Unitarian Arch in the sanctuary (2022)
To continue with the theme of Belonging we will be exploring Family Dynamics in the Sunday Service led by Rev. Mary Blocher.
Our sense of belonging begins with our family of origin. With the popularity of DNA testing, we can obtain knowledge about our ethnicity and traits. Along with this exciting information some people are also surprised with unexpected results. How does one cope with unexpected results from a DNA test? How does one find forgiveness and healing from a lifetime of deception? How can you move on in life and find belonging once again? The answers to these questions will be shared in the upcoming service.
Our YouTube service for this week is on “The Problem of Polarization,” which is part four of our continuing series on Belonging. I’ve also included the transcript from the talk in this week’s support page. Cohen’s 9 Tips to Help Minimize Polarization are especially useful. You will find the link listed below. Please join us for one of the services this weekend.
Have a good week-end everyone.
In Ministry, Dave
Coffeehouse tonight !!
HOULTON COFFEEHOUSE
November 19, Saturday Evening 7-9 PM
The Cup Cafe,
61 Military Street
FEATURE: Simon Pritchard
Coffeehouse Musician Jam to close the show! Open-Mic @7
This Saturday is coffeehouse in the basement of the UUHoulton Church. Simon Pritchard is our feature performer and comes on the stage at 8 PM following open-mic. Usually Simon has a couple of guitars and an array of foot pedals, but the poster shows him carrying an electric keyboard so I don’t know what that’s about? Come and check out what’s certain to be an original and entertaining performance. We’re also trying something new – Simon is inviting coffeehouse musicians from the audience to join him on stage and back him up for the last part of his set. We’re calling it CMJ (coffeehouse musician jam) and it could get interesting! Linda Rowe is also launching a new chai latte recipe at the cafe called “Not Your SB Chai.” (We couldn’t use the trademarked name Starbucks on our menu without getting in trouble so SB will have to do!) It’s freshly made with organic spices and Assam tea. This batch will be made with whole milk for a nice full bodied flavor and lightly sweetened with sugar. It will also be available at the espresso bar with frothed whole milk or an alt milk.
We will be giving away 40 free samples of our new chai for you to try, so get there early for yours. We also have a new cook in our kitchen (Judy J) who has prepared a remarkable vegetarian soup for our menu; creamy curried butternut squash. Yum yum…And of course we have our usual coffee drinks and desserts. Plus, Frank Sullivan is back behind the espresso bar as our barista for the night.
Open-mic starts at 7PM for aspiring musicians, poets and writers. Come early to sign up and we’ll have the coffee machine on for you…
See you at the Cup!
Feel the buzz…
Menu
Creamy Curried Butternut Squash Soup
Not Your SB Chai (free samples!!)
Spiced Pumpkin LatteIn Celebration of Music, Poetry and the Arts…THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
https://youtu.be/U-B8EWP3m0c
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
David Hutchinson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: UUHoulton Coffee hour & check-inTime: Nov 20, 2022 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/84124335287?pwd=cnFuNkQrelhNMFFEUDJLOCtwczRlQT09
Meeting ID: 841 2433 5287Passcode: 170385Virtual 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!
UU Church of Houlton
61 Military Street
Houlton, ME 04730
Belonging (Part Four)The Problem of Polarization Rev. Dave Hutchinson
To start things off a few quotations from one of my favorite little books; Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold Onto by Gregg Eisenberg great for mediators, moderators, motivators, meditators and medicators.
When it comes to complex problem-solvingour reptile brain says, “Kill, and ask questions later.”our mammal brain says, “See if empathy will work first!”our neo-cortex says, Tape-record the conversation and establish a paper trail…”
and two more…
Dualism works for me,but only about half the time.
I like to learn from all people, but especially from those who agree with me.
So what we are looking at today in part four of Belonging is the problem of polarization. While it’s important to feel like you belong to a group or a movement, it’s also important that your relationship or point of view regarding other groups does not devolve into an Us-Versus-Them dynamic. During recent US election cycles we have seen (all too clearly) how polarization can be counterproductive to the democratic process. So we are hoping to gain some insight on how do we find ways to maintain civility and respect even when we disagree with someone else’s point of view?
