UUHoulton Support  PageDecember 19, 2020

 “Winter Solstice”  Getty Images

As we have now recorded our first sub-zero temperatures of the (soon to be) winter season, this week-end offers our shortest days of sunlight leading to Solstice.  Brrrrrr…I know we go through this cold-acclimation process every year but it’s always a jolt to the system!

Since this year Winter Solstice happens to fall very close to the 4th Sunday of Advent we have combined the two events and will observe both in this week’s Sunday service being led by Leigh and Fred Griffith. Of course this is the first time we’ve ever done a virtual Winter Solstice ritual (like so many other firsts in this covid-pandemic year) but we hope you will join us and light many candles.

You can watch the service on YouTube Sunday morning or wait until the sun goes down Sunday Night.  You could even put some wassail on the stove and sip it during the service.  

Special music for Winter Solstice will be provided by The Unitunes as well as a harp duet by Dale Holden and Leigh Griffith. Keep in mind our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service will also be on YouTube available at 4PM on December 24th.

Although we miss being together during these annual holiday events we are close in spirit and and our community connection is important as never before. In these long nights of cold may we find the warmth and light of human connection.  

The recorded parlor service will be available to view at 10AM on Sunday morning and archived so it can be watched later at your convenience.  I will send out the service link to YouTube later today and the link will be live on Sunday morning at 9:45AM (in case you want to come to the service early).  If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you can locate it automatically on your YouTube home page under subscriptions. The 10AM service will be followed by a Zoom coffee hour and check-in at 11AM for those who are interested in discussing the service or just want to check in. I’ll send the Zoom links out today.

Have a great week-end everyone!
Practice patience and kindness.

In Ministry,
Dave

Virtual Offering Plate

If you would like to send in your pledge or donation (we still have to pay the bills) simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below.  Thank you from the treasurers!
Mary Blocher1124 Calais RoadHoulton, ME  04730

Here is a timely article I found on my phone app “Ten Percent Happier”  December 13, 2020

The Warrior and the Caregiver by Jeff Warren

Things are hard right now.  As I write this, the second wave of the pandemic is surging around the world. Frontline caregivers are overwhelmed, families are reeling, and many of us are facing lockdown. It’s cold and dark outside. People are anxious, they’re feeling isolated and under-supported.  My own mental health is definitely taking a hit, along with the mental health of pretty much everyone I know. To manage this crisis, I need a model for managing myself. I call it the Warrior and the Caregiver. The Warrior is the part of you that goes out into the world. The Warrior dons her doctor scrubs every day, takes a deep breath, and steps into the ER. The Warrior hears her baby cry in the night, and even though she hasn’t slept in six months, she gets up to offer comfort. Or, to give a recent and highly mundane example, the Warrior, cleaning up the kitchen while fried after a long day, breathes through the seething rage at that over-sized ceramic plate that refuses to fit in the cupboard—after trying five times to put it away! I hate that plate!  Obviously we’re not only talking about frontline heroics. The Warrior gets up in the morning.  The Warrior is where we expand our natural capacities in the face of challenge, just as our chests expand on the inhale. This is not about being tough—on the contrary, too much resistance creates friction, inside and out. It’s about opening. In a dignified and courageous way, we accept and acknowledge our fear, our anger, our grief. The more we totally accept, the more space inside we create. The Warrior, in other words, is all about equanimity. Equanimity is a superpower. Not only is it the skill for managing the moment, it is also the skill for transforming the self. With every pulse of equanimity, we dissolve old limits and conditioning. With every pulse of equanimity, we retrain our nervous systems away from reactivity and towards space.  We can observe this in meditation, where each push and pull of aversion and distraction is a tiny test of equanimity. We practice staying centered and present in the formal setting of meditation, so that we’re more likely to stay centered in our daily lives.  There is something thrilling and heroic about aspiring to this kind of Warrior-hood. Also—let’s be honest—something a bit deranged. Because who can actually live up to this? Something is always lurking just around the corner, waiting to kick our butt. We all find ourselves losing it one way or another. Because we’re human. And humans have limits.  What happens then? Then our Caregiver comes in. If the Warrior is our in-breath, expanding our capacity for whatever’s arising, the Caregiver is our long, full out-breath: sighhhhhhhh.  The Caregiver is where we accept our limitations, back away from intensity, and take care of ourselves. It helps us turn to the places we feel nurtured. Maybe that looks like taking five minutes to lie on the floor and focus on your exhale. Or maybe it’s going for a walk in nature. Or maybe it’s bingeing on Netflix. Who am I to critique your coping strategies? What matters is the reset. What matters is giving the nervous system time to settle and relax, so that you’re more likely to hold it together through the next frustration. The Caregiver’s strengths are discernment and self-compassion. Discernment to notice when you’re beginning to get crispy. And compassion to care about that. Compassion and humility—because our limits will not look the same as someone else’s. The Caregiver knows how to get real: Where am I right now? What are my limits? And what have I learned about how to care for myself? It teaches us what being over-extended feels like in our bodies and our minds. And compassion practices help us accept that it’s ok to pull back, to take care. They show us what care looks like.  We need both the Warrior and the Caregiver. Meditation helps build each capacity, and helps us discern which is needed at a particular moment. Of course, life often doesn’t let us choose. Very often we will be forced to stay with some challenge well past the point where we should be taking care of ourselves. So we do the best we can, and hope any screw-ups are outweighed by our positive efforts. This, too, is an equanimity practice.  The pandemic is our collective training ground. We don’t get to choose the timing, or how long it lasts. We only get to choose how we exist inside it.  Good luck out there, my friends. Jeff Warren is a meditation teacher, trained in multiple traditions, including with renowned teacher Shinzen Young. Jeff is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics and the founder of the Consciousness Explorers Club, a meditation adventure group in Toronto.

