You’ll notice something a little different when you tune in to this week’s UUHoulton Sunday Service; the broadcast is coming from the cozy kitchen of our farmhouse in Monticello. It’s almost like dropping by for a visit (I’ll have the coffee on). 

As we know, life is not easy. Some days it seems like nothing goes right and it is hard as heck to turn it around. There is no shortage of problems in our own life and in the world at large but how do we manage the caseload when the problems seem to outnumber the solutions? In this week’s service we take a look at creative ways to problem-solve and remain relatively unfrazzled in the process.

The title of the service is “No Problem” and we’ll also have another song by the CKS Band from our concert series when they were here back in 2013. 

Have a great week-end everyone and we hope you can join us for the UUHoulton weekly service.

The recorded 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. 

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 for your support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME  04730

Message from the UUA President

In the last year, we have experienced trauma unprecedented in our lifetimes. The assaults on our democracy, the devastation caused by COVID-19, repeated incidents of deadly police violence, the rise in white supremacist violence and the impacts of climate disasters continue to take their toll. So many lives and livelihoods have been lost. We are exhausted. We are grieving.

It matters that we lean more deeply into compassion and care. There is no more important practice  or culture to develop in this time.

During times of grief and loss, we have traditionally found comfort and resilience in gathering together. As religious communities, it is what we do. Yet, we now approach the first anniversary of when, due to the pandemic, the UUA and most of our congregations shifted to all-virtual gatherings. For many, this has been an additional source of grief and isolation and can make it more difficult to process our grief and pain. Given the layers of stress and trauma, the need to care for ourselves is more important than ever. We must recognize the level of trauma that has disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous and Latinx people and communities of color. Additionally, many of our children are experiencing untold stress and challenges. Parents are giving all they can to support their kids and their livelihoods. It matters that we lean more deeply into compassion and care, for these are practices that remind us we are not alone and reinforce our humanity and our interdependence. There is no more important practice or culture to develop in this time. May you be kind to yourself and others. And may you have space to tend to your heart, your spirit and your well being.  Yours, Susan Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray spends her days strengthening the thriving mission of this faith. In her spare time, she enjoys being with her family and playing with their dog, Hercules.

The Problem With Problems

BY JUDY LIEF    |  FEBRUARY 4, 2021

The more we increase our ability to deal with our own difficulties, the more aware we are that we can’t solve the troubles of family and friends. But, says Judy Lief, we can learn to be with one another just as we are.

As we go through life, we face many joys and discoveries and many problems and difficulties. We have continual ups and downs. Over time, most of us go through economic upturns and downturns, health ups and downs, relationship ups and downs—all sorts of ups and downs. As we are tossed about, we are gradually toughened and refined, like rocks tumbled in a stream.

The more obstacles we encounter and manage to survive and overcome, the stronger we become. On the path of dharma, we are encouraged to view difficulties as opportunities for awakening, not simply as roadblocks. The combination of study and meditative training gives us tools to work with what arises as it arises, whether good or bad, happy or sad. But the more we increase our ability to deal with our own obstacles, the more we become painfully aware that we may not be able to help others—our family, our friends, people in our communities—who are struggling in similar ways.

In this world of duality, every experience has its shadow. The wish that others may be happy and not suffer is marked by the fact that at times we can help, but many times we cannot. When we are faced with suffering, and we cannot fix it, what do we do with that recognition? How do we cultivate acceptance rather than despair, anger, and frustration? Although times are tough, we may have a way of working with hardships, but we cannot always say the same about those we care about. We may struggle and it may not be easy, but we have some degree of control, and when we make mistakes we can learn from them. Having gone through difficulties before, and somehow come through them, we may feel fairly confident that we can once again see our way through.

What we have to work with is close at hand: our own mind, our own emotions, our own body, our own blockages and hesitations. We know what we are dealing with, and we can draw on what we have learned by facing similar problems in the past. But we have no control over other people. Although we want the best for our family, for the people we love, we cannot just make it happen. We are helpless. We can be strong for others, but we cannot make others strong.

