Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning to have a chance to sing. So please turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you find inside your order of service. I know this service will open. Good morning everybody and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing and mercifully warm environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, intellectually gifted member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a special and a very warm welcome to any guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we usually offer a guided tour after every service and if there's a tour guide after the service you'll find him or her over here by the windows and we'll take care of you. If there is no tour guide then that means you can spend more time in the fellowship hour instead of on the tour after the service. This would be a great time to silence all those electronic devices that you just will not need during the service and that goes for those of you watching at home as well. And while you're doing that, let me remind you that if you're accompanied this morning by a youngster and you think that that young person would rather enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer a couple alternatives for you. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and then we have some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you can see and hear the service. But the main reason that you're able to see and hear the service is that it's brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers who make sure that the service runs smoothly including Mark Schultz who's operating the sound system and Smiley who is serving as our lay minister and doing double duty as an usher as well. Jeanine Nussbaum who greeted us with her smile this morning upstairs. Our ushers Ron Cook, Elizabeth Barrett and Patty Becker, Gene Hills and Chip Quaddy are presiding over the all-important coffee and hospitality hour in the kitchen a little bit later and something that you'll appreciate. The flowers that you see up here have been donated by John and Nancy Webster to commemorate their 62nd wedding anniversary. So thank you to John and Nancy and congratulations to you. A couple announcements. First and most importantly, if you recognize this key chain which has the word hope on the pendant, I hope you are ready to claim it because it was found in between the two services. So if it belongs to you then you can claim it actually Eric is going to hold it for me. There you go. See Eric if that's your key. Two other announcements before we continue with the service. One is a survey that is in your order of service. It relates to the WMUU radio station. We're trying to figure out what to do about that station's future and how to make it even more relevant and we want to know how many people are listening to it and suggestions that you might have for WMUU. Some of you probably are aware of it. Some of you are not. The survey is a chance for us to figure out the best things to do for the future of that radio station and how to make it as useful as possible to you. And the second thing for you to look at is also in the red floors bulletin. We are offering as we do every year a dinner complete with delicious food and folk dancing almost as exciting as cabaret this Saturday January 14th at 6.30 in the evening to celebrate our partner church relationship. Proceeds will support the partner church in Romania and our international students who are attending school in the Philippines. So if you're interested in that read the article in the red floors bulletin for more details and connect with Kelly to reserve your spot at this very popular event. We need to know how much food to prepare for that event again at Saturday evening January 14th 6.30 right here. So end of the announcements. All you need to do now is 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. Good morning again. We're glad you're here. We begin our service this morning with the words of the poet David White inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. Even with summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and 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 just by listening and the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter lead me to this otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and is Steve Kindles the flame of our faith please join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in your program. We gather as a community of memory and of hope to mark the emergence of a bright new year to this day of hope and promise to a place of peace and beauty to a journey toward truth and justice to a community of acceptance and support we come seeking inspiration and encouragement along our way and now I encourage you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm and friendly greeting please be seated and so on this bracing January morning at the beginning of a new year we feel privileged to have with us six children who are beginning or perhaps close to beginning their life journey and in this in this season of expectancy and never-failing hope we join four sets of proud parents in welcoming these children into our lives and into this our spiritual community today we offer these families our friendship and our support in the opportunities and in the challenges that lie ahead we trust that the commitment to and love for each other is strong in each one of these families and it's our hope that these youngsters will be blessed with secure homes and dependable loving caregivers that they might enjoy the freedom to develop their own personalities and to shape their own unique destinies now our faith tradition unitary universalism holds that every person comes into this world fresh unsullied possessing inherent worth and dignity and so this morning we would acknowledge that these children Ty Lily Rhodes Lucette Lucy and Nathaniel that they are all bonafide human beings with their own special gifts with needs and feelings that matter just as much as any of ours although they have yet to fully unfold these youngsters are already vital active participants in their family's home life full partners in the work and play of living true heirs to all of our dreams and values now dedication does not make these children full-fledged members of First Unitarian Society in our tradition that is a choice that each of them must make for themselves when they attain coming of age 14 or 15 years old this ritual does however affirm these children's special place in our hearts and it also affords them the special kind of emotional security and spiritual opportunity that a Unitarian Universalist community such as this can provide we are glad that moved by a sense of the blessings of parenthood and trust in this congregation that Christie and Mick Adrian and Luke Joel and Sarah Mary and Teresa that these parents have chosen to express their own values and progressive religious faith through this celebration and yet ultimately it is all of us friends and relatives as well as parents who are responsible for the teaching and the nurture of our children and so by presenting them to you here today the members of this faith community their parents acknowledge that their children are more than private treasures they are young souls in whom we all have a stake and for whom we all wish the best on this day of great promise then we