Yeah, yeah. Well, technically, technically, it's easier to do a very dark red light than a very dark blue light. So, if you know what you're actually learning, this is not the one. You can tell under a dark blue light, like under a dark blue light, it's over there. It's a little extra purple on the right, it's a little bit of a blue light. And it's going to just go instead of going like that. You can tell under a dark blue light, it's over there. I mean, we're still looking, we're going to keep an eye on it. It's not. It's not. It's not even right at the time. So, here you are. That's the one. Okay. I'm thinking of like, something that's really nice. I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of something that's really nice. Right. Oh, what? That's how you do it. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thanks to our little gonger. Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. Now, let's see how we sound when we sing the words to our in-gathering hymn which you'll find inside your order of service. Good morning everybody. Welcome to the Sunday service on Martin Luther King weekend here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberger, proud member of this congregation and the proud owner of a new haircut and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about what makes this place special, please join us for our fellowship hour after the service. During the service we ask that you silence your pesky electronic devices that you just will not need for the next hour. And while you're doing that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied by a youngster and you think that young person would rather experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some comfortable seating just outside the door in the commons from which you can hear and see the service. And one reason we are able to hear and see the service is because it's brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers whose names you get to hear right now. Ann Smiley is our lay minister. Lynn Scoby has been our greeter upstairs. Richard Scoby, Ann Smiley, Sam Bates and Ross Woodward are serving as ushers for this very unruly crowd. And our hospitality is hosted by Rich DeVita and Jean Hills. With that I ask you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Come from the poet Francis Ellen Watkins Harper entitled Lines. At the portals of the future, full of madness, guilt and gloom, stood the hateful form of slavery, crying, give or give me room, room to smite the earth with cursing, room to scatter, rend and slay, from the trembling mother's bosom, room to tear her child away, room to trample on the manhood of the country far and wide, room to spread or ever-eaten slavery's scorching lava tide. Pale and trembling stood the future quailing beneath his frown of hate as he grasped with bloody clutches the great keys of doom and fate. In his hand he held a banner, all festooned with blood and tears, which was a fearful ensign woven with the grief of wrong of years. On his brow he wore a helmet decked with strange and cruel art. Every jewel was a life drop rung from some poor broken heart. Though her cheek was pale and anxious, yet with look and brow sublime, by the pale and trembling future stood the crisis of our time. And from many a throbbing bosom came the words of fear and gloom. Tell us, O, thou coming crisis, what shall be our country's doom? Shall the wings of dark destruction brood and hover o'er our land, till we trace the steps of ruin by their blight from strand to strand? With a look and voice prophetic spoke the solemn crisis then. I have only mapped the future for the airing sons of men. If ye strive for truth and justice, if ye battle for the right, ye shall lay your hands all strengthened on God's robe of love and light. But if ye trample on his children, to his ear will float each groan. Jar the cords that bind them to him, no vibrates at his throne. And the land that forges fetters binds the weak and poor in chains, must in blood or tears and sorrow wash away her guilty stains. If you'll join me for the Lighting of the Chalice, which will be a responsive reading of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. if you can rise and body your spirit. And join me by reading the bolded sections of the text. We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. We must evolve, for all human conflicts, a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. I now invite you to turn in love to your neighbor and greet them on this fine chilly morning. And then we will sing him 1.39. Come up for the story for all ages. We're going to be talking about a woman named Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. It's my only picture, so I'm going to pass it around. You guys can take a look. And the first thing I want you to do is think about what she might have looked like when she was a little baby. Nearly 200 years ago, a little girl was born in the city of Baltimore near Chesapeake Bay. Her name was Frances Ellen Watkins. Frances Ellen was born in 1825. There weren't any cars and only a very few trains.  And Frances Ellen said, gah, because that's the kind of thing that babies say. Frances Ellen said, gah, because she was only a baby and she didn't understand what, oh, I skipped the line. And then her mother said, Frances Ellen, you are also the luckiest baby in the world because we are not slaves. You have been born free. And Frances Ellen said, gah, because she was only a baby and she didn't understand what free meant. She didn't understand what slave meant. She didn't know that in 1825 slavery was legal in southern parts of the United States and America, including in the city of Baltimore. She didn't know that people with dark skin could be bought and sold. She didn't know that children, even little children, could be taken away from their homes and not see their families again.  