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Happy Easter, everyone!
We are excited to be back in the parlor (a pre-recorded service) for Easter Sunday. Members from the Congregational Church and the UU Unitunes have combined to form an ecumenical Easter ensemble along with special music from Rosiland Morgan and Rev. Dale Holden as our pianist and Music Director for the occasion. It’s the first time we’ve had live music for a Sunday Service since Christmas Eve so this has been a real treat for both musicians and singers. There are a couple of rehearsal photos in today’s UU Support Page and we also have an Easter article by New Testament professor Esau McCaulley from Wheaton College.
Regardless of your religious background (or lack thereof) Easter is a meaningful Spring holiday that renews our vigor for life after a lengthy and prolonged winter experience. Think Spring!! Have a great Easter 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 on our YouTube channel 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
The New York Times
The Unsettling Power of Easter
The holiday is about much more than a celebration of spring.
Contributing Opinion Writer New York TimesApril 2, 2021
I grew up in the Southern Black church tradition, where Easter was the opportunity to don your best outfit. The yellow and red dresses and dark suits set against the Black and brown bodies of my church were a thing to behold. The hats of grandmothers and deacon’s wives jostled with one another for attention. The choir had its best music rehearsed and ready to go. Getting to sing the solo on Easter was like getting a prime spot at the Apollo.I watched rather than participated in these festivities during most of my youth. I didn’t have the money or social standing to attract much attention. Then one year my mother cobbled together enough money to purchase a navy blue three-piece suit and a clip-on tie. Without my father around, neither she nor I could tie the real thing. I thought I had joined the elect when I showed up fresh and clean for Sunday service.
The feeling didn’t last long. During a song, a woman sitting next to me with one of the aforementioned hats got excited. Our tradition called it “catching the Holy Ghost.” In her ecstatic state, she kicked out, hit me in the leg, and ripped a hole in my brand-new pants.
That Sunday introduced me to the two Easters that struggle alongside each other. One is linked closely to the celebration of spring and the possibility of new beginnings. It is the show that can be church on Easter. The other deals with the disturbing prospect that God is present with us. His power breaks out and unsettles the world.
We like to imagine the story of the first Easter as the first of the two, a celebration of possibility. We would be wrong.
The four Gospels describe Jesus’ female followers going to his tomb on Easter morning, only to find it empty. They receive the news that Christ has risen from the dead. Each Gospel, at different points, comments on the fear that these women felt.
The Gospel of Mark’s account is especially striking to me. The earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark conclude with a description of the women as “trembling and bewildered.” Mark tells us that they “fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). That the story is known at all makes it clear that Mark believes the women eventually told Jesus’ disciples what they had seen. But what do we make of the fact that Mark ends his Gospel on the women’s fear and silence?
Mark’s ending points to a truth that often gets lost in the celebration: Easter is a frightening prospect. For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive.
We know what to do with grief and despair. We have a place for it. We have rituals that surround it. I know how to look around at the anti-Black racism, the anti-Asian racism, the struggles of families at the border and feel despair. I know what it’s like to watch the body count rise after a mass shooting, only to have the country collectively shrug because we are too addicted to our guns and our violence.
I know how to feel when I look to some in the church for help, only to have my faith questioned because I see in biblical texts a version of social justice that I find compelling. I put it all in the tomb that contains my dead hopes and dreams for what the church and country could be. I am left with only tears.
Hope is much harder to come by. The women did not go to the tomb looking for hope. They were searching for a place to grieve. They wanted to be left alone in despair. The terrifying prospect of Easter is that God called these women to return to the same world that crucified Jesus with a very dangerous gift: hope in the power of God, the unending reservoir of forgiveness and an abundance of love. It would make them seem like fools. Who could believe such a thing?
Christians, at their best, are the fools who dare believe in God’s power to call dead things to life. That is the testimony of the Black church. It is not that we have good music (we do) or excellent preaching (we do). The testimony of the Black church is that in times of deep crisis we somehow become more than our collective ability. We become a source of hope that did not originate in ourselves.
After we take off those suits and sundresses and hats, we return to a world that is racialized. The Black skin that set nicely against those yellows and blues also makes us stand out as we live in a world that calls our skin a danger. We need more than celebration; we need unsettling presence.
To listen to the plans of some, after the pandemic we are returning to a world of parties and rejoicing. This is true. Parties have their place. Let us not close all paths to happiness. But we are also returning to a world of hatred, cruelty, division and a thirst for power that was never quarantined. This period under pressure has freshly thrown into relief the fissures in the American experiment.