not only dedicate these lovely and gifted children but we also dedicate ourselves to them to their interests and to their futures and now I would invite our parents and their children to come forward and line up before the pulpit order of service for the congregational pledge of dedication and if you would please rise and body or in spirit please join me in these words for the gift of childhood whose innocence laughter and curiosity bring hope joy and new understanding into our lives we lift thankful hearts we welcome Lucette Rhodes Lucy Nathaniel tie and Lily into this spiritual community and extend to their parents our love and support in the joys and challenges of caregiving as these children grow we will share with them our insights our values and our dreams that they may enjoy the rich benefits of our religious heritage and please be seated and if we have any other children I would ask you to please rise any other children these children you see before you are young now but they're already part of our community and some are already in our church school classes but in the future you will have a chance to get them to know them better will you befriend these children and do what you can to help them feel comfortable and welcomed at First Unitarian Society if you will say please say we will thank you thank you kids may sit down and so then among us as well are a number of individuals who bear a special close relationship to one or more of these children would you please stand as I call your names accompanying tie and Lily our grandparents Andy and Jerry Bergeson and Ron and Mary Ellen Galoon ties grand godparents anti-Christine and Uncle Mark they are here and Lily's godparents Carrie Ann and Cherry with Rhodes and Lucette our family members Deb Rachel and Joe Hickman Lucy's guests include godparents Julie Baird Katie Eberhardie Christine Doma and Lance Doma are here in spirit they could not make it I believe there's an illness there grandparents Carol and Eric Eberhardie Sue and Steve Allen are here as is her older brother Seth and as well as a number of other aunts and uncles her sponsors Austin Kubersky all the way from Denver and Ryan Ratley are here to witness and help celebrate Nathaniel's dedication grandparents Jackie Ratley Helen and Mark Kubersky and Russell Larson is also with us in spirit in addition there are a goodly number of other aunts uncles and cousins today here with us my friends those of you who are standing do you take upon yourselves the privilege and responsibility to nurture defend and support the freedom and growing spirit of the child to whom you are related will you recognize his or her worth as a person and encourage that child to speak truthfully and from the heart will you share with them the best that is in you the insights values and dreams that give your life meaning finally will you help this youngster to understand not only his or her own rights but also the rights of others if so please say we will please be seated and so now to the parents who have brought their children before us Christy and Mick Adrian and Luke Joel and Sarah Mary and Teresa it is your privilege your obligation to provide an environment both of security and of challenge for your child to grow up in do you commit yourselves to promoting your child's physical emotional and spiritual well-being will you respect as well as protect that child and bestow your love as a free and unmerited gift and do you also reaffirm your commitment to care for and support each other as partners in life and as parents if so please say we will in the act of dedication we use the symbolism of water as a sign of our common heritage there is no suggestion in the Unitarian Universalist dedication ceremony no suggestion of the washing away of inherited sin we believe these children came into the world with all the limitations that are natural to human beings but we believe that they arrived here innocent so water here stands for vitality it is the elixir of life it is the source of all potential and for purposes of today's ceremony a portion of this water has been saved from our annual water communion service to which our members bring water from their travels across the continent and throughout the world so its use here today reminds us of our common bond with all embracing ever-sustaining nature name this child Rhodes Weber we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community Lucette Weber we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community name this child Nathaniel Alexander we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and the love of this community name this child Ty Spencer Bergeson Galoon we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community Lily Ruth Bergeson Galoon we dedicate you in the name of truth the promise of love and in the love of this community. Name this child. Lucy, Aaron, Alan, Eberhardie, we dedicate you in the name of truth, the promise of love, and in the fellowship, one more for the community. May each of you be granted clarity of thought, integrity of speech, and above all, compassionate hearts. As a token of their dedication, we give to each child a rosebud, fragrant symbol of beauty, promise, and love. This rose has no thorns, symbolizing the better world we would give to our children if it were in our power. While we know that the world is not altogether as lovely as this rosebud, we hope that Lucy, Nathaniel, Rhodes, Ty, Lucette, and Lily will learn to recognize the beauty and goodness which does exist and that they will grow in wisdom and compassion, adding their own beauty to the world. Dear ones, as this rose unfolds in natural beauty, so may your life unfold. And we conclude our dedication, celebration with the words from the Unitarian religious educator Sophia Lyon Fawze. For so the children come, and so they have been coming. Always in the same way they come. Born from the seed of man and woman, no angels heralding their beginning. No prophets predict their future courses. No wise men see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind. Yet each night a child is born is a holy night. Fathers and mothers sitting beside their children's cribs feel glory at the sight of new life beginning. They ask where and how will this life end? Or will it ever end? Each night a child is born is a holy night. A time for singing, a time for wondering, a time for worshiping. We do give to each of our families each one of our children a comfort item, a quilt or a knitted item, all of these made by members of our shawl ministry group here at First Unitarian Society. So we welcome you all into our community and let's give them a round of applause. And so now as our families return to their seats I invite you to turn to our next hymn and children can leave for their classes as we sing together. Please be seated. Dedications are always a sign, a symbol of new beginnings and the two readings also reflect that particular sentiment. The first from Daniel Smith, an article entitled First Time Caller that appeared in The New Yorker in the January 2nd edition. A video began to make viral rounds late last summer. It showed a woman named Heather McGee. She's the president of the Progressive Think Tank Demos and she was responding to a call that came in on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Heather McGee is black. The caller was white and he admitted he was prejudiced against black people because of things he had seen on the news. But he didn't want to be that way. What can I do to change? He asked plainly. You know, to be a better American. McGee was moved and she offered him some advice. Get to know some black people. Read up on African American history. Stop watching the nightly news. Not long after the call, a 58-year-old disabled Navy veteran named Gary Civitello flew to Washington, D.C. from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.  