“walkway by Linda’s flower garden”  photo by Dave

Our traditional flower communion service will be held ” in-person” in the sanctuary on Sunday, June 6th at 10AM. Please bring a fresh cut flower to contribute to the ritual. This Unitarian tradition originated in 1923 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Dr. Norbert Capek asked his parishioners to bring and receive flowers as a symbol of their shared life as a spiritual community.

Masks will not be required for the service but left to personal discretion. The service space will be well ventilated and spacing is encouraged for those with safety concerns. There will be no congregational singing during the service but there will be plenty of special music and creative participation. Rev. Dale Holden will be our music director and organist for the service and the Congregational/Unitune Ensemble will be singing.

Please come and join us for this special service. Flashy shirts and splashy skirts are also encouraged for the festive and colorful occasion. The service will be recorded and available on the UU YouTube Channel later in the day. 

Roger Morin’s artwork will be available to view after the service and donations will be accepted to the Morin Art Fund for those interested in purchasing one (or more) of Roger’s paintings. If you have extra seeds, plants or seedlings left over from your garden planting please bring those as well as part of our flower/seed exchange and plant sale. 

Following the service there will be an outdoor coffee hour on the church front lawn. It is a pot-luck so bring something to share with the group. We will have tables and a canopy set up on the church lawn for dining. You can also bring your own comfy lawn chair if you like (and don’t forget the bug spray!). There will not be a grill on site this year so please keep that in mind as you make your plans. Everyone is welcome! 

We still plan to do a zoom coffee hour as well. We’ll have a laptop set up on one of the outside tables and people can zoom in and see what’s going on and say “Hi.”I’ll send the Zoom link out later today for the coffee hour and then the service link on Sunday afternoon when it’s ready. You can always find the latest service on the home page of our church website uuhoulton.org

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 for your support!
UU Church of Houlton

61 Military Street

Houlton, ME  04730

The Golden Buddha Inside You

BY TARA BRACH|  JUNE 4, 2021

The gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear and confusion, but it can never be tarnished. Tara Brach on how to trust your basic goodness.

For decades a prayer has circulated in the background of my daily life: May I trust my own goodness. May I see the goodness in others.

This longing emerged from a deep place of suffering I went through as a young adult. During that dark time, I felt anxious and depressed, separate from the world around me. I was continually judging myself as falling short, not good enough, doubting my basic worth. That of course kept me from feeling close and connected to others and to the world. It blocked me from feeling creative, stopped me from being fully alive.

The more you trust this loving presence as the truth of who you are, the more fully you will call it forth in yourself, and in all those you touch.

It feels like grace that this “trance of unworthiness” led me onto a spiritual path that showed me how to hold myself with compassion. This allowed me to see through the layers of judgment and doubt and to discover beneath them clarity, openness, presence, and love. Increasingly over the years, my trust in this loving awareness as the essence of who we all are has become a guiding light. No matter how wrong or lacking we may feel, how caught in separation, or how trapped by the messages, violations, and inequities of the society we live in, this basic goodness remains the essence of our Being.

A beautiful story holds within it this truth. During the mid-1950s in Bangkok, a huge clay statue of the Buddha began to crack due to heat and drought. When some monks arrived to investigate, they shined a flashlight into the largest of the cracks. What they saw surprised everyone. Deep under the gray clay was the gleam of gold.

No one had known that inside this popular but ordinary looking statue was a solid gold Buddha. As it turns out, the statue had been covered with plaster

and clay six hundred years earlier to protect it from invading armies. Although all the monks who lived in the monastery at that time had been killed in the attack, the golden Buddha, its beauty and value covered over, had survived untouched.

Just as the monks disguised the beauty of the golden Buddha in order to protect it during dangerous times, we cover our own innate purity and goodness as we

encounter a challenging world. As children, many of us were criticized, ignored, misunderstood, or abused, leading us to doubt that gold within us. As we grow up, we increasingly internalize the judgments and values of our society, further losing touch with our innocence, our creativity, and our tender hearts. We cover over the gold as we seek the approval of others, looking to them to measure our worth—to determine whether we are good enough, smart enough, successful enough. And if we are part of a nondominant group in our culture, we take on additional layers of protection to help us face the violence of social injustice and oppression.