Last week we took a look at various Nativity settings and themes observing that there are many artistic interpretations of the event. The Vatican has a long history of selecting a new theme each year on display in St. Peter’s Square. This year’s Nativity is generating interesting reviews:

The New York TimesDecember 18, 2020

VATICAN CITY — A couple stood in front of the Vatican’s new Christmas Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square, trying to understand exactly what they were looking at.The three wise men, life-size and cylindrical, looked as if constructed from ceramic oil drums. Joseph and Mary, likewise torpedo-shaped, seemed like enormous, Bible-themed Weebles. Two enigmatic, totemic figures stood in the middle of the platform. One held a shield and a decorative spear and had for a head what appeared to be an overturned caldron, carved like an angry Halloween Jack-O-Lantern. The other wore an astronaut’s helmet and held the cratered moon in its hands.“That one there?” Giorgio Banti, 71, asked his wife, Anita, as they gazed at the figures on Wednesday morning. She shrugged and read the informational poster. “First landing on the moon.”Every year, the Vatican unveils a different Nativity scene, usually donated by an Italian town, to be displayed next to the ancient obelisk in the center of St. Peter’s Square. Last year’s artists sculpted the holy family, the Magi, angels and donkeys out of 720 tons of beach sand. In 2016, the display featured a Maltese fishing boat to evoke the travails of refugees. The one in 2017 highlighted works of mercy with a man visiting a prison cell and another burying a shrouded body, complete with a dangling pale arm.

This year the Vatican went in another direction, toward Castelli, a town in the Abruzzo region of central-eastern Italy known for centuries for its ceramics.

Between 1965 and 1975, students and teachers at a local art school there sought to revive that tradition by using ancient coiling techniques — rings of ceramic stacked in sections like marble columns — to create more than 50 Christmas-themed figures. They graced Rome’s Trajan Markets in 1970, and made it to Jerusalem in 1976. They survived earthquakes in 2009 and 2016, and a bad snowstorm in 2017.Finally, this year, they made it to the big show, the “churchyard of Christianity,” as the crèche’s official description put it.The reviews haven’t been so hot.

“It’s hideous,” said Ms. Banti, who looked at the ceramic menagerie of animals — chicks that looked like fallen meteorites, a camel made of ceramic cubes — with horror. “Why do they have that one with the horns?” she asked. “What is that? A turkey?”

That critique has been amplified by conservatives who see in the ceramic figures a further erosion of church traditions and customary images they hold dear.“The Vatican’s Embarrassing SciFi Crèche,” read a headline in the conservative Catholic Herald, which like many conservative outlets and commentators, condemned the crèche. “One figure was often described as looking like Darth Vader,” wrote the article’s author, who then upped the nerd ante. “Though to me he looks more like a Sontaran from Doctor Who.”

Mr. Banti, a university professor, thought his wife and all the conservative critics were missing the point. He sought to provide more historical context.“What history?” his wife interrupted.“Would you let me finish?” he said. “I didn’t interrupt you.”His wife walked off in a huff while he explained that he remembered this style of ceramics from his youth; that it was of a time and a place when the moon landings dominated the secular and religious imagination; and that these harmless figures did not deserve all the insults they were getting in the philistine Italian press, with some writers even suggesting something demonic could be afoot.