And since then, she has spoken frequently about Gary from North Carolina, presenting him as a symbol of decency and hope and racial reconciliation. The two have developed, they say, a genuine relationship. They've talked on the phone now about a dozen times. Civitello will describe his prejudices and McGee, she suggests ways that he can transcend them, talking to him very much the way that a doctor would talk to a patient, she says. Now, in Washington, they met for a drink at a hotel a block from the White House. Shortly after that initial call to C-SPAN, Civitello actually took McGee's advice. He went to a used bookstore, and he says, so I go up to this young girl at the cash register, this little hippie girl in Asheville, and I say, I found a couple of black studies books, and I say, I'm practicing to not be prejudiced. And she's at the register, and she says, that's probably a pretty good thing. Now, a week before the election, McGee visited Civitello in North Carolina, and she brought with her two more books to give him, Just Mercy and the New Jim Crow. Civitello's reading, he says, has transformed him. My fears, my anxieties, they still linger, but I'm starting now to see some root causes. You see, I was just assuming that black people were being lazy, or that they just didn't care, or that they were being irresponsible in society. But no, now I'm finding out, they can't get loans at banks. They gotta go to pawn shops. Myself, I inherited my house. Civitello has employed a number of different methods to realign his thinking. He avoids TV shows that focus on inner city crime, or the traffic in minority stereotypes. He's begun taking iPhone pictures of the many Confederate flags that fly near his hometown. I really wasn't aware of them before, he says. And he has developed a system to transform his social interactions. Using a scale of one to 10, one being awful and 10 being just great, he grades his expectation of how friendly a black person will be toward him in an interaction. The expectation, then he grades the reality. His main laboratory is the VA hospital in Asheville. So he says, at first I was giving people threes. These are your pre-judgments, McGee remarks. But then Gary says, I have a little conversation with these folks. I'll say something like, wow, the traffic really got bad out this way. And they'll say, yeah, it really did. How long you lived around here? And then all of a sudden, I'm having a laugh with them, and I'm scoring them at eight and nine. This is not a system I recommended, McGee says. This is Gary's system. And McGee then mentioned that Martin Luther King, Jr. finished writing his I Have a Dream speech in the very hotel where they were holding this conversation. Yeah, I read that, Civitello says. He finished it here, walked right over to the Lincoln Memorial. He could have sat somewhere around here. He could have come down this staircase. Who knows? It's a real privilege to be here. I have to thank you for that, Heather McGee. Absolutely, Gary. Absolutely. The second selection from the Irish poet, John O'Donohue, for a new beginning. In out of the way places of the heart where your thoughts never think to wander, this beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time, it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you, noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispers. Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, wondering if you are always gonna be this way. And then the delight, the delight when your courage kindles and out you step onto new ground, your eyes young again with energy and dream the path of plentitude opening before you. Though your destiny is not yet clear, you can trust the promise of this opening. Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life's desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure. Hold nothing back. Learn to find ease in risk. Soon you will be home in a new rhythm for your soul senses the world that awaits you. Music to soothe the savage breast as the saying goes. Thank you. Despite its diminutive size, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas is one of the most recognizable faith communities in the United States. It is known primarily for its fierce antipathy toward gays and lesbians. Activists from that congregation have demonstrated at numerous gay rights events, and perhaps most notoriously at the funerals for fallen American soldiers. I had a chance to observe one of their protests several years ago when Madison's Covenant Presbyterian Church gathered to celebrate the ordination of Scott Anderson. Now Scott had received his ordination decades earlier, but he forfeited it when he was outed as a gay man. By 2011, however, the Presbyterian Church of America had changed its policy toward gay and lesbian clergy, and now Scott, the executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Scott asked to be reinstated. He thus became the first openly gay person to be welcomed into that denomination's clergy ranks. Enter the Westboro Baptist Church, whose leaders found this to be utterly intolerable.   We raised our voices in song, overpowering the taunts directed at us by the Westboro crowd. So adamant, so impassioned did these fundamentalist activists seem that I could hardly imagine any of them ever recanting their beliefs. But then I happened upon the story of Megan Phelps Roper. She's the granddaughter of the Reverend Fred Phelps, the militant founder of the Westboro Church. It's not clear to me whether she was among that contingent that traveled to Madison in 2011, but by 2014, Phelps Roper, at one time the Church's social media and demonstration coordinator, by 2014, she had repudiated the Westboro Gospel. Her decision required a whole lot of soul searching. It was not easy. It was a process that began with a series of online conversations with a man who had read her Facebook posts and now wanted to gently but firmly challenge her assertions, seeking to convince her correspondent of the error of his ways, Phelps Roper persevered. She kept up with the conversation, but ultimately he proved to be the more persuasive. Phelps Roper swung back and forth for a time. Some day she was convinced that everything she'd been taught since childhood was bogus, was wrong. On other days she felt that God was just testing her and she had to stand firm. You literally feel like you're going insane, she confided. In the end her doubts won out. She said, I could no longer do the things that we were being asked to do. I could no longer say the things that we were being asked to say. Now since then, Megan Phelps Joiner and her sister Grace, who has also left the church, they have spoken to a number of different audiences about their conversion, as it were. And they've also made a very real effort to engage with the very people that they had once disparaged and condemned. As undeniable as the truth she had been taught seemed before, now those truths seem to her to be just as impossible to believe. One notices certain parallels between Megan's story and that of the former racist, Gary Civitello. They both risked entering into dialogue with someone whose outlook was 180 degrees removed from their own. They were both willing to listen and to continue listening, even when it caused them mental and emotional distress. And then what did they do? They embarked on some serious relational work. Gary took Heather McGee's advice, began entering into casual conversations with people of color. Soon he realized that so many of his earlier assumptions were simply unfounded. For her part, Megan tells of the time that she and her sister were invited to make a presentation in Montreal, Canada. Walking down the downtown street after their presentation, they just happened to pass a gay nightclub and they made the snap decision to go in. Megan remembers it felt so illicit. