries of too much emanate from every quarter that is a struggle that we cannot afford to abandon and perhaps this effort should begin with just the simple acknowledgement that it's a matter of restoring a natural and necessary balance giving both the yin and the yang of our lives their rightful due because as the chinese philosopher Lao Tzu put it 2,500 years ago we shaped clay into a pot but it's the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want we hammer wood for a house but it's the empty inner space that makes it livable we work with being but non-being is what we use I invite you to join me now in the spirit of meditation so I invite you to settle in for just a moment or two putting aside all thoughts that annoy all disturbing memories all anxious agendas put away plans to be made things to be done victories to be won breathe deeply clear the mind of clutter sit easy and be at rest feel your body recover its balance your mind its bearings your spirit its strength feel the presence of your companions find reassurance in the well warmth of their welcome and the support of their caring may this be a temporary but welcome place of retreat it made the silence that follows nourishes all in the days ahead let us be a community of silence blessed be as you come into the auditorium if there's something you'd like for us to share that's going on but we do actually have something of a joy and a sorrow that's never obvious as of last month harry the second longest tenure member of our staff i being the first as of july harry carne's retired from his possession as our publications are and harry's been doing this work uh both in print and digital media with us for a long long time although he started here as a religious education assistant 17 years ago and gradually worked his way up the ladder who said f us is not a place of advancement but harry has not only you know been uh an employee with us for a good long time but you know in my working with him i have found that he has amazing dedication to unitary universalism and to first unitarian society he just simply loves this congregation and loves our movement and so he has been unfailingly diligent in his work and really on many many occasions gone above and beyond in meeting his responsibilities so this afternoon this morning we want to thank harry for those 17 years of service and rob a little token of our esteem and as testimony to the fact that harry probably is not going away anytime soon the images that were projected up here for the message for all ages were ones that he actually provided us with us this morning as a volunteer so thank you very much harry now i'd invite you to rise what's more in body or in spirit for our closing hymn please be seated for the benediction and the postlude our closing words are just a tad bit out of season as you'll note this poem by david white is entitled the winter of listening no one but me by the fire my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside all this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense around every living thing what is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence what we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes that has everything we need what we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained inside everyone there is a great shout of joy waiting to be born and so now even with summer so far off i feel it grow in me now ready to arrive in the world all those years listening to those who had nothing to say all those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard all those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening and the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness silence and winter have led me to this otherness so let this winter of listening be enough for the new life i must call my own blessed be