UU Day Lillies by the church ramp (2022)
Your minister turns the big 62 this week-end (July 24). The congregation surprised the minister last Sunday with a cake, gifts and a party downstairs in the Cafe during coffee hour. It was great fun and I had absolutely no idea what was up! A big thank you is in order to all the stealth organizers of the party. I was also talked into taking this Sunday off and Fen Carmichael will be leading the service in my absence. Thank you Fen! You’ll see a photo of the surprised birthday man in today’s support page.
In this week’s online YouTube service we are exploring the poetry of A.R. Ammons. Earlier this summer I mentioned the book of poems titled “The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons,” and when I say “really short poems” they really are; usually one sentence with very little punctuation, one poem per page, the book is 160 pages long and contains 160 poems. The title of the talk is “Short Sermons” and I am sharing nine short poems of A.R. Ammons or nine short sermons if you like, each one containing a brief insight or comment pertaining to leading a meaningful life in the 20th, and now, the 21st century. You’ll find the link listed below.
Please join us for one of the services this weekend.
Have a good week-end everyone.
In Ministry,
Dave
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour & check-inTime: Jul 24, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/82175712047?pwd=cCtWenBtd1BiN25VN250YUQwUlhpUT09
Meeting ID: 821 7571 2047 Passcode: 230950
Virtual Offering Plate
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UU Church of Houlton, 61 Military Street, Houlton, ME 04730
Poetry Corner
In this week’s YouTube service we are exploring the poetry of A.R. Ammons. Here is a sample of a couple of his poems and a short write-up.
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
The following is a brief bio of American poet A.R. Ammons found on the Poetry Foundation’s poet page:
Archibald Randolph (A.R.) Ammons was born in rural North Carolina on February 18, 1926. His experiences growing up on a cotton and tobacco farm during the Great Depression inspired a great deal of his poetry.
Ammons wrote his first poems while serving aboard a Navy destroyer during World War II. After the war, he earned a BA from Wake Forest University and an MA in English from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from 1964 to 1998.
Ammons’s many honors include two National Books Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Bosh and Flapdoodle (2005), Glare (1997), Garbage(1993), A Coast of Trees (1981), Sphere (1974), Collected Poems 1951-1971, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), and Ommateum: With Doxology (1955).
Ammons once told the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, “I never dreamed of being a Poet poet. I think I always wanted to be an amateur poet.” But critics have long recognized Ammons as a major American poet, and the measure of their esteem is implied by the stature of the poets to whom they compare him. Tracing his creative genealogy, they are apt to begin with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and work chronologically forward through Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.
Of those poets, Harold Bloom felt that the transcendentalists Emerson and Whitman have influenced Ammons the most. In his book The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, Harold Bloom contended that “the line of descent from Emerson and Whitman to the early poetry of Ammons is direct, and even the Poundian elements in [Ammons’s poem] ‘Ommateum’ derive from that part of Pound that is itself Whitmanian.” “Ommateum” refers to an insect’s compound eye, and presages the inclusiveness that marks Ammons’s canon and the works of earlier transcendentalists.
Daniel Hoffman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, agreed that Ammons’s poetry “is founded on an implied Emersonian division of experience into Nature and the Soul,” adding that it “sometimes consciously echo[es] familiar lines from Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson.” While inheriting both the emancipation from strict metrical forms won by Emerson and the multiplicity of alternatives recognized by Whitman, Ammons brings to poetry a fidelity to the details of nature and a contemporary, conversational tone, thus revitalizing a significant portion of traditional American literature. According to Bloom, Ammons “illuminates Emerson and all his progeny as much as he needs them for illumination.”