And the word sacred is a little tricky. And we're going to try something else a little tricky and actually hand some kids the mic and see how it goes. What does sacred mean to you? Does anyone have a good idea of what sacred means? Sacred means, like, something special to you. That's really good. Sacred means something that you like to keep to yourself. Anybody else, one more? You volunteered for me? I really liked what you said, Rosie, that sacred is something that's really special. I don't need this. I have my own. For me, sacred means something that makes something or someplace that makes you feel safe and loved. And sacred imagination is the imagination we can use when we feel safe and loved to help us imagine what life might be like for other people. Frances Helen Watkins grew up in a very happy home and she grew up in a home where her mom loved her. But she grew up in a home where she came to learn that if she lived in a different place in the country, not far away, she could have been taken away from her mom. She also learned that although she loved school, she loved going to school with her uncle, William Watkins, and she felt that she was lucky to go to school, she knew that in other places in the country, it was illegal for people with dark skin to learn to read or write and that in some places being a girl also meant that you couldn't go to school. So can you think of what it might be like not to be able to go to school because of the way you look? I know that for some people, going to school is no fun, but it's even more no fun to not be able to go at all just because of the way you look. Someday William Watkins, her uncle, said, Someday all children will be allowed to learn. Black and white, girl and boy, there will be schools for everyone someday. Then he smiled at them and opened his book, but you lucky children can start learning today. Frances Ellen learned, she learned math and spelling and English and Latin and Greek and she learned history and geography and music. What's some favorite subjects out there? What are the things that you love to learn? Reading. Reading. Reading was also Frances Ellen's favorite subject along with writing. She only got to go to school until she was the age of 14 and then she had to go to work to help her family. Now, 14 might feel like a really long time away, but think of some 14-year-olds and see and kind of that you might know or some teenagers and think how good they might be at going to work all day. Now, Frances Ellen was lucky because she got to go to a family that helped her to continue learning, a Quaker family that gave her access to their library and gave her writing supplies. And so she started to write even though she had to work all day. She spent her night writing. And she published her first book. When she was 20, her book Autumn Leaves was published and sold in bookstores. A woman wrote this, some people said, a colored woman, no, that's impossible, it's too good. Someday Frances Ellen said to herself as she dipped her pen in the inkwell to write another poem, someday people will know that the work you can do doesn't depend on the color of your skin. People will know that both men and women can do work and write someday. So she was the one, the poem that I read at the beginning, which probably had a lot of words that were hard for you, was written by her and it's a really beautiful poem about how we can't continue to treat people bad and expect for our country to be good. But someday it didn't look like it was coming anytime soon, this is a really important part. So Frances Ellen decided she would help it along. She wrote poems and stories and sold over 10,000 books.  What do you think would make you feel to have some people tell you that you couldn't be a writer or you couldn't do what you wanted to do because of who you were or what you looked like? You got something? Sad and mad. Sad and mad, let's get it. It's good. Be very upset. And she was upset too, but the thing that I really like about her story is that she kept going. She helped people, she wrote poems and stories and sold over 10,000 books. She helped people who were running away from slavery by sending them money, she'd made from her writing. Even though helping them meant she could be put in jail. She traveled from state to state, giving speeches to crowds of people, white people, black people, women and men. She told them that slavery was evil and should be against the law. And finally, after many more poems and many more speeches by Frances Ellen and other people, after 15 years in a civil war, slavery was made illegal on every part of the land. And everyone was free.  