As we leave the tombs of quarantine, a return to normal would be a disaster unless we recognize that we are going back to a world desperately in need of healing. For me, the source of that healing is an empty tomb in Jerusalem. The work that Jesus left his followers to do includes showing compassion and forgiveness and contending for a just society. It involves the ever-present offer for all to begin again. The weight of this work fills me with a terrifying fear, especially in light of all those who have done great evil in his name. Who is worthy of such a task? Like the women, the scope of it leaves me too often with a stunned silence.
Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is a contributing opinion writer and an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. He is the author of the book “Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope.”
| 5 Practices to Nurture Happiness Thich Nhat Hanh |
 The essence of Buddhist practice is transforming suffering into happiness, says Thich Nhat Hanh. He reveals five ways to do it. 1. Letting Go“Many of us are bound to so many things. We believe these things are necessary for our survival, our security, and our happiness. But many of these things—or more precisely, our beliefs about their utter necessity—are really obstacles for our joy and happiness.” |
| 2. Inviting Positive Seeds“If we pay attention only to the negative things in us, especially the suffering of past hurts, we are wallowing in our sorrows and not getting any positive nour- ishment. We can practice appropriate attention, watering the wholesome qualities in us by touching the positive things that are always available inside and around us. That is good food for our mind.” |
3. Mindfulness-Based Joy“When we practice mindful breathing or mindful walking, we bring our mind home to our body and we are established in the here and the now… Joy and happiness come right away. So mindfulness is a source of joy. Mindfulness is a source of happiness.” |
| 4. Concentration“When we have concentration, we have a lot of energy. We don’t get carried away by visions of past suffering or fears about the future. We dwell stably in the present moment so we can get in touch with the wonders of life, and generate joy and happiness.” 5. Insight“With mindfulness, we recognize the tension in our body, and we want very much to release it, but sometimes we can’t. What we need is some insight. Insight is seeing what is there. It is the clarity that can liberate us from afflictions such as jealousy or anger, and allow true happiness to come. Every one of us has insight, though we don’t always make use of it to increase our happiness.” |
Here is a new feature on the Support Page we are launching this week. During zoom coffee hour people often share interesting movies, books or music they’ve recently discovered so we thought we would provide space to post one selection (or two) a week.
Disk Jockey Turntable
This week’s DJ: Ray Byers
Here is the link to the song by the Ukrainian “ethnic chaos” group DahkaBrahkaa which brought me out of a major funk recently. Don’t know how anyone else might react. I think I stumbled onto this group a few years ago when I was looking for music similar to Pink Martini doing Schedryk. This song is a bit of a different instrumentation than some of the more traditional songs they do.
DahkaBrahkaa “Baby” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1KdGDEkj_U&list=LL&index=3
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
It was Linda Rowe’s birthday on April 1st (Yes, April Fool’s Day!)
Ryan Hines took this photo at 3AM in his sugar house.
Previous 2 boil days we boiled down 28 pails(5gal). We got 21 pails of sap in the past 2 days… And I woke up and thought of how many pails we had to boil and thought I better get an early start. Of course Angie came out at 6:00 saying that I was insane!
We knew the stove pipe ran hot…but we didn’t know it was that hot until I was boiling in the dark…glowing stainless!
Posted by Ryan
Report from Mike Fasulo’s Sugar House
Ahhh, the red glow of a wood stove pipe… Yes, I am cooking sap on my Portland Stove Foundry box stove up in the Sugar Shack. Nineteen trees have disgorged 37.5 gallons so far and I have boiled down about 74 ounces of syrup with maybe 20 gallons of sap left in the plastic garbage can. My collection jugs, those with anything in them after yesterday’s collection, are solid blocks of ice. That’s good. I needed break even though my favorite part is walking the collection loop, not the bottling. I’m sure Ryan’s setup is more sophisticated, with a specific gravity measurer ( to test for sugar content) and an accurate, reliable thermometer. The older I get, the less precise I try to be with the syrup. If it starts to foam, it’s ready to bottle, give or take.
Posted by Mike
Peter Rogers pruned the UU cherry tree earlier this week. Thanks Pete!!
David & Danielle had a house fire this week. (They are friends of ours from Houlton Coffeehouse and Sunday Morning Music) David, Danielle and children are fine but pray for the family as they rebuild their lives.
We normally do not publish names with health concerns and prayers on our website, in stead please refer to the prayer list distributed by email to members.
“That’s an awful big cupcake, Fred…” (Choir rehearsal)
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 named Prayer List is not published on the uuhoulton website.
For those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal 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.
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation.
Pray for the victims and their families of the mass shootings in Georgia and Colorado.
Prayers for Asian-American communities in our country.
Pray for peace and resolution of the protests in Armenia and Myanmar.
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