While they acknowledged Ammons’s debt to other writers, reviewers found that he had forged a style that was distinctly his own. Jascha Kessler wrote in Kayak, “[Ammons] makes his daily American rounds about lawn and meadow, wood, hill, stream, in an easy, articulate, flat, utterly uneventful expository syntax. Altogether unlike Thoreau’s sinewy, exacting, apothegmatic prose, and unlike that suavely undulant later [Wallace] Stevens from whom he borrows some of his stanza structures or envelopes, transmogrifying the Master of Imagination into a freshman-text writer who uses the colon for endless, undigestible linkages, never daring Stevens’ comma, or venturing Thoreau’s period.” Other critics joined Kessler in objecting to Ammons’s sparse punctuation, but David Kirby defended Ammons, writing in the Times Literary Supplement that “his short lines, his overall brevity, his avoidance of punctuation marks other than the occasional comma and that quick stop-and-go colon are hallmarks of his minimalism, his exquisitely unencumbered technique.”Ammons’s concerns with the transcendental everyman coalesce in what may prove to be his finest effort: the National Book Award winner of 1993, Garbage. The title, suggested when Ammons drove by a Florida landfill, is characteristically flippant and yet perfectly serious. “Garbage is a brilliant book,” said David Baker in the Kenyon Review. “It may very well be a great one. … perhaps even superior to his previous long masterwork, Tape for the Turn of the Year.” Once again evoking an Emersonian view of nature, Baker noted, “Ammons discovers that nature everywhere is composed of the decadent and entropic, the aged, the tired,” and also shows that matter transforms and renews itself, turning “garbage into utility, decay into new life.” As Robert B. Shaw pointed out in Poetry, however, Ammons’s transcendent meditations are always seasoned with “jokes, slang, ironies, Li’l Abnerisms.”
The Webb Space Telescope Is a Time Machine
The Atlantic
The new observatory may have found the most ancient starlight we’ve ever seen—and it’s only the beginning.By Marina Koren
The newly discovered galaxy looks a little bit like a squashed tomato, or maybe the crown of a cherry-flavored Ring Pop. Just a red blob, so blurry and edgeless that the first time I looked, I had to make sure I’d put my contact lenses in. I say these things because without invoking little earthly associations, I’m not sure how we’d even begin to fathom what this cosmic object is: not just a galaxy, but perhaps the most distant galaxy we have ever seen.
The galaxy was spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, the newest and most powerful observatory in the world, which kicked off operations last week. The starlight that Webb spotted from this galaxy left its glittery boundaries long ago, before, well, nearly everything. According to two separate teams of astronomers, that blurry tomato we’re seeing is the way this galaxy looked just 300 million years after the universe came into existence. So, so much has happened since then—our sun flickered on, the planets were formed, life arose on Earth, Ring Pops were invented. Webb has rewound that tape. The glow of the most distant galaxies, the kind that the observatory was designed to detect, takes eons to reach us. When Webb captures this ancient, well-traveled light, the telescope becomes a time machine. So by gazing upon this red blob, we are looking back more than 13.5 billion years, at a cosmic memory.
Several astronomers I’ve spoken with say that the preliminary discovery, if it holds true, could have extraordinary implications for the next era of astronomy. Neither of the teams that spotted the cosmic tomato expected to find a galaxy like this so soon, in their very first observations of this kind.
Astronomers haven’t even cranked up the Webb telescope as far as it can go; they’ve given it a little poke, and already distant galaxies like this one are “just falling off the tree,” Jane Rigby, a NASA astrophysicist and the Webb operations project scientist, told me. Plus, the galaxy appeared in a tiny field of view, smaller than a crater on the moon in the night sky; who knows what else Webb will find in the entire moon’s worth of sky? With each deep observation, every big rewind, the telescope will bring us closer to the Big Bang, revealing faint galaxy after galaxy. We’re about to go rolling through time.
The new galaxy is still only a candidate for the title of most distant galaxy ever discovered. For one thing, the finding has yet to undergo peer review. For another, the astronomers who spotted the galaxy in the Webb data—two separate teams, working independently, one of which calls its find GLASS-z13and the other GHZ2—will need to make new observations to confirm its distance. (I’ll call the galaxy Glassy to make things easier; the data set that produced the discovery is known as GLASS.) But if it’s confirmed, Glassy’s red glow would break the current record, set by a galaxy spotted through the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015, for the most ancient light ever observed by 100 million years or so.