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe we are in here. But they started talking to some of the patrons and by the intermission the two women were out of their seats and dancing on the stage. Wherever we went, she says, people wanted to help us despite all the hurt that we had caused them. She was incredulous about this, the generosity of the people that she encountered. Undoubtedly there was something stirring deep within these individuals, even before they began consciously to entertain alternatives. Now Megan had already witnessed other people deserting the Westboro Church. And she had watched as a group of LGBTQ activists bought a house across the street, painted it in rainbow colors and dubbed it the equality house. The mission to spread a message of tolerance and to support former Westboro members as they seek to transition. So at some point in time, there was simply more cognitive dissonance here than Megan could possibly handle. And so she began to shift. Now the Indian spiritual teacher Eknaath Eswaran, he once compared this process, the process that people like Megan and Gary go through, to the unclogging of a fountain. He says, we all possess this reservoir of courage and compassion and goodwill. These are not qualities that we need to acquire. They're qualities we simply need to bring to the surface. And thus he says, if we work to remove all the impediments that have built up over all those years of conditioning to dislodge the old resentments and the fears and the selfish desires, then our life will become like a fountain of living waters. But often that fountain is just so clogged with rubbish that hardly a drop can get through. And this kind of a blockage can occur in societies as well as among individuals. So consider our own country's antipathetic relationship with Cuba these last 65 years. That has included the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition, territorial invasions, blockades, economic sanctions, travel restrictions, and decades of mutual recrimination. Suspicion, mistrust, stubbornness have served to keep our two societies deeply divided from one another. The fountain was dry. But then that changed. As with Gary and Megan, it didn't happen overnight. A number of important developments preceded the breakthrough. As John Lee Anderson recounts in the October issue of The New Yorker, the process began actually with the 2012 summit of the Americas. The summit of the Americas is a gathering of the Western Hemisphere's top leaders. And a number of people spoke during that gathering and those who came from nations that were sympathetic to Cuba used their time to lambast the United States for its imperialistic policies. They really took us to task. Sitting with our delegation was Barack Obama. I can imagine past presidents simply getting up and walking out of the room. Barack Obama sat and he listened. And when it was his term finally to address the delegates, he surprised them by saying, you know, we'd like to move US-Cuban relationship into a new direction, a new path. The next year, many of the same leaders gathered in South Africa for the funeral of Nelson Mandela. There was a chance encounter between the new president of Cuba, Raul Castro and Barack Obama. They passed each other. Barack Obama stuck out his hand and shook hands with Raul Castro. The first handshake between two leaders of our countries since 1959, the gesture was not premeditated, Obama remembered. It was a purely human response. Now, Obama's domestic opponents were scandalized by this display of affection for a Cuban dictator. But it opened the door just wide enough for productive negotiations to begin and we've seen what's happened since. Obama's takeaway was this. He said, if people think he sees me, he really sees me, then if they disagree with you, they are still going to be open to having a conversation. And that proved to be the case. Now this is a story that is still unfolding and a new administration may very well decide to return to the status quo ante, reversing the progress in US-Cuban relations that has been made so far because that old Cold War rubbish that some politicians still cling to could very well plug up the fountain of hope and promise once more. Too many people in our society are still incapable of suspending their black and white view of the world long enough to have those open honest conversations. Those whom they have placed in the category of the opposition, they become simply untouchable and that's all they need to know about them. That's all they want to know about them. The task of breaking down barriers like these is immense and it's made even harder when powerful forces conspire to keep so many of us enthralled. Instead of appealing to the better angels of our nature's opinion leaders, too often simply want to raise hackles and reinforce some of our worst instincts. As the acclaimed novelist Zady Smith recently told an audience upon accepting Germany's Weltliterature Prize, she said, individual citizens, we are all internally plural. We have within us the full range of behavioral possibilities. We are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or others suppressed depending at least in part on who's doing the conducting.  The internet is also proving to be something of a mixed blessing in this regard. To be sure, it provides us with unlimited access to information, plethora of sources that we can turn to, an incredibly wide spectrum of viewpoints as represented and as Megan Phelps-Roper discovered, you can enter into these illuminating conversations with people who are completely unlike yourself. But on the other hand, studies have shown that most internet users gravitate towards sites that serve to confirm and to strengthen their biases. And indeed, Google, Amazon, other content providers, they aid and abet this behavior by nudging us toward books and sites that reflect the online preferences that we have previously expressed. And so you have to make a concerted effort to break out of that information-opinion bubble that we inadvertently create around us. That bubble can take many forms. Richard Miles is all too aware of that phenomenon. Richard Miles was wrongfully convicted of a serious crime and he spent 15 years in a Texas prison. Finally, he was exonerated. After he left prison, he founded the organization Freedom for All. And it's an organization that is designed to assist communities that are badly affected by mass incarceration. Now, Miles remembers that for most of his 15 