So Frances Ellen got to work. She traveled to the southern parts of the United States and helped start schools for all those people who hadn't been allowed to go to school before. She worked with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton to change the laws, so that women would be allowed to vote just like men. She worked, now this is an interesting one. She worked with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Does anyone know what temperance means? Mike does. Temperance means she tried to help people stop drinking too much alcohol and then not have any money left over for food. She worked with different churches to feed the hungry and teach the children. Of all those churches, the one she chose to join was the first Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. She became a Unitarian because she knew that Unitarians work hard to make the world a better place. You think that's true? And to make those some days come true. Well, here we are. It's been nearly 100 years since Frances Ellen died and many of her some days have arrived. It's not legal to keep slaves anymore in the United States. Women can vote. All children are allowed to go to school and sometimes even forced to go to school.  We know that the work people can do doesn't depend on the color of their skin or whether they're a boy or a girl. But still, many some days still haven't yet arrived. There are still people who are hungry. There are still children who don't have good schools. What are some other things? What are some other things you didn't think of? Some other some days that might not have come yet. Some other things we need to change to make things better for people. Some people aren't really peaceful. Some people aren't. That's good. Well, our president isn't doing the right thing. It's true. Some people don't even have food. Some people don't have homes. Some people are really poor. That's fine. You wanna say some people don't have toys? Yeah, that's good. Anybody else? Some people aren't treated nice because of their religion. Some people have bad homes because and are poorer than other people because of the color of their skin or their religion. There's still a lot of work to be done. So just like Frances Ellen, we Unitarian Universalists need to get to work and make those some days come soon. Thanks, everybody. Have a good time in class. And we're gonna sing 113 as the Children Leave for Classes. First reading today comes from the Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr., which he wrote in 1963 on the margins of the newspapers in his prison, the only paper available to him. And then had that letter sent out to churches like ours and newspapers across the country. There was a time when the church was very powerful and the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion. It was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being disturbers of the peace and outside agitators. But the Christians pressed on in the conviction that they were a colony of heaven, called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. By their effort and example, they brought to an end many ancient evils. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and beat us missed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning in the 20th century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust. Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They've gone on the highways of the south, to the highways of the south on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. They have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned, though we may be, our destiny is tied up in America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebears labored in this country without wages. They made cotton king. They built homes of their masters while suffering gross injustices and shameful humiliations. And yet, out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Our second reading is responsive. All of us need all of us to make it by Megan Foley and Teresa Soto. And I'll ask you to simply read the title, to repeat with me the title. All of us need all of us to make it when prompted. Unitarian Universalist Minister Reverend Teresa Soto writes, all of us need all of us to make it. I want you to get used to those words. Make them your prayer. All of us need all of us to make it. In a world where some of us are targeted for struggle and brutality, where others of us benefit and flourish, we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. In a world where powerful people of ill will and indifference make us fearful for our safety and our future as we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. In the excruciating space that lives between seeing and naming and hearing and changing, we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. Make a picture in your mind of someone you aren't very happy with right now.  All of us need all of us to make it. Unitarian Universalist believe that all of us need all of us to make it. This is why we are in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives today and every day. Amen. Ham 303, 310, 378, or 379, or readings 437, 443, or 444. You would see that the author of each is one Kenneth Patton. Patton, who categorically refused the title reverend, was the minister of First Unitarian Society for seven years from 1942 to 1949. He saw this congregation through a good portion of World War II and the beginning of the Civil War. He helmed for better or worse select Frank Lloyd Wright as the architect of the landmark auditorium, and he made sure that it would never be called a church or a chapel. He also chaired the committee that created the predecessor of our hymnal called Hymns for the Celebration of Life and made sure that many of his hymns would continue with us to today. Now why am I talking about a dead white guy on MLK weekend? For better or worse, the common history of Unitarian and Universalist involvement in racial justice is the story of white men and a large and increasing number of white women responding to the prophetic voices of people of color like