This past year has been a year like none other; a global pandemic, economic stressors, racial unrest and a polarizing political election process that is still trying to sort itself out. We’ve had a lot on the plate, so to speak, so in this week’s service we take a look at some of the positive things going on at the same time as the difficult things. Our attempt to balance things out a bit. And what’s encouraging is these positive things don’t need to be large or over-sized; if you have enough small hopeful things they add up amazingly quick and you start to build positive momentum. 

The title of this week’s talk is “Hopeful Things.”  We also have an original song”Things That Bring Hope” by UU minister Rev. Craig Werth that he sent to us in Houlton for the service. Continuing the theme of hope the UU Support Page has an article by Roshi Joan Halifax on “Wise Hope” and we have an insightful interview with film-maker Ken Burns on his approach to reach all Americans with his documentaries. 

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 Houlton, 61 Military Street,Houlton, ME  04730

Ken Burns Still Has Faith in a Shared American Story

By David Marchese

It cannot be said that Ken Burns is an unambitious filmmaker. He is, after all, a director who has spent 40 years making documentaries about truly foundational American subjects: the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, jazz, the Roosevelts, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War, country music. The list goes on. (And on. Think of an iconic American historical figure or event, and there’s a half-decent chance that Burns, 67, has made or is currently making a documentary about it.) But Burns’s greatest audacity might simply be his belief that the stories he tells about those biggies — and their attendant ambiguities, hopes and disappointments — can resonate with all Americans, across political or ideological divides. “It’s important for me to speak to everybody,” says Burns, whose documentary about another biggie, “Hemingway” (directed with Lynn Novick), premieres April 5 on PBS, “and to be able to try to remind us that we have things in common.”

In this moment, when there has been such a fracturing of any common American identity, has the project that you’re engaged in — of exploring fundamental national stories that might speak to all of us — become quixotic? That is really hard to answer. There was never a “project.” It was never like, Let’s do this. I’ve made films for more than 40 years on the U.S., but I’ve also made films about “us.” All of the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all the majesty and contradiction of the U.S. But the thing that I’ve learned is that there’s no “them.” This is what everybody does: make a distinction about “them.” It’s just us.

I understand what that means from a humanistic perspective but — But I got to sell newspapers, buddy!

But what does saying “There’s no them’’ mean for you practically as an American and a filmmaker? It’s easy to say “It’s just us,” but when you look around and see people willing to engage in racism, authoritarianism — it’s hard not to think that’s them. Is it wrong to do that? “There’s no them” requires discipline. It requires a nonreactive state, which is the state of observation. That’s part of a journalistic discipline. It is a difficult thing to do. You’ve described, in a journalistic question, the impulse to react and make distinctions. I don’t mean to call you into question. I’m not. It’s just that “There’s no them” is a form of self denial, of asceticism, that is important. My neighbor down the street believes in what is called the Big Lie — fervently. Do I make him “them” or do I struggle to not do that? The only answer that I know is, I struggle not to do that.

Does that empathy make it easier for the people promulgating the Big Lie? It is the tortoise handing sneakers to the hare. But I have to believe that eventually that hare, no matter how fast the sneakers help it run, slows down.

In January you wrote an essay for Politico in which you said that people have been asking you whether the assault on the Capitol was the start of something or the end. You wrote that it was neither; it was a moment that gave us a chance to choose how we could proceed. So how should we proceed? And are there historical parallels of other countries making that kind of choice?

You know, the events of Jan. 6 and of the last four or five years are unprecedented. At the same time, there are antecedents. We’ve seen the Know Nothings. We’ve seen a Civil War. Father Coughlin. What I amplified with the Politico comments is the sense that we are living through an incredibly momentous time.  Lincoln said: “Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” He was saying the danger is within. We’ve now come to full realization of that. And superimposed on this critical moment are three viruses. The first is Covid-19, obviously, which has killed 500,000 of us. We’ve got a 402-year-old virus of racial injustice. And we’ve got an age-old human one, which is lies and misinformation. Richard Hofstadter, the historian, has a famous essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” That style has always been there, and now we’ve seen it come from the top down. Before Donald Trump, we never had a chief executive so willing to suspend the truth, so willing to promote the most fringe ideas or anti-Semitism and racist remarks. That puts us in an incredibly difficult position. We’ve veered out of our lane so significantly that we have the opportunity for this to be a course correction. It’s hard to see how that happens quickly given the persistence of the disinformation, how politically expedient it is in the short term for that to be promoted. So to answer the first part of your question: Historians make lousy prognosticators — and I’m not a historian, I’m a filmmaker — because while they understand that the past is prologue, all these things represent not history repeating itself but human nature superimposing itself on the seemingly random chaos of events. Ecclesiastes said: “What has been will be again. And what has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun.” That says human nature doesn’t change, which is scary and also interesting.

Does that make you optimistic or pessimistic? Optimistic. I can’t put my finger on why other than that if you have been aware that we have gone through similar things, there is a sense of power, or maybe the word is perspective, that permits you to have a kind of optimism. In the ’08, ’09 meltdown, I had friends, including people in the financial industry, who would say to me: “Man, this is so bad. This is a depression.” And I said: “It’s really bad, but in our Depression, in many American cities the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I’ll grant you that this is a depression.” That was inoculating the Chicken Little in us from a sense of doom. Is that optimism? Maybe. It is perspective. 

