“wax and sand” ( photo by Dave) The practice of lighting candles, sharing our weekly joys and sorrows of living this life, is a part of each service in our UU tradition. The ups and downs, the successes and failures, the simple joys, as well as the concerns we carry for ourselves and for the world, all of these are contained (and more) in each bowl of lit candles. Oftentimes, during the course of the service the candles melt down into the sand forming art-like designs, no two alike. I think this is an apt metaphor for the shared life of a spiritual community; each of us an individual candle, but as we hold space together (shining our light) we become something more. Covenant is one of our theological words that refers to this concept of shared community. Why do we assemble together? What is it that keeps us together? And how do we keep it going? With this in mind, our theme for the new church year is focused on covenant and transitions. This Sunday’s Service is an introduction of the theme as we begin our study of the topic. One of the books we are using is “Unlocking the Power of Covenant” published by the UUA. Here is a brief excerpt from the back flyleaf: We are living in immensely difficult times. Deep societal issues including racism, economic inequality, and environmental injustice mar our current lives and threaten to harm the life of future generations. There are no easy remedies to these community ills, but returning to the practice of covenant may offer a path forward. Living in covenant creates and develops community. It also furthers both the mission and the health of our faith movement. YouTube Channel content for this week is a Sunday Service
led by Rev. Dale Holden, who will be served as both minister and musician for the day. The title of the message is “Safe Within the Fold” and explores the theme of sheep, flocks, shepherding and spiritual community. The Unitunes provide special music. We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.
In Ministry,Dave
Excerpt from Rev. Dale Holden’s homily “Safe Within the Fold.”As sheep, what are our needs? Where is our flock? What is our safe fold? We are the sheep and we are also the shepherds. We need safe folds and we also need to help provide welcome and safety for others. In the current state of our country, the opposite is happening. Black sheep are literally being kicked out of the fold. Leaders with power don’t know the sheep, don’t seek the lost, don’t protect the flock; but open the gates to invite in the predators of poverty, joblessness, homelessness, divisiveness, parasites, disease. As a church, and as individual parishioners, we have a mission: to feed as well as to be fed; to care for as well as to be cared for; to seek find, and restore, as well as to be sought, found, and restored; to love as well as to be loved. We each CAN shepherd in our own ways. Sometimes the most effective and meaningful act of a shepherd is a small act of kindness – such as a genuine smile or “hello” to a sad-looking person, or holding the door open for an old person with a cane. It’s a matter of becoming aware, of opening ourselves, and caring. It’s listening for our “call” of the moment and finding our own Good Shepherd, our own Higher Power to guide us.
From the U
UAThe New Church Year
Our Greatest Why
By Tyler Coles
September 8, 2025
In conversation with friends, I am often asked, “Tyler, why do you go to church?” While my role as a religious professional is frequently overlooked in those conversations, I take the question to heart. Depending on the context, I would say that it all began when I was a teenager looking for a spiritual community that both embodied its faith and provided real solace in a weary world. And at other times, I would share my first experience with the Water Ceremony and the meaning that it has come to hold for me. While I didn’t understand the power and importance of the ritual at first, I followed the instructions given to me. I filled my small glass bottle with a bit of water from the river that I spent countless summer days in and would routinely find myself beside when I needed space to be still. On the appointed Sunday, I witnessed individuals and families alike fill a large bowl with their respective waters. When all was done, the Minister shared how the combined waters were not just a symbol of our interconnectedness, but was, in a very real sense, the substance that sustains our connection – our existence – in a variety of ways.
As the new church year approaches and many of our congregations across the region prepare for their own Water Ceremonies, like my friends, this is a good moment to ask, “Why?” Why do we gather in community? Why do we routinely take part in ceremonies like Coming of Age, blessing new congregational leaders, or the Water Ceremony itself? Why, or maybe better yet, what is our purpose as a religious people with and for one another? While I do not doubt that there are those among us who regularly ask themselves these questions. I believe it is imperative at this point in our liturgical calendar, given all that is happening within our individual and collective lives, that we all return to these questions routinely. For it is in this practice of reflection that we might discern our personal and collective missions in the world. Why do we do the things we do? And why are we doing the things we do as a church community?
While the world is different today than it was all those years ago when I, and maybe even you, first encountered Unitarian Universalism and the Water Ceremony. The ritual and our faith are not, in essence, different. They have remained a constant source of grounding and reassurance amid unimaginable change like large boulders in the middle of a steadily flowing river. As the thin veil disguising authoritarianism within our nation has slipped away, when the pressures of dwindling resources have come into sharper focus, and our hearts are surmounted by sorrow of all types. To frame it one way, the why of our churches and congregations are to be places to grow in deep connection, to wrestle with the transcendent, and to transform the world. As we meet this moment and all that it brings with it, may our whys ground and guide us in all that we do.