I remember when I was in junior high and my Uncle bought tickets and took our two families to a Boston Red Sox game, the first time I had ever been to Fenway Park. And best of all, it was a Yankees-Red Sox game our arch rivals. It was a Tuesday night game, July 31, 1973 with Pat Dobson the starting pitcher for the Yankees and Bill “Spaceman” Lee pitching for the Sox. The Red Sox had a two run lead going into the 9th inning, but the Boston bullpen had just as much trouble in those days as they do now, blew the lead and ended up losing 5-4. Last night I found the boxscore from the game that night on the internet and I have it here if anyone would like to see it. We had seats right behind home plate, but I don’t think they hurt my Uncle’s wallet too much because they were all the way back under the roof, as far back as you could get, and to my surprise, we were surrounded by Yankees fans! I couldn’t believe it. What were Yankee fans doing here? And why did the Fenway Park security staff let them in? And, of course during the 9th inning rally, they really made a lot of noise. That was one of my first life- experiences with diversity, partisan loyalties and polarization – sports related tho it was.
I also remember my first political experience; the 1972 presidential election when Richard Nixon and George McGovern ran for office. I was in 7th grade at the time and one of the guys in my class, Wesley Palmer, wore a vote for McGovern T-shirt to school one day. I had never met a Democrat before. This was disturbing to me on two counts; one, he was the smartest guy in our class and two, he was a minister’s son from one of the largest churches in town. How could someone so smart be a Democrat? And how could someone with a strong religious background end up being a McGovern supporter?
I was perplexed. Years later, when I found a vintage McGovern campaign pin, I purchased it and have held on to it ever since as a reminder of the importance of our always evolving life-experience and expanding perspectives.(show the pin) reference to Ginny Urbanek’s shop downtown
When exploring the current dynamic of social and political polarization, two of the terms you keep running into are “confirmation-bias” and “information-silos.” Confirmation bias, according to Wikopedia, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. And what makes it especially sneaky, is that you aren’t aware that you are doing it! Even if someone points it out to you, the personal blind-spot bias makes it unlikely that you will see it. This can be a conservative-bias or it can be a liberal-bias, what makes it a bias is that you are unaware of it and it can create a direct-felt polarization.
When you are isolated in an information silo, the limited content that you have access to separates you from other sources of data, content and contact. Social media and News media can frame your perspective (on any topic or issue) more than you may be aware of.
I try to make it a practice to sample a wide swath of media information and websites. I regularly visit right-leaning outlets just to see what they are saying and see if I understand what they’re trying to say. I visit left-leaning outlets just to see what they are saying and see if I understand what they’re trying to say.
Interestingly enough, when I visit both the right and the left I hear them saying something similar. When I read the right, they feel like the other side has a lower IQ and are uninformed. If they only had the same information as we did they would arrive at the same conclusion. How can they not get it?
When I read the left, they feel the other side has a lower IQ and are uninformed. If they only had the same information as we did they would arrive at the same conclusion. How can they not get it?
What I’d like to introduce this morning, is not something from Cohen’s book (we’ll get to that in just a minute) but a basic teaching from Taoism which is found in the symbolism of the yin/yang image itself. (refer to the bulletin)
In Taoism the problem is not the yin or the yang, it is the exclusion of one or the other.
When you do that, dualism only works half the time. The practice aim in Taoism is to work with both the negative and positive, to work with the entire equation, working to balance the numbers or find a balance point; a place of harmony and inclusion. You use it all and work to integrate the movement and the content into one functioning system; a system that exhibits balance, inclusion, harmony, vitality and calm.
A key part of the symbolism in the yin/yang design is the opposing dot in each domain; the black dot in the white and the white dot in the black. As the diagram in the bulletin states, “these dots indicate that there is no absolute or separate yin or yang, each contains the germ or aspect of the other. It is two parts, yet all one integrated thing.
When it comes to your own personal view, it is in the overall context of the supporting whole. There is room for all views, these views are in constant flux and movement, the important question is “What is your particular view right now in relation to everything else?” If you are not aware or observing or in communication with those who hold those other views, then you are at risk of being off-balance or confirmation-bias can come into play. To be aware is to work with it all. Select and choose, but be in touch and in contact with it all.
As you may have noticed, everyone has an opinion, and that’s okay.It may or not be correct, it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it,it doesn’t mean you have to correct it,everyone has a right to their own opinion.but they also have a responsibility that their opinion is a responsible and a helpful one.