Martin Luther King, Jr. These were and are good people, even at times great people, with stories of risking more for the cause of racial justice than most of us can imagine. Even like James Reeve and Biola Luiso, sometimes giving their lives in an attempt to bring the world to a place of greater justice. My question today is this, is Unitarian Universalism a place where meaningful work for racial justice can truly be done on a significant scale? This isn't a rhetorical question. For you used today, both nationally and in this congregation, this has become an existential question. Rosemary Bray McNat recounts a conversation she had with Coretta Scott King. Where King admitted that both she and her husband gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one point, but Martin and I realized that we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian. We are not solely a social justice organization, but neither are we solely a social club. Unlike many faiths, we claim no divine mandate for our work. We are not God's chosen people, God's kingdom on earth, or at least if we are, we're doing a really good job of hiding it. Our mission statement says that part of who we are as a people is those who seek to be a force for good in the world. If this seeking does not lead to meaningful action on perhaps the most pressing social issue of our day, we should seriously reconsider the state of our priorities. We, a majority white congregation, are constantly at risk of falling into the trap of the white moderate, who became for Martin Luther King Jr. the great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom of oppressed African Americans. Those who prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice, resulting in moderates becoming dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. Kenneth Patton certainly believed this congregation to be a place where meaningful social action could be accomplished. And this then unitarian pulpit and in the universalist pulpit he would go on to occupy, Patton preached his most lasting message. We are one human family. And that human family should do away with the illusion of inherent racial difference, difference as soon as possible. Race is a lie. A lie Patton taught meant to divide our family, destroying the common unity that is our birthright on this wondrous green and blue homibars. He was, of course, right. Biology, anthropology, oh, both tell us that he was right. And more than that, I think our hearts tell us he was right. Race is an illusion. But he was also wrong. For race is the worst kind of harmful illusion. It is an illusion that we have made real. It is a lie that has become more real than the truth. When Patton stood at this pulpit, which was then located in the gathering spot of a YMCA, 70 years ago and formally resigned the white race, which would become his most famous act, he was giving voice to a sentiment that many of us who are white still feel deeply today. We don't remember signing up to be white. And while we recognize that we have benefited significantly from being classified as such, I think we would give up quite a bit to live in a world where racial prejudice no longer exists. But we know that something as simple as publicly resigning from our race will never be sufficient to make systemic change. Let me be clear, Patton made some serious waves with his declaration. I don't know how things went viral back then, but this declaration went viral. You got the kind of hate mail I can only dream of as a pastor. And to be fair to Patton, he had a plan to back up his declaration. He tried to give up his white privilege in such forms as marking colored on his bus pass, limiting his choice of seats on segregated lines. He told his congregation that if they found that the church was not fully welcoming of people of different colors and nationalities, that they should leave the church and find a better one. But it is also clear that First Unitarian Society never became the post-racial utopia that Patton hoped it would become. Critiquing the past is easy and cheap. Setting our own vision for the future is a much more difficult and much more urgent task. Among the most influential reading of my time in seminary, which helped me to shape my future vision for this denomination, was Sarah Kajawa Holbrook's research into multicultural congregations. Now she found that inclusive churches go through several consistent stages in their progress towards inclusivity. The first two stages are monocultural, where first open and then secret policies deny people of color access to our white congregations. We hopefully can say that we have moved on from those stages. I believe that leaders like Patton helped to move this congregation into the third multicultural stage, where conscious discrimination is no longer tolerated, and the goal of diversity is solidified in the church's aims. But where the congregation still unfortunately remains unaware of continuing patterns of privilege, paternalism, and control. I further believe that our congregation since the time of Kenneth Patton has made significant steps toward moving towards the fourth stage that Kajawa Holbrook identifies, the stage of becoming an anti-racist organization. With growing understanding of racism as a barrier to effective diversity, we are becoming a congregation that develops a systematic analysis of racism, and has an increasing commitment to dismantle racism and eliminate inherent white advantage. Of course, we still have work to do to even get to this stage, but I will admit that