Dear Ones, as we enter this new church year, I offer you this blessing:
May the Love that holds all things hold you. May the grace that affords transformation create pathways towards new possibilities. May the waters that sustain our connections flow ever freely in our work and ministry. And when things get rough, as they always do, may we never forget that in Love, all things are possible
Tyler Coles
UUA Staff
Prayer by Rev. Hutchinson for UUHoulton Ingathering Service 2003
Opening Prayer
O timeless God,
we are the ones who look back
to remember,
but it is not our memory.
It is the ears and eyes and minds
of those who lived before.
It is those who struggled and questioned,
to live a life of resolve and meaning beyond their years
yielding an unbroken continuance to this day.
It remains today in this town and in this church.
It remains today in the workings of our body and mind.
It remains today in our spirit and soul.
Timeless
In this moment
Passing into the next
the unbroken continuance of our being…
Bless this historic church
and the souls who have gone before.
Bless this town of Houlton;
her bakeries, her footbridges, her mailboxes and places
of commerce, a reading of newspapers and playing with children.
Bless this country and the ideas that continue to be debated for the betterment of society,
workers of steel, justice and technology.
May we exhibit patience, optimism and endurance…
Bless each of us now,
regathered on this day to share our lives together
in sweet remembrance of all
and the all that shall remain always.
THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
Calendar of Events @UUHoultonSept 21 Sunday Service: David HutchinsonSept 28 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury &Ira DyerSept 30 Meditation Group 5PM (online)Oct 1 Aroostook Climate Group 6PM in the cafeOct 5 Sunday Service: MaryAlice MowryOct 5
Trivia Night at the UU’s Cup Cafe 5:30-7:30PMOct 12 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson Oct 13 UUHoulton Board Meeting 4PM in the parlorOct 18 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 NoonOct 18 Houlton Coffeehouse 7-9PM Feature: Brian BouchardOct 19 Sunday Service: Kathryn HarnishOct 26 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
During the month of September we are featuring historical articles about UUHoulton that were written during our Bicentennial year in 2011 by Dr. Bill White. These articles were researched and written by Bill and published in the Houlton Pioneer Times. Thank you, Bill!
Rev. Edwin Smith Elder
{Researched and Written By Bill White}
Rev. Edwin Smith Elder was the fifth settled minister of the Houlton First Church Unitarian Society. One hundred and forty year ago Rev Elder held his services in the Old Meeting House located on North Street in Houlton.
Edwin Elder was born on December 12, 1837 at Milton, New Hampshire and shortly after became an orphan. At six years of age he was adopted by Peter and Ada Elder in South Windham, Maine. Edwin was a bright young boy and enthusiastically attended the district school in South Windham. At 18 he became a teacher. Over the next ten years he taught in local schools and nearby towns. He established his own large flourishing school and taught the higher levels of students in the local area. He also served on school boards and held various public offices during the years he was a teacher. This experience in education was a benefit to Houlton schools while he served as minister at the Unitarian Church.
Under the influence of Rev. A. D. Wheeler, a Unitarian missionary in Maine, Edwin decided to enroll as a student of theology at Harvard in Cambridge. He completed his studies in 1869 and chose Houlton, Maine as his first pastorate. Comments made about Edwin at that time was that his joy of conviction and straight forward humanness was well suited to the citizens of Houlton. He said that the shaggy seriousness of the great woods was akin to his own nature and Houlton made it a fit place for his secluded novitiate. On July 1870, he was the first minister to be ordained at the Houlton Unitarian Church. He followed the practice of previous Unitarian ministers in Houlton, and augmented his meager ministerial salary by teaching in the local Houlton schools.
Rev. Elder, his wife, and three children had three happy years in Houlton. He captivated his church members as well as the Houlton community as a valued speaker. The Elder family remained in Houlton until October 1873 when he accepted his second pastorate at the little octagon Unitarian Church at East Lexington, Massachusetts. He later served Unitarian churches in Keokuk, Iowa and Franklin, New Hampshire. Rev. Elder died in October 1906 after suffering from crippling rheumatism. Elders’s friends in Houlton and elsewhere said of him he revealed a love of ideals, strong hearted endeavors, endurance, and a singing patience.