years in prison, he spent his time, for the most part, just dwelling on his victimhood, his sense of being victimized. Because he had been wrongfully convicted. At 19, he had been a regular churchgoer. He had been a passable student. He had dreams and aspirations. All he could think about was his victimhood. But then at a certain point in time, he recognized this is futile. What is this doing for me? What is this going to do in terms of my future? And so he decided that instead of being a victim, he was going to become a benefactor. Being incarcerated, he said, yes, that is a real problem. But the larger problem lies in here. We have all been in prison, he says. We imprison ourselves in bad relationships. We imprison ourselves in economic hardships. We lock our own selves up over and over again. And the only difference he says between my prison and yours is that in my case, someone else held the key to my release. Ruben Carter is a former boxing champion. He was convicted of a triple murder. He would agree with that assessment. In his late 20s, Carter received three life sentences from a New Jersey court. Repeated attempts to overturn his questionable conviction, they all failed. But in spite of that, Ruben Carter gained his freedom. The bitter, angry man that entered prison, he says, was not the one who came out. After yet one more unsuccessful appeal, Carter threw up his hands, said, I'm just not getting out. Then he had a vision, a vision that he would not be freed by the law, that he would be freed by a miracle. And with that, he undertook a disciplined study of spirituality, philosophy, and religion. And after a while, he had, as he put it, awakened to a higher level of reality. And when his convictions were ultimately overturned, Carter, like Richard Miles, became a benefactor. He founded the International Association in defense of the wrongly convicted. In 2003, in an interview, Carter was asked, how do you wanna be remembered? And Carter replied, he said, I've been a lot of things. I've been a fighter, I've been a soldier, I've been an inmate. But if I had to decide tomorrow what to put on my epitaph, it would be this. He was just enough. He was just enough to overcome everything that was thrown at him. He was just enough not to ever give up on himself. He was just enough to have the courage of his convictions.  He was just enough. Ruben Carter, Richard Miles, Gary Civitello, Megan Phelps Roper, they all had this in common. They were unhappy with what they had become. They were tired of wallowing in unhealthy feelings, mired in a rut of negative thinking. Harry Schenck is the head of the Innocence Project, and he says that for many ex-prisoners, this is the crux of the problem. The individual either stays stuck or they transcend and they move into a more life-affirming mental and emotional space. And if they remain stuck, the chances are they're gonna die. So what's the takeaway here? To affect deep, meaningful change, a major shift in orientation, there needs to be two things. There needs to be both a letting go of all the old rubbish and an opening up to new experience. Zen Buddhist teachers often describe the enlightenment process as one of unlearning, emptying ourselves of all the notions that prevent us from achieving a clear, uncontaminated view of reality. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard echoed that insight when he compared the pursuit of truth to swimming. To swim, hey, you gotta take your clothes off first, right? As a truth seeker, you need to undress in a more inward sense. You need to divest yourselves of prejudices, assumptions, and self-centeredness. And this emptying project is enabled when we open ourselves to the unfamiliar and even the uncomfortable. When Hannah Black, a multiracial artist, teacher, and writer, when in the course of a lecture she was giving to a college class, she made an unkind comment about transgendered people, after she made that comment, she heard from her students. They were angry, they let her have it. Now Black could have, hey, she's the professor, right? She could have justified her statement about transgendered people. Instead, she controlled her reactivity, she swallowed her pride, and she freely conceded that what she had said was both misguided and hurtful. And later she said, I am grateful for the people that called me out, that yelled at me. I did not regard this experience as an attack from the thought police. To the contrary, she said, my realization about the complicated untruths of gender was one of the most intellectually liberating experiences of my entire life. It released me, she said, into a new, gentler conception of my own sexuality and of the sexuality of others. It brought new people into my life and gave me a greater and sometimes scarier sense of human possibility. As this new year begins, let us be just that honest with ourselves. We all have some work to do at both the personal and the societal level. We are living at a time when the deep story, the deep story that many of our fellow citizens are telling themselves is a story of resentment and anger and bitterness. And for our part, we need to develop to develop peaceful and powerful strategies for dealing with that deep story lest we become a more polarized society than we already are. And as individuals, this is, of course, an ideal time to take stock, to take inventory, for there is undoubtedly some rubbish blocking the release of our own living waters. Let us be about that business so that we too may be granted a greater sense of life's possibility. Blessed be and amen. And in this new year, the first recipient of our outreach offering is the Madison Urban League, doing fantastic work in our community. I invite you to participate with gratitude and generosity. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. We would pause now to acknowledge Carol McGuire, sending her healing thoughts. She underwent hip surgery last week and thoughts of goodwill and hope also with Helen Burns, 96 years old, long time member of FUS, who was in the hospital last week and has now been relocated from her apartment at Oakwood Village to the care facility, Hebron. And good luck and bon voyage to our lay minister, Anne Smiley, sitting back there, who is leaving in two days for not Indiana, but India to celebrate her son's wedding. So congratulations to Anne and to their family. We did have some dedications today, as you know. We congratulate all those parents and at least one gentleman I believe wanted to share a little music with us in celebration of his niece and nephew's dedication. Would you like to share with us just a little of your music or do you want to wait until later? Just a verse or two. And so in addition to those mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unarticulated joys and sorrows that remain among us as a community. We hold those with equal concern in our hearts. And now I would invite you to turn to our final hymn, the upbeat hymn number 151. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. One more piece of poetry for your edification, this from Lucille Clifton. I am running into the new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair. Like strong fingers, like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was 16 and 26 and 36 and yes, 36. And now I am running into a new year and I beg what I love and what I leave behind to forgive me. Blessed be and amen.