One of the key things to remember in conversational dialogue is to always find and hold your center. If you look carefully in the diagram you will see a very small pinpoint dot in the middle of the yin-yang circle. That is the still point or center around which everything revolves and spins. That is the practice point. Can you find it? Can you feel it when you lose it? Can you get it back quickly when you need to?
And now, returning to Cohen’s book on Belonging…
Chapter 13 Belonging and our Politicspage 300
A major force driving polarization, and the dehumanization and demonization that have accompanied it, it the desire to belong. If we want to open up psychological room for understanding and bridge-building across political lines, we have to acknowledge that people become truculent (entrenched) about their views largely because they find opposing views threatening to their sense of belonging and, by extension, their sense of self (and I might add, their sense of what is true or truth). 9 Tips to Help Minimize Polarization page 314
1. Affirm that you view them with dignity and see them as people of integrity. This can be conveyed verbally and nonverbally. 2. Communicate y our curiosity and interest in learning; a growth mindset encourages openness in yourself and others.3. Present your own views as opinions rather than facts. (opinion framing)4. Use stories to capture the human dimension of the problem. Although we must be aware of the power of stories to mislead, they can help people achieve a fuller understanding of a problem than they can with facts and arguments lone.5. Ask questions about people’s view and their reasons for them in a way that provokes reflection and awareness of contradictions in beliefs and values. (values affirmation) 6. Evoke empathy for the negative effects of policies and rhetoric that people support by asking if they’ve ever been nade to feel the same way as victims, perhaps also asking if they would share their experiences.7. Talk to individuals away from the influence of their group. One-on-one conversations and discussions in small ad hoc groups work better than debates and dialogues between preexisting groups.8. Make time for people to reflect on how the conversation has influenced them.9. When possible, engage in face-to-facxe conversation. Body language and eye contact all say much about our warmth and regard.Dave’s 5 Tips when trying to close the gap
- Ask questions
- Look for common ground
- Push gently
- Don’t get upset
- Don’t try to do too much
Conclusion: page 316, 318
Confronting hard topics rather than avoiding them can be transformative if we do so by carefully crafting the situation in these ways to open minds and hearts rather than putting others on the defensive. If you don’t m make other feel threatened, we may be astonished about the breakthroughs in understanding we can achieve…Even in our day to day lives, we can be catalysts for fostering civility and belonging. While we should all work to change our institutions, including the media and our government, for the better, we can also take heart that through our own words and actions in our daily encounters, we can reduce conflict in our immediate lives and perhaps even inspire more open-mindedness and compassion in others.
How Not to Freak Out
BY JUDY LIEF
You’re not alone if you despair about the present and fear for the future. If you find all the bad news overwhelming, Buddhist teacher Judy Lief has some meditations to help you relieve your anxiety.
It’s not as if times of fear and despair are anything new. People have fought wars, struggled to survive, faced injustice, experienced loss, dealt with violence and greed, and been caught up in historical movements beyond their control pretty much forever.
Life has never been that easy.
In Buddhist practice, you learn never to shy away from facing the pain of the human condition. At the same time, you also learn not to shy away from the beauty and value of life in all its forms.
By clearly seeing the extremes of experience, you learn to scout a middle way.
It is easy to become so consumed by your fears for this world that you lose your balance. It is hard to think about the challenges facing our planet and not feel overwhelmed.
It seems as if we humans never learn. Instead, we keep perpetuating the same dysfunctional behavior in every generation. Only now, we have the capacity to create havoc on a global scale, to the extent of threatening the continuation of life on this planet. We not only continue to rely on age-old habits of violence, greed, and deception, but we have put these habits on steroids.
On an individual level, we can’t seem to stretch beyond the narrow bounds of self-interest and looking out for number one. This focus on ourselves feeds our fear and makes us susceptible to manipulation. It feels as if the worse things get, the more frantically we apply approaches that have never worked.
Because these times happen to be our times, for us they seem uniquely difficult. But it is hard to imagine any time that has not seemed troubled to the people who were experiencing it.
To the extent that our world is dominated by hatred, greed, and ignorance, known in Buddhism as the three poisons, it is because we have collectively made it so.
The Buddhist notion of samsara implies that all times are troubled. Not only that, but the troubles we complain about are the very troubles we ourselves create and perpetuate. So to the extent that our world is dominated by hatred, greed, and ignorance, known in Buddhism as the three poisons, it is because we have collectively made it so.