The struggles of people we care about can be harder to face than our own difficulties. It is not uncommon, for instance, for a dying person who has come to terms with their own mortality to still be in great distress because they are worried that their family or loved ones do not have the inner resources to face up to what is happening. You recognize that your family is caught up in fear and anguish, pain and confusion—and there is nothing you can do about it. The fact that you are aware of your own situation and are dealing with it as best you can does not help. In some ways, that even makes things worse, because you see the contrast. You can work with your own situation but cannot protect the people around you or remove their confusion. And much as you might like to do so, you cannot simply transfer your understanding to others. So in addition to facing the pain of dying, you suffer from the frustration of not being able to help those you love, no matter what you yourself have learned.

It is so lonely to know what is going on and be unable to fix it. But you cannot walk the path of another, and another cannot walk the path for you. The reality is that each of us is a traveler, and we travel utterly alone.

You see people beaten down by the pressure of trying so hard to succeed, but not getting anywhere other than deeper in debt. How do you not feel despair?

This pattern repeats itself in many contexts. In the current economic climate, many people have lost their jobs or are afraid they might. Money is tight and prospects are dim. Savings are disappearing and investments tanking. It is a time of belt-tightening, constriction, doing without, in which many people are cutting back on their expenses—those lucky enough to have expenses beyond the bare necessities. If you have lived through economic booms and busts before, you may be pretty sure that you can weather another round of tightened circumstances and uncertainty. In my own life I have experienced many different economic conditions, and I am grateful for that, five lived on food stamps and unemployment and I’ve lived as a middle-class homeowner. Because I’ve experienced these extremes, I know I can adjust to both times of poverty and times of economic well-being.

It is empowering to face poverty and loss and find yourself not destroyed but strengthened by the experience. But even if you are able to weather changes in your own health or your economic situation, that is not enough. What about your children? What about your friends? How do you deal with the pain of others? You see so many people struggling just to cover their basic needs and support their families—working to the point of exhaustion, never being able to save a cent, and seeing no end in sight. You see people beaten down by the pressure of trying so hard to succeed, but not getting anywhere other than deeper in debt. How do you not feel despair?

You may be worried about your own children, wondering whether they will ever escape from living paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by. You worry that they may never reach the same standard of living as you have, no matter how diligent and hardworking they may be. The desire to see your children flourish comes up against the harsh reality that you cannot make it happen. You want to help, but your own resources may be limited. And even if you have resources, it can be really hard to know what is truly helpful. It is like the story of a child who comes upon a chrysalis, and touched by the struggling of the moth inside, decides to help it break out. But when the child pulls open the covering, the moth dies. Because the moth did not have to fight to break free, its wings were unable to strengthen and mature, so it could not survive. Blindly trying to solve things may only make them worse.

As you look beyond your own family and friends and your own immediate situation, you see that there are endless problems, endless issues, endless crises. There will always be something to obsess about, always be someone to worry about, always a reason to give up in the face of the futility over making things right. The thought loop of troubles and possible troubles, future troubles and remembered troubles, can take over your mind without interruption or relief. And the more you are captured by such thinking, the more frozen you feel.

Such worrying feeds on itself. It is a self-perpetuating trap. We can become so absorbed in frightening future scenarios that we lose touch with what we are experiencing here and now. Worry can have the perverse quality of making us feel righteous that we care so deeply—and we do not take responsibility for our worrying, but we conveniently blame it on others. Worrying about a person may show them we care, but it also conveys to them our sense of superiority and our lack of trust in their ability to handle their life. With worry, instead of recognizing our frustration at the limits of our power to help, we convert it into an incessant inner mental drone of thinking and anxiety. We are obsessed with all we cannot do, with thoughts of powerlessness. It becomes overwhelming and we do not know how to dig our way out.

Instead of piling up all the problems we cannot solve one on the other until we have a giant mountain of impossibility, we
could take another approach. In working with people and their problems, we could accept that those problems might never be solved. The other person may or may not be able to deal with their situation and we may or may not be able to help them. That is the reality and we need to accept that. No amount of worrying is going to change that.

It is difficult to be with a loved one who is unhappy and suffering, and it is tempting to want to save the day and make everything better. We want their pain to go away—and we are uncomfortable with our own pain as well. That ground of mutual pain and rawness is an intensely claustrophobic and forbidding territory to explore. Rather than looking into it, we would like to get out of it, to fix it. But we need to examine that notion of “fixing,” particularly the idea of fixing others. We need to question our concepts about how we want things to be and what we want people to become.