Is there a belief about America that you held as true in 1981, when you made your first documentary, but that you now hold as false? Of course. The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Doubt is the mechanics of faith in a way; it’s testing and not being too sure. Learned Hand — could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand? — said liberty is never being too sure you’re right. That’s a wonderful, kind of un-American statement. Because we are certain that we’re right. I am aware that I imbibed, growing up, an exceptionalism-without-question view of us. Which I have spent my entire professional career dismantling — to the place where I then thought I could at least show glimmers of where exceptionalism might take place or has taken place. That’s a bit of a dodge. There’s no real answer here. We have to unsubscribe from the dialectic. I remember Tom Boswell, great sportswriter for The Washington Post — I was interviewing him about baseball’s performance-enhancing-drugs scandal and Barry Bonds. He said that Keats wrote a letter about William Shakespeare saying that Shakespeare had what no one else had in the same quantity, which was negative capability. The moralist in us wants to judge good or bad, and Shakespeare had this ability to withhold that judgment for as long as possible, to understand the complexity. I think I’ve learned how to avoid both the ratification of simplistic heroes and villains and to muddy the water with the shades of gray. It’s the only way in which actual life takes place.  

Ernest Hemingway certainly was a complex figure, but he hasn’t exactly been underanalyzed. What is it that you believe you’re adding to our perspective on him — or any of these big topics you take on? With the exception of “Horatio’s Drive” and “Vietnam,” I don’t think we broke new ground. But it’s how you tell a story. With, say, “The Civil War,” there may have been a handful of documentaries before ours, but none of them began with Frederick Douglass’s devastating quote about America, which is essentially, As I look at America’s beautiful rivers and star-crowned mountains, my rapture is checked; when I remember that the fields drink daily of the tears of my brethren and the rivers flow with the blood of my sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. Race is a central theme of ours, and I’ve been told for most of my professional life, Would you stop talking about it? I had dear friends — conservative, center-right — who would say when Barack Obama was elected, “Now will you shut up?” And I held up the Onion headline after that election: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” I said, “Wait till you see what happens.” It’s the worst way to be vindicated — on the body of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin. These are missing Americans that diminish us by their absence. 

I’ve seen people ask you, given where the contemporary conversation is about race, if “The Civil War” would be done differently if you were to make it today. You’ve said it would, but not how. So how would it be different? I don’t know. It just would naturally be different. But not in any fundamental way. It was important to represent all the different voices that we represented. The most important thing about me talking about race now is to say that I am in a position where I have to be quiet. You have to be quiet. There are other voices that need to speak. The dismantling of white supremacy is not just white people continually talking about the dismantling of white supremacy. You have to shut up and listen. Shut the [expletive] up. So I can be a reporter. I can be an aggregator. I can be a distiller. But I wish the films to be populated with voices that are not my own. And I don’t mean just for representation, which is important, but for how you unpack all these things. Along those lines, are there stories relating to race — or any subject — that you think are not yours to tell? That’s legitimate, but I’m drawn to what I’m drawn to. I don’t go looking for race, but we have two projects going: One — it’ll be out in September — is a history of Muhammad Ali. We’re also working on a big series which I’m calling “From Emancipation to Exodus.” Reconstruction is the heart of it — actually, the failure of Reconstruction. It’s important that we not resegregate ourselves and our narratives. So, for example, we were taking what was, with the Civil War, a white narrative and saying, Uh-uh. Frederick Douglass has a position of centrality. Spottswood Ricehas a position of centrality. People talk about the avuncular Shelby Foote as if he represented a Southern bias. He represented a Southern perspective, and had his own biases, but what’s remembered from the film is Barbara Fields’s comment that the Civil War is still going on and regrettably can still be lost. That’s one of the last moments of the film, and that’s what’s being replayed constantly since Charlottesville.

You bring that Barbara Fields quote up a lot in interviews. But the literal closing lines in “The Civil War” are spoken by Shelby Foote, quoting the bittersweet writing of a Confederate veteran. Do you ever wish you’d switched who got the last word? No. I tried it. It doesn’t work. It took the film out of a historical dynamic and placed it in another one. In the penultimate position, Barbara Fields’s comment works perfectly because it feeds into an ending in which the Shelby Foote quote is a release. It’s like music. Whatever the last note is, usually you sustain it. Barbara’s note wouldn’t sustain and wouldn’t have had the power that it has if it wasn’t buffered by this other thing that permitted you to leave the song, if I can extend the analogy.

There has been an explosion over the last few years of nonfiction storytelling, particularly in podcasts. Is that form interesting to you? Yeah. I don’t have time to listen to them.