I have long been content to see this stage as an end goal. Early in the development of my sense of call, I had made peace with the fact that unitarian universalism was a place where white folks got together to work on white people problems like privilege and structural racism. Sure, we weren't really racially diverse, but what denomination was. However, I was slowly converted to the idea that there was something beyond anti-racism. Right before I went to our denominations, General Assembly in June of 2017, where I was able to witness firsthand the grit and grace of the organizing work of people of color within our denomination. My understanding of what our denomination was, and what it was meant to be imploded, and I began to glimpse over the distant horizon a different way of being. In learning to be white, the African-American UU minister, Tandeka, helped me to start to fill in a gap in my own understanding of my racial identity in a way that I have yet to experience. With a comprehensive and concise history of racial identity formation in the United States, Reverend Tandeka, helps us to understand how white identity was crafted not just to justify the control of non-whites, but also to justify the control of powerful whites over disempowered whites, in order to break up natural class affiliations between white indentured servants and black slaves. The elites legislated white privilege for a class of persons they both despised and feared for whites. With a clear acknowledgement of the wages of whiteness, the social, financial, religious benefits that being white grants, Tandeka broke into my heart by introducing the idea of wages for whiteness. The price of admission she writes to the white race in America has been exacting. Costs have included ethnic conflicts, class exploitation, police intimidation, humiliation by teachers, child abuse, and lost self-esteem, and a general feeling of self-contempt. I call these costs the wages for whiteness. To tell you them is to give an account of a racial victim, someone who had to become white in order to survive. The story of this racial victim is rarely told. I find that paragraph, I find that paragraph deeply uncomfortable to even read. One of the things, one of the ways white, going off script here, one of the ways white privilege and white power try to divide us is by making us numb to the pain and the sorrow that growing up in a racist society doesn't just bring to people of color but to white people as well. And what white power teaches is that any sense of working to try to understand that pain is somehow a violation of this white pact that we all have made that we all signed up to before we can remember. The tree of racism is rotten. It's rotten from bottom to top. And what I'm afraid of is that we white people in this denomination and elsewhere have made becoming the right kind of white people, our greatest idol. And instead of focusing on dismantling the systems, the system of demanding wages of unquestioning loyalty for being white, we have simply constructed an alternative system of being good enough white people to think ourselves free of the costs of white guilt. We're scrambling for this place on this tree of racism where we think it's not rotten, that there's this place, this magical place that all the good white people can come together and escape this pain, escape our pain and escape the shared pain that racism brings to people of color. We must learn to vastly stretch our concept of inclusivity. One of my brightest hopes is that the work of centering voices of color in our denomination has begun. Its emerging throes have been significant and painful as we begin to see from the diligent and direct work of UUs of color, how what to many of us appears to be a neutral is in fact institutionalized whiteness. I said earlier in this sermon that UU history, the UU history of racial justice work is most commonly the story of white men and women responding to the work of people of color. But that was an intentional half truth. In the book from which I read our story for all ages, each chapter on a notable unitary universalist has a post script that starts with referencing where each person can be found within our denominations, children's religious education curriculum. UUs like Thomas Starr King and Olympia Brown have multiple references. While Harper's post script begins with the incredibly sad words, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is not featured in any UU curriculum. Our history does in fact include a large and significant number of dedicated people of color whose stories are untold and underappreciated. And our congregation contains the stories of people of color that are far too often untold and underappreciated. And if you're a person of color who's come to hear me, the whitest guy in Madison preach on MLK weekend, I'm grateful. And I'm sorry for the way you've been treated. I said earlier, it's a sad truth that right now in its current state, there is only room in our denomination for people of color with exceptional commitment and dedication, compassion for the shared struggle against racism. And even then the extraordinary story is almost never centered or remembered. As N.K. Jemisin has taught, equality is not making room for the exceptional but embracing the average. Plenty of white UUs can survive and thrive with an average amount of commitment. And that makes me happy. We're not a faith that should demand your entire life and energy to feel a part of the community. But each UU of color that I have met has