It's been my dream for like eight years to no longer wear any industrial clothing. So nothing that's made in a factory, no plastic clothing, no logos, no brands, and one year ago I broke free from my last piece of plastic clothing, which was a pair of shorts, and my friend's son gave me a pair of linen shorts, but those were still industrial. So as one year ago I broke free from all industrial clothing, and then this is 100% homemade. So my friend Abby sewed the shirt and the shorts, it's linen, and then I dyed these shorts with black walnut, and I dyed the shirt with indigo and weld. Trying to make green, but haven't gotten there yet. So I'm 37 years old, and up till right now I've made all of, so as of a couple weeks, as of a couple days ago, really, I finished dyeing the last item and now have my full 100% home grown, or sorry, homemade natural fiber and naturally dyed clothes. And so these two sweaters are my last two items that were industrial clothing. So these are the last two items of industrial clothing that I own, and you know, this one is, they're both wool, so they're natural fibers, so they could both return to the earth. This one I actually dyed with black walnut, from black walnuts from my mom's house, and so I feel a connection to them. This one I actually sewed with sinew to like sew it back up, deer sinew. So I certainly have a connection to these, but they are indeed industrial. Brands created these, they were monetized clothes, and my mission, one of my missions is to exist in clothes that are completely from the earth and will return to the earth. The basic concept being that I could walk into the woods and dye, and whatever I'm wearing could return to the earth on me without littering and just my whole being returned to the earth. So it's a part of the concept of impermanence, really, like what clothes are the most impermanent clothes that I could be wearing? And I still have further to go because although this is natural fiber, naturally dyed, and homemade, the fabric itself was still made with industry. And so eventually my plan is to raise my clothes from either seed or animal, whether it's linen to make flax, cotton, or hemp, but largely wool through raising sheep. So eventually I'm going to raise my fibers and do start to finish and everything that I will own, I will have that full connection to including the plant dyes. But for now, this is a chapter of Breaking Free from Industrial Clothes, and these are the last two items of industrial clothes. So what I'd like to do is gift this, gift these, and there's five of us here, so I don't know who to gift them to, if there was two of us it would be easy. So to me it's like do these call to any of you as something that you would love to wear and would bring you great meaning and whoever feels that I would love to, I would love to share these and I'd love to gift them with anybody that would feel like a real meaning in connection. You look like you'd like one. Yeah. All right. So which one would you like? Which one calls to you? Um, I think, oh, I think this one, I think this one's for you, let's see who put it on. I think this one is going to be, let's see, this has kept me warm for about the last five or six months. Oh, it looks, I love it. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I love it. Yes. Good to see you. All right. So I'm, no, no, who's feeling, who's feeling the green? I'm feeling that. I'm kind of feeling like it's you. And I think, because you know, you got the green going on and, oh yeah. I was kind of feeling like, let's see. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. So yeah. So this was a, this was a organic moment in the sense that I've been wanting to break free for a long time. And I shared with them, we had a gathering tonight and I shared with them, hey, I'm interested in another step of liberation and what do you all think about me filming it? And they said, yeah, let's do that. So it's an interesting moment. It's a little interesting because it's like the most beautiful thing in a way to do would be to not film this at all, but I wanted to bring all of you on the journey that follow me online and who will see this as an inspiration in your journey of breaking free from consumerism and materialism. And our clothes are just one of the ways in which we are trapped in the materialism and consumerism cycles. And it's not about having to go this far necessarily. I felt great in these clothes. I love them natural. So if, you know, if we're, if we're not going to this level, breaking free from plastic clothing, breaking free from any corporation that is pillaging the earth to put the clothes on our body. So polyester and nylon, generally that means that the earth has been pillaged through the extraction of fossil fuels. So natural fibers and even another step is there's something called a fiber shed. Like we have a water shed. Well, a fiber shed is getting your clothes from within your region. A fiber shed. There's actually a book called Fiber Shed and the website is Fiber Shed. So there's so much that we can do, you know, buying our clothes second hand is something that we can do. There's no reason why we ever have to buy a new item of clothing again. And that's accessible to most of us. So there's so much that we can do. It doesn't have to be this level. But if you want to take it to this level, awesome. You know, I will say this level feels pretty good. So I love you all. I'm glad to have spent this time in this moment with you, even though you're on devices around the world, but we are here together in heart. Anything any of you want to say to the people out there? It was a nice experience. We are very much connected. All right. We love you.