We can support the people we love and worry about, but we cannot solve their problems for them—and neither can anyone solve our problems for us.

If we can let go of some of that, we will see more clearly what we can and cannot do. We can learn not to obsess about all the problems we cannot solve, but to sort through them to find the one or two things we can actually do that might be helpful. It is better to do one small helpful thing than punish yourself for the many things beyond your power and ability to change or affect. Some problems can be solved, some cannot, and some are best left unsolved.

Shantideva, the great Indian teacher of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, said that if we could do something positive we should just do it. So why worry? He said that if we cannot do something about a problem, we should accept that. So why worry? The trick is to keep it simple—either do something or don’t.

As we grow and develop and learn from our experience, we are more likely to be able to help people who are struggling more than we are. We can learn when to help and when to step back, and we can see other people grow, as we have, through struggle and hardship. However, although we can prepare ourselves to face tough times, we have no real control over others. We can support the people we love and worry about, but we cannot solve their problems for them—and neither can anyone solve our problems for us. But we can be together with those we love, problems unsolved. Although each of us must face our own individual journey through life alone, we can travel together, bound by love.

ABOUT JUDY LIEF

Judy Lief is a Buddhist teacher and the editor of many books of teachings by the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She is the author of Making Friends with Death.

Resources
In last week’s zoom coffee hour as we discussed “Straight Talk” and the need for accurate and trusted sources of news and information in this increasingly complex and contradictory world the group started sharing where they got their news. We thought it might be helpful to share our sources and recommendations here on the support page. So here’s a start. These are just a sample of sources (and so much could be said about each one), but the links will take you where you need to go to find out more.Please keep sending in your contributions and we’ll continue doing this for a couple of weeks. 

Resources from Dave’s List:
New York Times    nytimes.com
Common Dreams   common dreams.com  Daily headlines and articles from various sources. Independent, non-profit, advertising free and 100% reader supported.    
Informed Comment  juancole.com       Founded by Juan Cole, Professor of History at University of Michigan. Specializes in Middle East history and energy technology research.
Heather Cox Richardson   heathercoxrichardson.substack.com  American historian and professor of history at Boston College
Chris Hedges  scheerpost.com    Journalist, Harvard Divinity School, host of “On Contact” (RT America) and columnist.  
Bill McKibben    billmckibben.com    Environmental author and founder of 350.org
Naomi Klein    naomiklein.org     Environmental author and activist. Delivered the Ware Lecture at UU General Assembly 2020
Dr. Cornel West  cornelwest.com  Minister, activist and scholar; Delivered the Ware Lecture at UU General Assembly 2015
Bill Moyers  billmoyers.com    American journalist and political commentator
Noam Chomsky   chomsky.info      American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.
Neal DeGrass Tyson  haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/    American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator.    

Resources from Audrey’s List:

Link to Yes! magazine which I mentioned at coffee hour:https://www.yesmagazine.org
I look to this organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, for research on social/economic issues related to the U.S. I get their weekly newsletter, “Inequality This Week.” They are clearly ‘left, progressive’ ideology and the data is often depressing, but they have been around for 20+ years and I trust their research and numbers:https://inequality.org
I love this woman’s gem of a blog for the unusual and curiosities that are mostly delightful—mostly European based but sometimes U.S.—and off the beaten path of world maps, history books, and the internet. It’s a fun place to lose time in times past and present.https://www.messynessychic.com
And I like to read, usually, what these NY Times reporters—Max Fisher and Amanda Taub—have to say about current issues in their column, “The Interpreter.” Their analysis looks at what is happening and links it to past similar incidents and outcomes, and also to bigger picture theories about the dynamics of what is going on. I especially like at the bottom of each entry their list of what they are reading now.https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-interpreter

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

After zoom coffee hour last week, I looked out the window and saw what I usually see sometime in February and consider to be one of the first signs of spring: twigs at the ends of branches of some shrubs and small trees glowing reddish. In Cary, I always saw it first on a Nannyberry shrub cluster in view from the kitchen window. Today I saw it on the weeping cherry trees out the front windows of this house in Glenburn. This picture doesn’t show it as clearly as I see it in real life, but maybe you get the idea—or maybe you are familiar with what I am describing.
Happy first signs of spring coming,Audrey