an extraordinary story of their struggle to find a place in our community. And that must become completely unacceptable. To have any hope of moving past the insular, inwardly focused stage of anti-racism to true inclusion, we must begin to stretch our sacred imaginations. Part of that is listening deeply to groups like Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism. But part of that is also the work that was done by the Standing on the Side of Love campaign. That confronted with the fact that standing is not possible for some in our congregation and in spite of some concerted resistance has officially changed the name of their campaign to Siding with Love. Part of that work is considering how very often this building is inaccessible for those with different mobility, needs and capabilities. And that when we must work to make our building more accessible to those with these different needs. We must ensure that our services are accessible to those with different levels of hearing. And we must learn to include those with little discretionary time or funds in all levels of our community. The core skill set of Unitarian Universalists must be our ability to hold the tension between the reality of artificially created difference and the deeper truth about our unity. We must learn to set aside our best intention and conception of us and them. And at the same time learn to consistently confront the ways that us and them organizes a large portion of our communal lives. Our Universalist spirit must continue to hold up the universal siblinghood of all humanity. While our Unitarian spirit must continue to hold up the inviolable nature of the individual experience of racism and the pain that living in a racist society system brings. We must acknowledge and move past not only our feelings of white guilt, but also our white shame and our white fragility. We must hold ourselves to a strict measure of accountability at the same time we hold ourselves in a deep measure of compassion. There is no hope. There is no hope for us, but the hope that we create. Roxanne Gay, a Haitian American writer, quickly becoming one of the most important voices of our generation, responded to the president's latest determined attempt to sacrifice his inherent worth and dignity. I like that idea. Disparaging once again people from countries which we have consistently and ruthlessly exploited for our own gain. It's a tough read. This is a painful and comfortable moment, she writes. Instead of trying to get past this moment, we should sit with it. Wrap ourselves in the sorrow, distress, and humiliation of it. I might cover your kids ears for this next line. We need to sit with the discomfort of the president of the United States referring to several countries as shitholes during a meeting. A meeting that continued his comments unchallenged. No one is coming to save us. Before we can figure out how to save ourselves from this travesty, we need to sit with that too. This is the moment we have created. The garden that us white folks have grown from the seeds that we have planted.  We organize this absurd disgraceful merry-go-round and we don't get to check out early just because we are starting to realize how awful it is. The only way out is together through our shared pain and sorrow and anger. As a small step, we have organized a letter writing station outside where you can learn about and act on with the help of our Moses team. The issue of the Lincoln Hills School for the Boys, which is a deep miscarriage of just, no, Lincoln Hills School, they call it the school for the boys, the prison that we have set up for young boys primarily of color, affecting the lives of young incarcerated teens in our state. Once again, if you will join with me, with all of us, need all of us to make it. In a world where some of us are targeted for struggle and brutality, where others of us benefit and flourish, we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. In a world where powerful people of ill will and indifference make us fearful for our safety and our futures, we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. In the excruciating space that lives between seeing and naming and hearing and changing, we pray, all of us need all of us to make it. The only way out is together, amen. We'll now have our offertory. We're sharing our offering today with the NAACP of Dane County. Please be generous. There each week, a community of this time and place we bring our whole and at times our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past and seek a place where they might be received, be celebrated, and be shared. We pause now to acknowledge the following concerns. Long time FUS member Nancy Dot passed away yesterday. After six years of struggle with a debilitating stroke, Memorial Service has been tentatively scheduled for Saturday, March 3rd, and we give our heartfelt condolences to our husband Bob and their five children. Please give prayer to Chloe Duckin, who is recovering from brain surgery to remove her tumor from her brain. She's across the street recovering and hopes to be home next week or the next. Please send thoughts and prayers for our anonymous relative struggling with alcoholism. In addition to these mentioned, we also acknowledge all of those unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us and that as a community, we hold with equal concern in our hearts. Let us now sit quietly together for a few moments in the spirit of empathy and hope. By virtue of our time together, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. Our