So what we're going to do right now, just to show how powerful this is, what we'll end up doing is we're going to do conversions, figure out what a certain area, segment areas, or a certain arc length is for a certain degree or for a certain radian. So let's take this down, let's come up with other types of questions that we can do unit conversion for using ratios. And one type of question you end up getting in mathematics is they're going to give you a circle, and they're going to give you a certain radius and they're going to say what's the shaded area of part of a circle. So let's do our calculations, let's do one problem here where you'll see how this works and how powerful this is. So let's draw a circle. Now I'm not going to put this on a grid, I'm just going to draw an arbitrary circle. Again I'm bringing out my little floss and putting this on it, so I'm just going to draw a random circle. So we have a circle, let's say our radius for this circle is 12. Hopefully you can see that, but let's say the radius is 12, so that's 12. And the question is going to be if we've traveled, let's say that's 110 degrees, 110 degrees, then what's the area of the shaded region here? How much have we covered? Now the connection, the ratio that we're going to use to do this conversion, to figure out this calculation is what we know about an area of a circle. The formula for area of a circle is pi r squared, right? Now I gave this degree measure, I gave the angle measure in degrees, right? So what we do is for your unit conversion, figuring out this calculation is we're going to use the same principle as we did with degrees over radians, but we're going to use area over the angle. So the conversion that you do is area of a circle is pi r squared. Pi r squared is for a whole circle, the area of a whole circle, right? If you go the whole circle, you're either going 360 degrees or 2 pi. This is the unit conversion we have. If you write this in equal notation and proportionality, right? You would have pi r squared equals to 360 degrees or 2 pi. I just wrote it as a fraction straight out. This ratio, this proportionality, this ratio has to be proportional to whatever we have here, right? So I'm just going to write it as general. It would be area divided by angle, super important. You end up using this a lot for calculations anyway. So let's see how this works for this, what our answer is going to be. This is the general ratio that we have, general unit conversion equation that we have. So whatever area you want to figure out, all you got to do is punch in the angle here. Conversely, if I gave you the area, you could figure out how many degrees or radians you've got. So let's do this calculation and we'll do another one with doing an area and figuring out what the angle is. So for this, my radius is 12, right? I gave the angle measurement in degrees, so I'm going to use 360, I'm not going to use 2 pi. If I gave the angle measurement in radians, you would have used 2 pi and not degrees, right? So I hope it makes sense when I put an or here, 360 or 2 pi, it really depends if you're doing your calculations in radians or degrees. So what we're going to do is we're going to go, for this calculation, we're going to go pi 12 squared divided by, we're in degrees, so I'm going to put 360 here, is equal to area, that's what I want to figure out, x over the area for what portion do I want, the portion that covers 110 degrees, right? And again, what you do is you cross multiply, you kick this up, that guy just goes up, right? So again, we need a calculator for this. So this is going to be pi times 12 squared, 12 squared is 144. So pi times 144 times 110 divided by 360. So the area, this area for the segment is 138.2. If this was meters, let's call this meters, so x is equal to 138.2 meters squared, if this was the radius, it was in meters, pretty powerful ratios. We're going to do one for arc length as well, but before we do that, let's do one where I've given you the area and you want to figure out the angle, right? So what we'll do is draw another circle, so let's put our circle dot here, then slip that out of my little knot here. So it's not going to be a beautiful circle for this one, but it's okay. We have a little slippage here. So let's say, again, the one thing that you do need for this is your radius, right? So let's do radius of, call this 25, okay? Let's say we've gone all the way down here, the radius is still 25, right? It's a circle, the radius is the same. Let's say we want to figure out the angle in radians, okay? And I'm going to say the area here, so let's say the area that I've given you here is 1407, right? Remember, 1407. So let's say the area I've given you here is 1407. So that's the area that we have here. And I want you to figure out the angle in radians. So what we end up doing is we're going to use the same ratio, the same equation, but instead of using 360, I'm going to use 2pi because in the question I would say, I want the answer to be in radians, okay? So what we have is, we're going to have pi r squared, which is 25 squared, divided by 2pi has to equal, I've given the area. We have the area. This is our unknown, the angle. So this is going to be 1407 over x. And the angle that we figure out is going to be in radians because we use 2pi, not degrees. So if we do our cross multiplication, this guy's going to kick up, that guy's going to go there, and then this guy's going to go down, but I'll do it in two steps so you see what's going on. So this is going to be pi times 250 squared x is equal to 2pi times 1407. And keep in mind, I could have killed the pi's right here, right? And then I want to get x by itself, so I'm going to divide by pi 25 squared. I'm going to divide by pi 25 squared, okay?  So what we end up having is 2 times 1407 divided by 25 squared, which is equal to 4.5 radians because that's what we're doing, right? We're doing our measurements in radians. So that ended up killing that. So x is equal to 4.5024, but we're not that accurate with this, right? Because we're losing information. Actually, we're not losing information because we killed the pi's. So 4.5024 radians, that's the angle we've gone. Pretty sweet, yeah? Let's do set up a same kind of ratio conversion, but instead of trying to figure out what an area is and how far what the angle is, we've traveled for a certain area, let's do it for arc length, right? The distance traveled. So let's draw another circle. Now what we'll do is I'm going to use the same angle as I did in the first one. That way there's a connection between the previous calculation and this calculation, right? So let's draw a circle again. So what we had was 110 degrees. So I'm going to draw this, and I'm going to go here, and I'm going to say this is 110 degrees, and this was 12, I believe. 12. So what I want to figure out now is what's the distance from here to here, right? What is that distance? So what we end up doing, the ratio, the equation we set up is, if you recall, the circumference of a circle is 2 pi r. So instead of having pi r squared up top and the angle in the bottom, we're going to have 2 pi r and the angles in the bottom. So the formula is 2 pi r over 360 degrees or 2 pi, depending if the angle you've been given is in degrees of radiance, right? And this is going to be equal to arc link divided by angle. So for this calculation, we want to find out what the arc link is when we travel 110 degrees for a circle of radius 12. So I'm going to use 2 pi r, that's a given, that's for sure we have to use that.  