The teams that found Glassy have dated it by studying the properties of its light. The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, a process that stretches light into longer, redder wavelengths. Starlight from distant galaxies leaves its source as visible light, but by the time it reaches us, it is “redshifted” down the electromagnetic spectrum into the infrared range—invisible to our eyes, but perfect for Webb’s sensors. Astronomers know that the redder light is, the farther away the galaxy that produced it. Glassy “is detected very, very well in the redder wavelengths, but when you go to the bluer wavelengths, it just completely drops out, and it drops out very dramatically,” Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at Harvard who led one of the teams that spotted the galaxy, told me. “That signature is very characteristic of these very distant galaxies, and it’s very difficult for any other objects to make in such a dramatic manner.”
To confirm Glassy’s distance from us, astronomers will need to measure the galaxy’s light using a different method that would reveal information about its chemical composition. That technique is considered the gold standard in measuring galactic distances, and scientists are certain that Webb can pull it off. Last week, the Webb team released data that showed just how well the observatory can capture the particularities of a galaxy much closer than Glassy, but still considered quite distant. The light from that galaxy took 13.1 billion years to reach Earth, and yet Webb could pick out the distinct signatures of oxygen, hydrogen, and neon with impressive sharpness. Knowing the composition of the most distant galaxies “is really going to reveal to us something fundamental about how these galaxies form and grow,” Tommaso Treu, a UCLA astrophysicist and member of the other team that independently identified the galaxy, told me. (Treu also led the Webb observation program that produced the data in which Glassy was found.)
For now, astronomers are basking in the possibility of Glassy, which, on top of being a potential record-breaker, is also far weirder than they’d imagined. Astronomers have always thought that galaxies couldn’t have gotten very big so early in the universe’s history, and would start bulking up on stars about 500 million years out from the Big Bang. But Glassy is extremely luminous, suggesting that it holds an abundance of stars, which together are 1 billion times as massive as our sun. “That would mean that star formation gets going fast,” Chris Lintott, an Oxford astronomer who studies galaxy formation and was not involved in the new research, told me. Maybe producing massive stars is far easier than scientists have predicted, or perhaps the very earliest galaxies were shaped by gravitational forces we don’t understand. Whatever the explanation, the existence of galaxies such as Glassy would suggest that “the end of the universe’s dark ages”—when the first stars ignited—would have been “spectacular,” Lintott said.
This is just the beginning of getting closer to the beginning. Expect a flood of “now this might be the most distant galaxy we’ve ever seen!” scientific papers. Several astronomers told me that they would not be surprised if the next candidate for the title holder is announced as soon as next week. A year from now, they said, tens, maybe hundreds, of galaxies might be identified at similar distances. “We’ll figure out which ones are real, and then we’ll study those,” Rigby said. Then the true fun will begin—figuring out what those galaxies are made of, how much dust they contain, the story of the brilliant stars within. We’re only just starting to get familiar with the universe’s most ancient light, even though it’s been out there all along. “We have, for all of human history, been bathed in light reaching us from such distant galaxies, born when the universe was just a few hundred million years old,” Lintott said. “But only now have we built something capable of capturing it.”Marina Koren is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Did someone say he is 62?!
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 peace
The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth month
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Southern California
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Uvalde , Texas
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting in Racine, Wisconsin
Prayers for those grieving the recent mass shooting(s) in Chattanooga, Tenn
Prayers for those grieving the recent shooting in Smithsburg, Maryland
Prayers for those affected by the tragic earthquake in Afghanistan.
Prayers for those grieving the recent shooting in Highland Park during the July 4 parade.
The global heat wave is affecting millions of people world-wide. Prayers for people, crops and animals.
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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