“They could be ugly, or it could be beautiful,” he said. “But it’s not satanic!”“Satanic?” asked Annamaria Zeppa, a retired schoolteacher, who wore a beret and leaned on a single ski pole as she stood a few feet away. She was looking at a ceramic figure, maybe an angel, blowing a trumpet that looked like a fruit roll-up. “What does satanic have to do with it?”For some traditionalist conservatives, everything. But they also tend to criticize Pope Francis for an overzealous spirit of inclusion that has opened the church’s doors to relativism and, more literally, fertility statues, which some conservatives threw in the Tiber River.

Francis, who has shown an interest in space exploration, also seems willing to push the crèche limits. Last year, he issued a document, “Admirable Signum,” in which he defended a more open-minded approach to the Nativity scene.“Children — but adults too! — often love to add to the Nativity scene other figures that have no apparent connection with the Gospel accounts,” he wrote.The late soccer player Maradona has been a fixture in the mangers of crèche-crazy Naples for decades. This year, that city’s artisans made a manger scene out of pizza dough.Maradona and pizza is one thing. But 60s-era ceramics arts is apparently beyond the pale.
“Post-Modern Vatican Nativity Scene Provokes Wave of Criticism,” complained a headline in the National Catholic Register, another home of conservative dissent during the Francis pontificate. It bemoaned “20 modernistic ceramic objects,” including “a morbid, satanic-looking executioner.”Art historians popular in the Vatican’s conservative circles also considered the crèche an unnecessary insult to the injury of a plague year.“It has been a dark year and many have had their faith challenged,” the art historian Elizabeth Lev told Breitbart News’s Rome correspondent, who is also her husband. “Perhaps it would have been better to give them a symbol to rally round rather than an object of mockery.”

“The misshapen figures in the Nativity scene,” she continued, “lack all the grace, proportion, vulnerability, and luminosity that one looks for in the manger scene.”Gazing at the crèche, Maria Letizia Panerai, 58, said the ceramic figures were just what she was looking for in a manger scene.“I like it because these are not traditional times and we don’t need a traditional Nativity scene,” she said. “It’s representative of our anomalous age. It’s disconcerting, but this is a disconcerting year.”“The only thing I don’t understand is that astronaut,” she added. “And that sort of monster behind him.”“I see,” her mother, Argia, 84, agreed, squinting through sunglasses.“How can you say you see?” she told her mother. “You can’t see a thing.”The daughter added that she saw nothing offensive about the crèche. The adjacent Slovenian spruce that dwarfed it in the square was another matter.
“What’s ugly is that tree,” she said.“Shaggy,” agreed her mother.
The Vatican has yet to mount a vigorous defense of its tree, or its Nativity scene. (“The life-size ceramic statues hold a cultural heritage not immediately visible to the eye,” suggested Vatican News, its official news outlet.) And some Romans seemed to be coming around to it.“It’s particular,” Marianna Sebastiani, 38, said, charitably, as she looked at Joseph and Mary flanking the baby Jesus, who will be cloaked until Christmas Eve with a red tarp. “The ones that leave me a little perplexed are the astronauts. But they made this when man went to the moon, so it has something to do with progress I think.”Cristina Massari, 52, a guide in Rome, also said it wasn’t as bad as she had expected, given all the negative coverage. Plus, in the year of the epidemic, she appreciated that there was something otherworldly, but also empathetic, about a crèche that had endured natural disasters and scorn.“It’s a Nativity scene that has had problems, like we’ve all had a lousy year,” she said. “If it made it, we can.”

Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.

Have you seen the amazing festival of lights in Houlton’s downtown Monument Park? And Christmas music plays all day…
Please pray for a friend of mine, JM who is having surgery today at Eastern Maine Medical in Bangor. He is also battling cancer.posted by Dave

Why not put on your favorite Holiday classic DVD and watch it sometime this week as we get closer to Christmas Day.

Covid cases are increasing in the Houlton area. Please remain vigilant as we help to keep the curve flat in our town.

Fred and Leigh Griffith (and their little friend) will be leading our Winter Solstice Service on Sunday. 

Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.

The joy or the sorrow of one is shared by all. May our hearts be as one on this day.  Let us carry each thought or concern expressed in our heart and may the light of our love and compassion transform suffering into non suffering and ease the difficulties of life.  We radiate love and the light that we are.  Blessed are we all.

Prayer ListLeola BishopElaine Robichaud Mary Annah Joy  (Linda’s Mother is at Leisure Garden in Presque Isle)Richard DesautelDeb Ball and her mother Delores JackinsFor those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal emergency personnel and hospital staffFor our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisisFor those working for social justice and societal change Kalle Petroski

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 exclusion.

UU Classifieds (transportation, helped needed, odd jobs, people to visit etc…)