closing hymn is hymn number 121, if you can rise and body your spirit and then remain standing for the benediction. It comes from the Reverend Tandeka. Despair is my private pain, born from what I have failed to say, failed to do, failed to overcome. Be still my inner self, let me rise to you. Let me reach down into your pain and soothe you. I turn to you to renew my life. I turned the world to the streets of the city, the warm tapestries of brokerage firms, crack dealers, private estates, personal things in the bag ladies cart, rage and pain in the faces that turned from me, afraid of their own inner worlds. This common world I love anew as the lifeblood of generations who refuse to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world, courses through my veins. From within this world, my despair is transformed into hope. I begin anew, the legacy of caring. Blessed be, go in peace and please be seated for the postlude.


My name is Sam Bechning, I am the author of Maligman's Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. From an early age, usually in the school system, we are taught, at least in the United States, that there is no limit to what we can achieve, that if we wish to accomplish something all we need to do is set ourselves goals and then apply ourselves to their attainment. At this time, dedication, we are taught, positive outcomes are guaranteed and indeluctable, no matter how high we set the bar. There are no unrealistic aspirations we are informed, only insufficient perspiration and lacking inspiration. This narrative is narcissistic and delusional. It is counterproductive, because in reality we do have limitations, we suffer defeats, we make mistakes, no one is infallible, invincible, omnipotent or omniscient. But exposed to this onslaught of propaganda aimed at boosting our self-esteem and puffing our self-confidence, when inevitably we fail in some endeavors we tend to blame ourselves.  Such inner sadistic voices tend to deplete our energy and discourage us from trying again. In hoc to the official line that casts us as absolute masters of our own fate, we rather abstain than be proven wrong. By attributing failures to our failings, we become the ratification of our own bad fortune or indolence. We give up on life's challenges engulfed by fatalism and defeatism. Some of us choose another path when confronted with failure or defeat. We say, if I botched and bungled it, surely I did not want it that badly, and this is known in psychological jargon as cognitive dissonance. This kind of self-deception is equally self-destructive. It teaches us that nothing really matters. Everything is fun and games and should not be taken too seriously. Reality and personal history are what you make of them, and are subject to rewriting, reframing and outright confabulation. So how to avoid these pitfalls? You should develop a realistic gorge of your forties and weaknesses, talents and shortcomings, skills and limitations. Make a list of your own positive and negative traits.  If they're reluctant to risk your ire, find a way to allow them to submit their input anonymously. And now, once you have your list and their list, compare them. Compare the one you have generated, with ones others have provided you with. Are these lists largely congruent, are they in agreement? If they are, it means that you know yourself well, and that you evaluate your capabilities or lack their own courageously and objectively. If, however, there is an abyss between the way you see yourself and the way others view you, something is wrong with your self-assessment. Concentrate on the questionnaires of those who know you best, longest, and in a variety of situations. Single out their responses with conflict with your responses. Proceed to grade these answers on a scale of one to five, with five being I completely agree. Isolate these reactions and descriptions that you have rated most highly.  Do you recognize yourself in some of the feedback? Give yourself time to digest all this conflicting information. Think about it hard and long. Can you come up with incidents and events in the past which support your view or theirs? Try to return to your list and redo it in light of these new data. This protracted inner dialogue is important.  You will learn to set goals that are realistic and that are unlikely to result in frustration and emotional pain.  You and your nearest and dearest will benefit from it immensely.


A strange dream, that I thought I had as a child. But it was a dream come true, it really wasn't a figment of my imagination. It all started the day before yesterday evening. Since I had nothing to do, I decided to watch one of the old cartoons on VHS, that my brothers had. And I watched when we were young. There were many, from the episodes of Looney Tunes, to the Search the Land. DuckTales, Chip and Bale Special Agents, Tailspin, all cartoons that my father recorded when we were children. Even ones that Walt Disney did not want you to know about. I had seen all these cartoons so much, that if I looked at only a minute of any of these cartoons, their entire contents could easily come to my mind. Then, I found an episode of DuckTales, which, unfortunately, had been recorded ten minutes from the start. I put it in the VCR, and started watching. After two minutes of old advertising of the early 90s and a few seconds of an unknown TV show, the show began. Viewing it, old and magnificent memories buried in my childhood came to mind. However, I began to feel, weird. My mind kept