That was a very half-hearted “yeah.” It is half-hearted. It’s nothing against the people who do them. It’s like when British people come to me and say, “Baseball is based on our rounders and cricket.” I say, “Yeah, it’s a huge improvement on both.” I’m a filmmaker. My first memory is of my father’s darkroom. I am interested in images. Not the images that oral presentations permit the listener to have — I want to be the decider. I don’t want to in any way discourage or dismiss a podcast, but I like the court I’m playing on. To switch would be to take away half of what I do, which is the visual dimension…….

You’ve talked before about the connection between your work in bringing the past to life and your Mom’s death. Isthe explanation for what you do that simple? That you’re driven to make historical documentaries because it’s a way of waking the dead? “Driven” sounds too easy, but you wouldn’t be talking to me if my mom hadn’t died. That’s the truth of it. In April, I will have been without a mother for 56 years. That is way too long. Her name was Lyla. The half-life of grief is endless. But it has also been hugely productive. I remember being interviewed in the ’90s by two sociologists about the early death of parents, and their last question was, “What is your mother’s greatest gift?” And I said “dying” and then started to cry. I didn’t want her to die, but I don’t know what I would do without the loss as being the engine of exploration, of confidence, of bravery. What idiot would take on all of these things and think you could do it? It’s pretty absurd. So there it is. But the good postscript to this: Near you in Brooklyn, David, is a little girl who is 10 years old whose name is Lyla. My oldest daughter named her first child after my mother, and a name that was never spoken except draped in black crepe now gets spoken all the time with joy and love.

Do you wonder what your mom would make of your work? All the time. And it just — I’ll start to cry right now. Only because I sort of feel that she must — she’s present. There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not aware of her. But at the same time there has been that friction that has helped me to create, so I can’t help but honor that. I feel very fortunate that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

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Yes, We Can Have Hope

BY JOAN HALIFAX

Roshi Joan Halifax reflects on the idea of “wise hope” and why we should open ourselves to it.

A good part of my life has been spent relating to situations that might be deemed hopeless—as an anti-war activist, a civil rights worker, a caregiver of dying people. I have also volunteered with death row inmates, served in medical clinics in remote areas of the Himalayas—where life is hard, food is scarce, and access to health care is nil—and worked in Kathmandu with Rohingya refugees who have no status, anywhere. You might ask, why bother? Why hold out hope for ending war or injustice? Why have hope for people who are dying, or for refugees fleeing from genocide, or for solutions to climate change?

I have often been troubled by the notion of hope. But recently, in part because of the work of social critic Rebecca Solnit and her powerful book Hope in the Dark, I am opening to another view of hope—what I call wise hope.

As Buddhists, we know that ordinary hope is based in desire, wanting an outcome that could well be different from what will actually happen. Not getting what we hoped for is usually experienced as some kind of misfortune. Someone who is hopeful in this way has an expectation that always hovers in the background, the shadow of fear that one’s wishes will not be fulfilled. This ordinary hope is a subtle expression of fear and a form of suffering.

Wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them.

Wise hope is not seeing things unrealistically but rather seeing things as they are, including the truth of suffering—both its existence and our capacity to transform it. It’s when we realize we don’t know what will happen that this kind of hope comes alive; in that spaciousness of uncertainty is the very space we need to act.

Too often we become paralyzed by the belief that there is nothing to hope for—that our cancer diagnosis is a one-way street with no exit, that our political situation is beyond repair, that there is no way out of our climate crisis. It becomes easy to think that nothing makes sense anymore, or that we have no power and there’s no reason to act.

I often say that there should be just two words over the door of our temple in Santa Fe: Show up! Yes, suffering is present. We cannot deny it. There are 65.3 million refugees in the world today, only eleven countries are free from conflict, and climate change is turning forests into deserts. Economic injustice is driving people into greater and greater poverty. Racism and sexism remain rampant.

But understand, wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognize and move us to address suffering right now. “Do not find fault with the present,” says Zen Master Keizan. He invites us to see it, not flee it!

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And that we will be part of it. We move forward in our day and get out the vote, or sit at the bedside of a dying patient, or teach that third grade class.

As Buddhists, we share a common aspiration to awaken from suffering; for many of us, this aspiration is not a “small self” improvement program. The bodhisattva vows at the heart of the Mahayana tradition are, if nothing else, a powerful expression of radical and wise hope—an unconditional hope that is free of desire.

Dostoyevsky said, “To live without hope is to cease to live.” His words remind us that apathy is not an enlightened path. We are called to live with possibility, knowing full well that impermanence prevails. So why not just show up?

ABOUT JOAN HALIFAX

Joan Halifax is the abbot and head teacher of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her most recent book Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet explores how we can face the challenges we are facing in our current fraught political climate

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

Last week during zoom coffee hour we shared a great YouTube video of a poem by Naima Penniman called “Being Human.” It is inspirational and hopeful. Here’s the link in case you’d like to check it out:
https://youtu.be/EdMHqjN4Wtw

We put a metal roof on our cabin a couple of years ago. We call it a “tin hat.”  When we had cedar shakes I usually had to shovel the roof several times during the winter, but not any more…(Just don’t stand too close!)

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 List

For 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 Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation

Pray for the victims and their families of the mass shooting in GeorgiaPrayers for Asian-American communities in our countryPray for peace and resolution of the protests in Armenia and Myanmar

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.