On this third week of Advent we reflect on gift and wonderment. In this season of gifting we reside in a place of unexpectedness, surprise and excitement.
The title of this week’s message is “The Shimmering Moment” and we also have a musical selection by Nick Foster for the Christmas season. You won’t want to miss it. The service will be available at 10AM on our YouTube Channel followed by Zoom check-in and coffee hour at 11AM. You’ll find the links listed below. Have a great week-end everyone!
Practice patience and kindness.
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S SERVICE(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UU Check-In and Coffee HourTime: Dec 12, 2021 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87688062786?pwd=SVZTWWowb0pmUkE4VkdEajU3bUhSQT09
Meeting ID: 876 8806 2786
Passcode: 552118
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military StreetHoulton, ME 04730
Searching for Wisdom in the Clutter
Towering stacks of newspapers, a mountain of clippings — James Kullander feels they might contain some fact that would transform his life. Deep down, though, he knows what would be truly transformative. From the November 2011 issue of Lion’s Roar.
One bright summer day many years ago, I was sitting on the hood of a neighbor’s Plymouth station wagon reading the New York Times. My parents didn’t get the Times, so occasionally I wandered through the woods to our neighbor’s house and read theirs. I went there to visit with my friend, too, a girl my age. Perhaps by reading the newspaper in front of her I would impress her with my worldliness.
I was never all that good at sports and I was painfully shy. The girl, a svelte blonde, was clever at making things with folded paper. While I was reading, she took a section of the Times, made a big newspaper hat out of it, put it on my head, and laughed. I thought it funny, too, and played along. Another friend, who had his own 35mm Nikon and darkroom, snapped a shot of me. In the photo I’ve got the big newspaper hat on my head, and in my hands I’ve got the other section spread open before me as I scan the headlines. On my face I’m wearing a big smile. I’m thirteen years old.
I walk by that photo every day, and it used to make me smile. But recently I’ve looked at it with a sinking sensation as I’ve watched the spate of reality television shows on hoarding, such as Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive, and all the media attention suddenly paid to packrats of all stripes. In the scenes of mindboggling clutter that people have crammed into their homes, I can see my own tilting heaps of newspapers all around me.
We all have our stashes of junk somewhere—in a drawer, a closet, the attic, the basement—but what’s been happening with me over the years is a little more serious. Recently, I went to the big guns, a guide for therapists, to help me. “We buy what we need, sometimes more, and we discard, recycle, give away, or sell what we don’t,” I read in Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring by Gail Steketee and Randy O. Frost. “But for people who suffer from compulsive hoarding,” the book goes on, “this process is not so easy. For them, possessions never ‘feel’ unneeded or unnecessary, and trying to get rid of them is an excruciating emotional ordeal. For some it is easier to divorce a spouse, sever ties with children, and even risk life and limb.”
Psychologists have come up with all sorts of reasons why people hoard. Some say it’s genetic; some say it’s a form of an obsessive-compulsive disorder; others say it could be related to brain abnormalities or damage. For me, I think it all began with a need to know, although I can’t recall specifically when or how it happened. Perhaps I’d been made a fool of for not knowing the answer to a question. Perhaps I’d lost an argument—or a bet—because I didn’t have the correct information. Mostly what I remember is that I thought that everything I needed to know was in the daily newspaper.
So every day after I got off the school bus, I’d grab the afternoon Bridgeport Post from the mailbox at the end of our driveway and pore over its pages while my friends were still back at school rehearsing a play, practicing in the marching band, or playing sports. I was not embarrassed or ashamed by this. Actually, I was quite proud of myself. None of my friends was reading the newspaper with the attention that I was giving to it. Maybe it made me feel grown up, a cut above the rest.
Some obsessions we outgrow but I did not outgrow this one. I could never keep in my head everything I felt I needed or wanted to know, and this is perhaps where my need to know soured into an obsession. I’d started clipping in my teens, filing the clippings in folders arranged by topic and stashing the folders in tall, gray file cabinets, and long after I had plunged myself into Buddhism, which teaches about the emotional pain of clinging to old habits, I continued to pile newspapers around me to protect a fragile sense of self that felt threatened without them. Wherever I moved, those file cabinets and stacks of newspapers came with me, growing like stalagmites in every room in every apartment and house I lived in. Over the years, I’ve found myself becoming embarrassed by them. Once, I was even reluctant to let a plumber into my house to fix a broken pipe for fear of what he would think of me.
Everyone I tell about my situation gives me the same admonition: Get rid of the newspapers. You can find everything online now. Move on. Make space in your life for something new. Some Buddhist you are, they taunt me. I laugh, and shrug it off. But deep inside, the confusion is acute. Over the years I’ve made some small attempts to clean up and put a stack of yellowing copies of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times out on the curb for recycling. But as I’m doing it, I am convinced— and dread mightily—that in the stack I’m turning my back on there’s something I need to know, and now will never know. Some bit of knowledge or fact that will transform my life.