telling me that at the end of this show, there was something unusual, something I had only seen as a child. I also noticed that the sound of the show had some problems. In the background, I could hear a man who sang to the sound of music. But this was normal, especially for an old tape. If you recorded a program over with another, there would be background sounds left of the original program that had been recorded over. I wondered what that song was, which was playing. Then, the show ended, and my stomach began to ache strangely. While the DuckTales and Credits ran, the show's theme song played, and I was tempted to sing it, karaoke style. Suddenly the music stopped, and a second after, images started appearing. The images were in black and white, showing a strange and disgusting mush that looked needed and mixed up. It looked like one of those programs, where it showed the preparation of products known and used all over the world. That must be it, I told myself. Then, a still image appeared and the song and singing ended. I swear that when I saw it, I was literally stunned. On a black background there was the image of a skeleton with no head, legs or hips. Above it was the old logo of Walt Disney, and under that was the title, Vomit Industries. Ridden in italics. At the bottom of the image there was more writing, saying, we are working for you. Then the tape stopped. I played the tape back again and again, and I watched the video a dozen times. What was this? An old cartoon of Walt Disney? I thought so. The next day, I went on the internet and looked for information on Vomit Industries, but I found nothing. I also tried combining some of the names of old Walt Disney cartoons with Vomit Industries, absolutely nothing. I thought that maybe some of you knew of the existence of the video. So I decided to buy a USB video capture stick, that I had noticed long ago in an electronics store. Then I downloaded the debut video capture program, and with the help of a tutorial, I captured the video. The video is pretty much perfect. The sound as well. However the sound, for some reason, is delayed. I uploaded the video on YouTube. The video's link will be in the description below. After this story was posted, many people commented on the post, writing about remembering seeing something similar to the video as children. Here are, translated into English, some comments from the users about their memories of Vomit Industries. Strange, now that I think of it, this is not the first time I saw Vomit Industries, but I have like a memory lapse on the subject. I think the video has reminded me of something too. Now I remember as a child, I saw after a cartoon, cannot remember if it was from Disney, a skeleton like that, and the same text in italics. I then asked myself, why is that skeleton in a cartoon? That doubt of the video has remained until now. I do not know, weird. When I was a child, I did not watch a lot of the Disney cartoons, except for some movies like The Lion King, or 101 Dalmatians. They could not interest me particularly, perhaps because I had a sort of distrust towards them. However, this video of the Vomit Industries seems to me to be something I have already seen. Maybe I have seen it as a child once, but my memories were suppressed. Okay, I have all the VHS you have, but I do not have this particular VHS. I'm sure 98% of you have already seen that logo onto the, but do not know when. I do not understand, the jingle should be disturbing, but to me it seems happy and funny. Anyway, I remember seeing something like this, when I was very young at my childhood. Anyway, I remember seeing something like this, when I was very young at my older cousin's house. I simply do not remember any connections with DuckTales and the picture I remember was different from the one of this video. Then again we are talking about many years ago, and the memory is very blurry, so everything could be different. Also because I do not have a good memory for these sort of things. I remember in the ending credits at the end of a cartoon movie I watched, there was a strange clip, not black and white. But in a bad quality. I can't tell you what it was, but I remember that night I had many nightmares since I always woke up mid-sleep. Too bad I do not have the VHS since I moved, and it was lost. Not bad. But I, rather than the logo at the end of the video, have seen those pictures of paste. Reading of you remembering the logo, it seems something is coming to mind, but I think it may be only suggestive memories. The vomit industries was a Disney sketch, I remember that as a child. In the credits of Donald Duck, there was a video showing a chicken on a skewer, I have to ask my mother if she still has the videotapes.  Let me explain better, there are various sketches, not just one. Um, the first time I read this pasta, if you can call it, I had memories rekindled regarding the words vomit industry and we are working for you. Quite disturbing memories of me watching television, and after the end of a cartoon, a logo depicting a skeleton similar to that of this video, and the same writings too, but certainly not with the same font. I do not remember which cartoon it was, but I remember that I felt a bad feeling seeing and remembering it. This makes me think that the video could be a fake, but now that everyone is denying the pasta's validity I wonder, were all our memories only a suggestion? Maybe I read the pasta, or saw a few videos regarding this, some time ago, and I have associated it with something bad, that happened in the past.