For yesterday's service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville, TN:

PRAYER (Vivian Pomeroy's "Confession")

O God, forgive us that often we forgive ourselves so easily and others hardly;
Forgive us that we expect perfection from those to whom we show none;
Forgive us for repelling people by the way we set a good example;
Forgive us the folly of trying to improve a friend;
Forbid that we should use our little idea of goodness as a spear to wound those who are different;
Forbid that we should feel superior to others when we are only more shielded;
And may we encourage the secret struggle of every person.

MEDITATION (from Thorton Wilder's novel The Ides of March. This section is from a letter Wilder imagines Julius Caesar sending to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus. I read a shortened version of this for the service.)

Of the four men whom I most respect in Rome three regard me with mortal emnity. I mean Marcus Junius Brutus, Cato, and Catullus. It is very likely that Cicero would also be pleased to miss me. There is no doubt about all this; many letters reach me which were not intended for my eyes.

I am accustomed to being hated. Already in early youth I discovered that I did not require the good opinion of other men, even of the best, to confirm me in my actions. I think there is only one solitude greater than that of the military commander and of the head of the state and that is the poet's -- for who can advise him in that unbroken succession of choices which is a poem? It is in this sense that responsibility is liberty; the more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose. I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility and that no greater danger could befall mine than that it should reflect an effort to incur the approval of any man, be it a Brutus or a Cato. I must arrive at my decisions as though they were not subject to the comment of other men, as though no one were watching.

And yet I am a politician: I must play the comedy of extreme deference to the opinion of others. A politician is one who pretends that he is subject to the universal hunger for esteem; but he cannot successfully pretend this unless he is free of it. This is the basic hypocrisy of politics and the final triumph of the leader comes with the awe that is aroused in men when they suspect, but never know for certain, that their leader is indifferent to their approval, indifferent and a hypocrite. What? -- they say to themselves --: what? can it be that there is absent from this man that serpent's nest which is lodged within us all and which is at once our torture and our delight -- the thirst for praise, the necessity of self-justification, the assertion of one's self, cruelty, and envy? My days and nights are sepnt amid the hissing of those serpents. I once heard them in my own vitals. How I silenced them there I do notknow, though the answer to that question, as put to a Socrates, exceeds all other questions in interest.

It is not by reason of such serpents' nests, I think, that I am hated by a Marcus Brutus, a Cato, and by this poet. It is indeed from their minds that they hate me and from their views of government and freedom. Even if I brought them up to the place I hold and showed them the world stretched out as one can only see it from here; even if I could split open my skull and show them the experience of my lifetime, so many hundredfold closer to men and government than theirs has been; even if I could read with them, line by line, the texts of the philosophers to whom they cling, and the histories of the countries from which they draw their examples; even then I could not hope to clear their eyes. The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves into a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error. Brutus and Cato repeat liberty, liberty, and live to impose on others a liberty they have not accorded to themselves -- stern, joyless men, crying to their neighbors: be joyful as we are joyful; be free as we are free.