At the same time, I know that what would really transform my life would be to get rid of the newspapers. I have canceled all my newspaper and magazine subscriptions, and recently had a friend over to help jump-start the arduous cleaning-out process. We ended the day with a whopping thirty-nine grocery bags (which I had been saving, of course) stuffed with newspapers deposited on the curb outside my house for recycling. I even found a New York Times clipping titled, “Clutter Counseling: Just Say Throw.” The date of the clipping: November 9, 1995.
I try to concentrate on the basic Buddhist teachings contained in the four noble truths I learned years ago: there is suffering in life, we suffer to the degree we crave and cling, there is an antidote to this clinging, and it is an eight-fold path that shows us how to live with moderation. To me, this moderation looks like a house where I don’t have to navigate my way through the heaps of newspapers, where friends can sit down at my kitchen table and enjoy a meal together. Not rocket science, yet for me difficult to put into practice.
I know by now that no amount of knowledge is going to change my life. “Wisdom is the only thing that saves people from suffering, finally,” the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman said at a recent talk I attended. When I heard those words I thought back to my house a few miles away, silently groaning in the night like someone who’s eaten way too much. Buddhism teaches us that the greatest mind is a mind that lets go and the greatest wisdom comes from seeing through appearances.
I was reminded of a Zen story about two monks returning to their monastery one evening. It had rained, and a beautiful young woman was standing on the path, unable to go on because of a big puddle blocking her way. The elder of the two monks lifted her up in his arms, carried her across the puddle, and continued on his way.
That evening the younger monk came up to the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman, right?”
The elder monk answered, “Yes, brother.”
Then the younger monk asked, “But then, sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the road?”
The elder monk smiled at him and said, “I left her on the side of the road, but you are still carrying her.”
*
A Practice for Developing Kindness Toward Yourself
Valerie Mason-John, author of Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Emotional Healing, shares a meditation for cultivating a positive relationship with yourself, and, by extension, the world.
When we take positive action and respond creatively to our anger, we are taking good care of ourselves. Taking care of our hearts, minds, and bodies is taking positive action. Learning to be kind and loving toward ourselves is a challenge. It is also part of the lifelong practice of working with our anger.
There is a meditation called the metta bhavana, which has its origins in the Buddhist tradition. Metta means loving-kindness, and bhavana means to develop. This meditation teaches us to be kind and gentle by cultivating a positive relationship with ourselves and the rest of the world. Loving-kindness can be the beginning of compassion for ourselves and the way to end anger in our hearts and minds. It is what I have used to begin releasing the toxins of anger, hatred, and fear from my heart. It has been the alchemy in my life.
The first stage of this meditation turned my life around. It was here that I faced the question, “If I can’t feel love for myself, how can I feel healthy love for others?
Below are instructions for this first stage of the meditation. I hope you find it as revolutionary, over time, as I did.
Developing Kindness toward Yourself — A Metta Practice
- Close your eyes, grounding yourself on your seat. Make sure you are fully supported and your feet are placed firmly on the ground.
- Become aware of the breath permeating your body. Imagine it to be a spray clearing the toxins from your heart.
- After a minute try to visualize looking back at yourself, or see yourself in a beautiful place that you enjoy. Or just silently call your name. Remember to breathe.
- After another minute say to yourself, “May I be happy,” then breathe and acknowledge how this feels. Then say, “May I be well,” then breathe and acknowledge how this feels. Then say, “May I be kind toward my suffering,” then breathe.
- Allow yourself to sit in stillness with whatever arises. After a few minutes say, “May I cultivate more kindness within my heart. May I cultivate more peace within my heart. May I continue to develop and grow.”
- Continue to recite these phrases, leaving a minute or two between each, staying connected with yourself all the time.
- After ten minutes bring the practice to an end.
If you practice this weekly it will begin to transform your heart. If you do it daily it will bring about positive change in your life.
If our hearts are full of love and kindness for ourselves, there is little room for anger. Such mental states might arise, but love is the cleansing water that puts out the flames of anger.
Reproduced from Valerie Mason-John’s book, Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Emotional Healing, with permission of Wisdom Publications.
ABOUT VALERIE MASON-JOHN
Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John is a senior teacher in the Triratna Order and author of Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Emotional Trauma. Her next book, I’m Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin, will be published this spring.
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.
When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
From the UUHoulton altar on the third Sunday of Advent. The Buddha gets out of his box once a year…
The fire pit on a snowy day in early December 2021
Please send in joys and concerns during the week to dave@backwoodsblog.com and I will post them on the Support Page.
Prayer List
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
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation
Prayers for the people of Haiti
Prayers for the people of Afghanistan
Prayers for British Columbia and Washington State with the recent heavy rains and landslides
Prayers for refugees in Eastern Europe, Central America and for those along our southern border
Concerns regarding the new covid variant Omicron
Prayers for the recent shooting victims at Oxford Hight School (just outside Detroit)
Prayers for all those who may be alone or blue during the holidays
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.
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