MaryAlice Musingsfrom her writer’s Blog     maryalice-musings.blogspot.com

 Well March 2, 2021 can go down in the memory book.  There is wind up here on ridge, and there have been big winds since I moved into my house in Patten, but yesterday topped them all. After an almost balmy start to the month, the arctic blast happened,  the winds blew, and I mean they blew hard and long.  I heard house and outside noises that I have never heard before. The wind chill was -20+ something.  I was concerned about being able to attend my second session of Decolonizing in Conservation Communities by the Wabanaki Reach Program Tuesday morning.  Even though the winds were roaring and the temperature was continuing to drop we all got online, almost 50 of us zooming from 9 to Noon… 

Then lunch, a little reading, a few “to-do’s” and I decided to take a “couch nap”.  It was not too long and I fell soundly asleep.  I woke up and it felt a little cool.  It was very quiet, I realized too quiet.  I looked at the TV shelf, no blue light on the modem.  Yes, really quiet, no refrigerator hum.  It was around 4 pm.  I looked at my phone and the power was below half, more below half than I would like seeing that I know had no power.

Within minutes a text came from my neighbor, “did I have power?”  No.   The winds were still ripping and I had to decide if I try on my own to start the generator.  (I will not go into my generator story today, it is a story all in itself).  I decided to not try it myself and called Matt.  Matt often helps me out in these moments when i just need help.   He could not come because there were electrical lines down going across his driveway.   His neighbor had reported down lines and while we were talking that firetruck and then the repair truck arrived.

Good,  help is on the way.  I will just hunker down.  It was still light so I made sure that I brought out extra blankets.  I pulled out candles and lanterns.  Most of the lights downstairs are these magical bulbs – they charge while the lights are turned on when electricity is on.  The bulbs are then charged and they are good for around 12 hours.  So I had light.  I decided to not even try to start the generator since help had arrived!   I wrote in my journal.   I made some supper.   I read and played cards with myself.  Another neighbor checked.  Then another it is now after 6.  The flashing lights from the repair trucks cast shadows across the living room windows.   

I wanted the electricity to come back on.  The house was staying amazingly warm.  I kept trying to imagine what would happen if anyone saw me.  I didn’t want to get cold so I had on my warm leggings.  I had an extra very very warm wool sweater.  I had my hand felted wrist warmers and a one of my felted beret hats on my head.  For good measure I had my flannel robe on.  No wonder I thought that the house was warm.  

Meanwhile I would glance out the window.  Wondering how in the world those workers could be out there in this absolute frigid, unforgiving weather.  Bless the workers I kept thinking.   I also was remembering my first FB post of the day when I asked, ” Did I wake up in Siberia?”   I had gotten very fun responses from the post including a reminder that there is actually a Siberia Township (near Stacyville) just 16 minutes from my house.  Siberia Township Maine came to Patten and brought the wind, the temperature and the wind chill.  I kept having scenes from  Dr. Zhivago float through my head.  I kept being hopeful.

I went back to the couch,  fell asleep and woke to sounds, and light.  Almost exactly to the minute the power returned at the 5 hour mark.  The furnace started.  The internet came on, the thermostat worked, the refrigerator made it sounds and the lights came on.  

What a day.  Today seemed so much milder, although it really wasn’t.  The winds died down and the sun felt good.  I still mostly stayed in the house.   I moved snow around.  I chipped away at the pile of snow that dumped from the roof blocking my front door.  I appreciated the absence of blowing wind sounds.

Gratitude for the workers.  Gratitude for the sun and rising temperatures.  Glad to resume tasks.  A fun zoom time with women that I worked together with in Minnesota.  A good good day.

Tomorrow I get shot #2.  Vaccine #2.  My arm is ready, I am ready.  A good day today and a better day tomorrow!  

It is March, feels like January.  Covid time.  The lion is roaring and we can only hope the lamb arrives soon. 

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.

For privacy concerns the Prayer List for our members is distributed by personal email only. We pray with love and concern for our family and friends and:

For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of Maine

Local emergency personnel and hospital staff

For our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisis

For those working for social justice and societal change 

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.