I've been given the angle, I'm going to put 110 here, I'm going to figure out what the arc link is. So it's going to be 2 pi times 12 divided by 360 must equal the arc length over 110. And again, I'm just going to kick this up. So x is going to be equal to 2 times pi times 12 times 110. 2 times pi times 12 times 110. And I'm going to divide that by 360 divided by 360. So that's going to be 23.038234, whatever it is, right? Approximately 23 units, if this was meters, this is meters, right? If this was meters, that's meters. So we've traveled 23 meters around this circle. So let's draw another circle, and I'm going to give you the arc length, and we're going to figure out what the angle is we've traveled, right? Same as before. So we're going to set up our circle, and we're going to go... So we've got our circle set up again, and previously, in the last calculation, we said the radius was 25 and went all the way here, right? So instead of giving you the angle, I'm going to give you the arc length that we've traveled from there to there, right? So let's say, if this is 25, let's say we've traveled 112.5 around the circle for us to get here. So we've traveled, if this is in meters again, we've traveled 112.5 meters around the circle, and we want to figure out what our angle is, theta, in radians, right? Well, I'm going to use the same formula. 2 pi r, I want it in radians. I'm going to use 2 pi, not 360. I've given the arc length, I'm going to find the angle. So I'm going to go 2 pi times 25 divided by 2 pi has to be equal to 112.5 over x. And I'm going to do just to simplify the calculations. I want to kill the pi's, right? So x comes up, so this is going to be 2 times 25 is 50. Actually, I could kill the 2's as well. So 2's die as well. So this is going to be 25x is equal to 112.5. I'm going to divide by 25. I'm going to divide by 25. So x is going to be equal to 112.5 divided by 25 is 4.5 radians, 4.5 radians. And that's the angle that we've traveled on the circle to have an arc length of 112.5 meters if the radius of the circle was 25 meters. Learn these three equations. Understand them. You should know them intuitively. They should make sense. Right? As for what they were again, let's recreate them so you know. So if you're going to be converting between radians and degrees, you need to use this ratio. 360 over 2 pi is equal to degree radian. If you're going to try to do area, if the question involves areas, it's going to be pi r squared. Over 360 degrees or 2 pi is equal to area over, okay, super powerful. If the question is going to involve arc length, you're going to use 2 pi r over 360 degrees or 2 pi. It has to be equal to the arc length over the angle. And the angle depends, if it's in radians or degrees, or if you're given the arc length or whatnot, right? We did a couple of questions.  And you can do combinations of these, right? I could combine area and arc length. I could say pi r squared divided by 2 pi r. That's another proportionality ratio that I have, and that would have to equal the area over the arc length. And this ratios and proportionality and learning cross multiplication to do unit conversions, to jump from one system to another system is, again, it's super, super powerful. And you end up using it all over the place. And it is really understanding this concept of, you can compare any two things, any two systems, as long as you have a link in between. For our case for trigonometry right now, what we're doing is we're making a connection between radians and degrees. We're making a connection between area and an angle, maybe degrees or radians. We're making a connection between arc length and the angle, maybe degrees or radians, right? And that proportionality has to stay true for whatever circle that we're talking about, as long as we're not going outside of that system, right? Outside of that connection. For a circle right now, it basically means the radius of the circle has to stay constant, right? For whatever system that we're doing, for one calculation, right? So learn these three different equations, I guess, but these three concepts, and you can combine different ratios. We could have written down a fourth equation where we're comparing the area to the arc length. So we would have had pi r squared in the top and 2 pi r in the bottom. And over here, it would have been area and arc length, and this can go on forever. You can compare any two things, right? So that's how we do unit conversion. That's how we do converting between radians and degrees. And what we're going to do in the next video is take a look at some special triangles. And these special triangles are getting into the core part of where trigonometry comes into play, where a lot of different types of questions you end up getting in school regarding trig identities.  But for us, what we're going to do, we're going to generate a table. And these special triangles basically, just to give you a teaser, the way it works is, we take our unit circle and we take one quadrant, the distance from here to here, right? That's 90 degrees. And there are two special triangles we have. One of them is 45 by 45, or 45, 4590, which basically cuts the 90 degree angle in half, right? Because one thing that we like doing in mathematics, we like taking equal chunks out of something. We like looking at a system and taking chunks out, dividing things out evenly. So we take 90 degrees and cut it in half. That's one special triangle, which gives us 45 degrees. The other special triangle is, we take 90 degrees and cut it in three parts, right? And it gives us 60, 30, 60, 90 degrees and 60, 30, 90 degrees. It takes 90 degrees and breaks it up into 30 degrees segments, right? Useful. So that's what we're going to do in the next video. We're going to take a look at our special triangles and we're going to take a look at our trig ratios and find out what our trig ratios, what the ratios are for sine, cos and tan for our special triangles. And we're going to move around the unit circle. And we're going to take a look at those numbers, the ratios and see how they change. I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye for now.


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. It says if 2 by 11 is the probability of an event, what is the probability of the event not A? So let us first understand the key idea behind this question. If the probability of an event A is P, then the probability of the event not A or we can say probability of A bar is equal to 1 minus P. This will be the key idea. Let us now move on to the solution. We are given that the probability of an event A is 2 by 11. So the probability of the event not A is 1 minus 2 by 11, which is equal to 9 by 11. Hence the probability of not A is 9 by 11. And this completes the question. Might we now take care and have a good day.