During the past year we have featured Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny (we have copies in the Unitarian Society library). We are including his latest column in this week’s Support Page. You can subscribe to his writings on Substack, free of charge, which is titled “Thinking About.”
The overall design of Trump’s policy is clear enough: weaken the United States abroad to create an environment friendly to dictators, while using the American armed forces as an intimidation force to make dictatorship possible at home.
Whether this plan works depends upon how we see it, or rather, whether we choose not to see it. In the worst case, we choose not to notice this general shift, look away as our cities become militarized, and then pretend that we had no other choice but to give away our democracy.
Pretenses for this will be found. Lies about crime. Exploitation of acts of violence.
Let us not make the mistake of confusing the pretenses for the underlying policy.
The transition to authoritarianism in the United States depends upon us. In Trump’s paradigm, this is all a show, and our role is to be bit players. We have been handed a script with no words and await our cue to do nothing.
The crucial term here, one that I feel like I am reading too often, is “show of force.” That is how the deployments of National Guards (and Marines) in the United States have been (too frequently) described.
But what kind of force is it? And what kind of show? And how can we get beyond seeing it as a “show” in which we have no speaking part, in which we do not act?
We have to be watchful of our reflexive American militarism. It moves us, mindlessly, towards fascism.
These deployments are obviously illegal. And they are designed to spread terror. The legality of this is a matter for lawsuits and eventually the Supreme Court – one has to pursue this route, although this Court has little appetite for law, and much appetite for self-destruction, so hope is minimal.
What service members are being ordered to do is plainly wrong. It is a violation of American law, regardless of how long it takes for that to be decided by this or perhaps some later Supreme Court. It is a violation of the long and rightly valued precedent that soldiers are not to be used for law enforcement. It traduces the basic point of having armed forces, which is that they are for the military defense of a country from attack.
The terror, though, is largely up to us. Do we choose to be terrorized?
There are those, such as undocumented workers, who have good reason to fear. And then there are those, many of the rest of us, who have an occasion to think and react creatively.
In the media, one has to be concerned about being coopted into the “show.” By definition soldiers are not defending the United States if they are loitering in its cities, and yet they get the benefit of patriotic symbolism. Illustrating a story about self-invasion with gravely handsome soldiers is not neutral. It is a step towards fascism. It helps to create the sense that, in the end, they were “just obeying orders” and being patriots.
These urban self-invasion deployments are a trap for for other service members. By sending troops to city after city, Trump is creating the statistical likelihood that something will happen – a suicide of a service member conflicted by an illegal and immoral mission, a friendly fire incident, the shooting of a protestor – that they can use to manufacture some greater crisis by lying about it. Or they can wait for their Russian friends to stage something, or for one right-wing person to shoot another, and then blame the opposition.
That is their way, and I suspect that that is their plan.
The only way to be prepared is to see the futures that come with passivity. If we do not communicate with our friends and family in the armed services about these risks, we are accomplices when they are used and abused to bring about authoritarianism. If we allow the “show of force” to impress us into passivity, then we are assisting aspiring dictators in a process that they cannot achieve on their own.
I wrote this during an air raid alert in Dnipro, Ukraine. I had scholarly work to do in Ukraine, and the history project that brought me to the country was not made easier by having some colleagues in active duty, and others kept sleepless by the missiles and drones. They all showed up, though.
I was not frightened by this and I mention it not to frighten you. On the contrary, I mention it to help us keep perspective.
Ukrainians are being invaded by Russia.
No one from the outside will invade us. We can only invade ourselves.
And whether that happens is up to us: whether we choose to see the overall logic, whether we choose to name things as we are, whether we choose to talk to one another, and whether we choose to go on with the work of citizenship, decency, and humanity.
Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. Two of his best-selling books are On Tyranny (2016) and On Freedom (2024).
Michael Fasulo played at the September coffeehouse, a cover of the Rolling Stones’
Jumpin’ Jack Flash. You can check out his performance on The Cup Cafe Facebook
Page. Mike appeared at the first Houlton coffeehouse in the Fall of 1992 and he is
still going strong!!
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal change
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation
The war in Ukraine continues
Prayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza
Prayers for those affected by recent governmental (and policy) changes in DC
Prayers for Peace in the Middle East
Prayers for those affected by Hurricane Erin on the American East Coast
Prayers for the lives lost and those affected by the school shooting in Minneapolis
Prayers for those affected by the earthquakes in Afghanistan.
Prayers for those affected by the school shooting in Colorado last week
Please pray for peace and civility as the nation responds to the assassination of Charlie Kirk
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and delusion.
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