This Christmas Eve we are rebroadcasting the Christmas Eve service from last year, December 24th 2020. In the almost two years of recording services on our UUHoulton YouTube Channel, this is our most-watched video. Featuring a variety of Christmas music, a visit to The Cup Cafe, a short message from our minister and hosted by Jeffery “Fen” Carmichael as our MC this production has become an instant Christmas classic.
Although we won’t be meeting in-person for our traditional Christmas Eve service and pot-luck meal, we hope this special Christmas Eve service brings you joy during the holiday week-end. Grab a glass of eggnog and enjoy the service.
No matter where you may be this year we hope that you and your family are safe and finding a meaningful way to celebrate the holiday. From all of us here at UUHoulton we wish you a merry Christmas; peace, compassion and prosperity in the new year 2022. The service will be available at and from 4PM on Friday, Christmas Eve.
Merry Christmas everyone!
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S SERVICE(The link will be active at 4PM on December 24)
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 26, 2021 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87688062786?pwd=SVZTWWowb0pmUkE4VkdEajU3bUhSQT09
Meeting ID: 876 8806 2786Passcode: 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. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions. Thank you for your generous support! Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton
61 Military Street
Houlton, ME 04730
How to Work with the Winter Blues
BY SYLVIA BOORSTEIN| DECEMBER 21, 2021
“Perhaps,” says Sylvia Boorstein, “these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.”
These are especially hard days for people whose minds are burdened with the fatigue of depression, the grief of loss, even the relatively mild Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) that seems directly related to the amount of daylight. Someone once said to me, “The view out the window looks like the inside of my mind. Hopeless.” Right after Thanksgiving, therapists I know begin saying, “I can’t wait until the holidays are over. Everyone feels worse. It’s such a problem to try to be happy if you’re not.”
So for these darkening days, here are some thoughts about varieties of mind fatigue, how psychotherapy is sometimes helpful, how meditation is sometimes helpful, how medication is sometimes helpful, how patience is always helpful.
Depression
A friend of mine, a woman I’ll call Eve, began mindfulness meditation shortly before I did, twenty-five years ago. Eve is a psychologist, successful at her work. I met her at my first retreat. She told me that she had the same clinical depression that her mother and grandmother had before her. Eve’s particular depression came and went in cycles of several month intervals, not predictable by season or situation. She had been in psychotherapy for long periods of her life, and said it had supported her through some very difficult times. Eve began to meditate years ago hoping it also would help her depression. She went on retreat often and had a regular meditation practice at home.
I particularly remember her enthusiasm for practice, which was evident even as she told me, all those years ago, “I still have the same cycles of depression. They are not different, but I am different. First of all, I see the cycles coming on more clearly than I did before, and I adjust my work schedule so it’s easier for me to manage. I’m also less anxious about them because I know they will pass. I’m just more relaxed about it all.”
When the mind is balanced and energetic, mindfulness supports the development of insight.
These days there are drugs to treat Eve’s depression and she takes them. And she still has a regular meditation practice. “The difference,” Eve said to me recently, “is that I used to end retreats just balanced enough to keep on going. Now I start reasonably balanced. My mind has energy in it. I’m starting to see things I hadn’t seen before. I’m surprised, especially after all these years of looking at myself, to see parts of my own psyche that I never saw before. I’m even starting to see the habits that set up extra suffering in my mind, and I’m not doing them so much. Now I feel like I’m really meditating.”
I think Eve was always really meditating. It was enough that the quiet and seclusion of her meditation times, on and off retreat, was soothing to her, and that her determination to try to concentrate created enough energy so she could say, “I feel balanced.”
Mindfulness, in my experience, does not cure clinical depression. But when the mind is balanced and energetic, mindfulness supports the development of insight. And even when the mind lacks energy, paying attention soothes the anxiety about the fatigue. Any lessening of suffering is good.
Grief
Grief is different from depression. Grief is the intense sadness associated with the loss of something dear—the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, the collapse of a career, the unexpected onset of an incurable illness. Grief is the natural reaction of the mind to a shock. My own experience of it is that the mind feels numbed. Maybe the numbness is the body providing temporary anesthesia for the pain.
Mourning, when the mind is ready to acknowledge the loss, seems the beginning of the process of healing, and it takes however long it takes. My friend Judi told me that the first year after her partner Meg died was the hardest. She said she needed to do one Thanksgiving, one Christmas, one Valentine’s Day, one of everything they had done together, by herself, before she began to feel like herself again. It’s different for everyone. Another friend of mine told me she needed to wait five years before she was able to even begin to cry about her mother’s death.
The insight of impermanence, the deep down sense that everything, including current grief, mercifully passes, is comforting.
Talking about sadness is good for the mourning process. Having someone who is able to witness grief with compassion, someone who isn’t frightened by pain, eases the burden of keeping it unspoken. Loving friends are good. Grief counselors are good. Grief isn’t an illness. Usually it does not need either therapy or medication. It needs time.
Meditations that are comforting might be helpful. Silent meditation retreats, I’ve discovered, are helpful for some people and not for others. Someone I know came to Spirit Rock Meditation Center a week after the death of his teenage son some time ago. Now he comes every year, for that same week. The silence and seclusion allow him to feel safe enough to cry. For others, the sense of isolation and the absence of stimuli seem to magnify the pain. The insight of impermanence, the deep down sense that everything, including current grief, mercifully passes, is comforting. It doesn’t erase sadness. It supports the ability to be sad. It is unwise, though, I think, to remind grieving people of impermanence. They feel unheard. The insight arises by itself, as part of the natural mourning process, in its own time.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Seasonal Affective Disorder is a relatively new term in the psychology lexicon. People used to call it Wintertime Blues. It’s a good thing that scientists have named it, and figured out that the absence of daylight is a probable cause. Maybe it is that. Legitimizing Seasonal Affective Disorder makes it possible for people to talk about it, and not feel they need to hide it. It also gives people courage to wait it out. It will pass, soon, after the solstice.
And maybe we also experience Seasonal Affective Disorder because this is a time of endings, and there is a melancholy about endings, especially if some hope for what might have been has not been fulfilled. Perhaps it’s a good thing to let ourselves be sad, at least enough to recognize the losses in our lives that we’ve avoided seeing. Perhaps these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what perhaps can only be seen in the dark.
As we move toward the return of the light, blessings for a new year.
ABOUT SYLVIA BOORSTEIN
Sylvia Boorstein is a psychologist and leading teacher of Insight Meditation. Her many best-selling books include Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake and Happiness Is An Inside Job.
POETRY CORNER
Year’s Endby Richard Wilber
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.Richard Wilbur, “Year’s End” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.
Merry Christmas from Linda & Dave! (photo by Dave)
Prayers for hope and peace as we near Christmas and the new year.
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 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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