Adding layer after layer to protect ourselves, we become identified with our coverings, believing ourselves to be separate, threatened, and deficient. Yet even when we cannot see the gold, the light and love of our true nature cannot be dimmed, tarnished, or erased. It calls to us daily through our longing for connection, our urge to understand reality, our delight in beauty, our natural desire to help others. Our deepest intuition is that there is something beyond our habitual story of a separate and isolated self: something vast, mysterious, and sacred.

What helps us uncover that gold? How can we learn to trust the pure awareness and love, the basic goodness that is our very essence? How can our lives be an active expression of our natural wisdom and kindness? And how can we respond with a wise heart to the human ignorance, greed, and hatred that perpetuates violence toward each other, racial and other caste systems, cruelty toward nonhuman animals, and destruction of our living earth? These questions have shaped my spiritual path.

The basic teachings of the Buddha awaken us to who we are. They begin with learning to recognize the Truth of our experience by opening to life, just as it is. Then we discover how to awaken our inherent capacity to meet this ever-changing life with Love. This unfolding of presence and love reveals the Freedom of our true nature.

Even though the gold of your true nature can get buried beneath fear, uncertainty, and confusion, the more you trust this loving presence as the truth of who you are, the more fully you will call it forth in yourself, and in all those you touch. And in our communities, as we humans increasingly remember that gold, we’ll treat each other and all beings with a growing reverence and love.

Our Basic Goodness

The gold of our true nature can never be tarnished. No matter how it might get covered over or disguised by feelings of anger, deficiency, or fear, our awareness remains radiant and pure. In the moments of remembering and trusting this basic goodness of our Being, the grip of “something’s wrong” dissolves and we open to happiness, peace, and freedom.

I could have done that better. I should have gotten more done. I wish I had been more sensitive. For many years, “never enough” was a chronic habit of my mind, and I could run endless variations on the theme. Finally one night before going to bed, I sat down and asked myself: “Okay, what would be enough? What do I have to do to be good enough?”

Over the next weeks I started tracking what happened after I’d completed a successful weekend of teaching, or after receiving feedback about contributing to others’ well-being, or after being particularly kind or generous with someone. The enough feeling would last for about 2.4 minutes before I’d start fixating on what else I needed to do, how I needed to prepare for the next event, how I needed to be more consistently sensitive and kind. Even the most satisfying accomplishments, upon close inspection, would seem tainted by ego, and therefore not spiritual enough. Whatever I was doing, it didn’t leave me with an enduring sense of enough.

Since that long-ago evening when I faced the never-ending narrative of falling short, I have discovered that enoughness has absolutely zero to do with accomplishing, nothing to do with achieving, and is not at all about trying to be good enough. Rather, the realization of enough is right here in the fullness of presence, in the tenderness of an open heart, in the silence that is listening to this life. These are the moments when the glow of gold shines through.

Reflection

Pause and let yourself sink into this moment, into presence, into your heart.

Gently say to yourself, “There’s nothing to do. This is enough…I am enough.”

Feel the fullness and peace of coming home.

ABOUT TARA BRACH

Tara Brach is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C., and the author of Racial Compassion, Radical Acceptance, and True Refuge.

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

CONGRATULATIONS ALL GRADUATES !!
Thank you and appreciation to the Congregationalists (and Dale) who placed a beautiful pot of summer flowers on the church front steps this week. I’ll take a picture of them at the flower communion service this week-end and include it in next week’s photos.

A BIG THANK YOU to all those who helped clean, organize and prepare the church building for our reopening this Sunday. A special note of thanks to Donna Rich, Christoph Leibrecht and Peter Rogers. The place looks great!

You saw the iris bud in the “walkway by Linda’s garden” and here they are a week later bustin’ out all over…

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.

The personalized Prayer List is distributed with the email version of this Support Page only.

Prayers 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

Prayers for Asian-American communities in our country

Prayers for the Palestinians who are stateless and under occupation

Prayers for the victims and their families of the San Jose mass shooting

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.