The idea of samsara could be taken as an extremely pessimistic view of things. But it could also be a quite liberating message.
It is liberating to drop the fantasy of there being a more perfect world, somehow, somewhere, and instead accept that we need to engage with the world as it is. It is our world, it is messy, but it is fertile ground for awakening. It is the same world, after all, that gave birth to the Buddha.
It is easy to be overwhelmed by all the problems in this world. You may already be overwhelmed by the problems in your own life. On top of that, you are continually bombarded with news about political, humanitarian, and environmental problems.
There seems to be no end of problems. While you are worrying about human trafficking, you get an email about starving giraffes in Indonesia. When you are distressed about racial hatred, you hear about the latest famine. While you are learning about nuclear proliferation, a politician says something outrageous. It never lets up and it is hard to catch your breath. The continual bombardment of bad news can infiltrate so deeply that it subtly infuses everything you do.
Ironically, it is only this disappointment with the world—with human beings and their stupidity, and with ourselves—that provides a powerful enough motivation to change. Traditionally, reaching the point where you see through the futility of samsara is considered an essential breakthrough on the spiritual path.
For many people, it is the experience of disappointment in its many forms that leads them to the dharma and to the practice of meditation.
Disappointment is a great instigator. From it, positive seeds of change can emerge. When we feel genuine remorse about our own contribution to the samsara project, it strengthens our longing for an alternative and our determination to find a better way to live.
You could go on for years, drifting along in your complacency, not wanting to let the world’s pain touch you. But when it does, you are primed for transformation. Your willingness to feel the suffering of samsara begins to draw out from you a bright stream of compassion for all beings.
When you get news of something disturbing, it is good to pay attention to the shape of your reaction. If you hear about a suicide bombing in Lahore, for instance, what is your immediate response?
You could pretend none of this is happening, that it has nothing to do with you. But because you are human, like it or not, you cannot help but care about such things.
You need to recognize your ability to care and appreciate it for the gift it is. You can actually care about something beyond yourself! You can care about others, you can care about our Mother Earth, you can care about structures of oppression. How amazing that you have not shut down, that you have not given up!
What about when you feel that the intensity of this world is just too much? When you’re caught between freaking out and shutting down?
This is the moment when you need to step back and get some perspective. When you feel your mind/heart filled to the point of claustrophobia with thoughts of disaster, fear, and despair, it is good to bring to mind the many counter examples of human kindness and sanity, which are so easily overlooked.
If you think about it, the degree in which our world is stitched together with loving-kindness is extraordinary. To a surprising extent, accomplishing the simplest daily tasks requires that most people we encounter will be relatively decent, even kind. This network of decency is so close at hand, so mundane and ordinary, that it is mostly invisible to us. Even in the midst of the most dire conditions, there are countless examples of people who still manage to love, share, help one another, smile, and laugh.
When you get news of something disturbing, it is good to pay attention to the shape of your reaction. If you hear about a suicide bombing in Lahore, for instance, what is your immediate response?
Most likely it is one of empathy. You imagine how horrible it must be to witness such a thing. You think about how painful it must be to be killed or injured or to lose a loved one so suddenly and violently. You imagine how it must feel to be stuck in a country at war with no means to get out.
That natural response of human empathy and kindness is tender and raw, and at the same time, it is uplifted and beautiful.
If possible, notice and stay with your empathetic response and get to know it. It is simple and immediate, but it also tends to be fleeting and subtle. It is good to keep coming back to that natural compassionate response to suffering, for it is easily lost in the complexities that follow.
The plot thickens as our innocent and natural response to suffering is captured by ego’s defense mechanisms. That tender response, with its rawness and vulnerability, gets taken over by our emotional habits and fixed views. We are fearful and we want the world to make sense. We are angry and we want revenge. We don’t want to feel the pain of caring, so we feed our negativity as a way to deflect it outward.
You do not need to let your thoughts and reactions run wild. You can interrupt the pattern.
This also unleashes our urge to fix things. We don’t want to keep feeling this way. We want to act! “There’s got to be something I can do to about this right now!” The problem is that often we are in no position to really help.
In response, you could let helplessness overwhelm you, but you don’t have to do so.
You need to accept the fact that you can’t fix everything, much as you would like to.
The world needs help, but our ability to contribute seems so miniscule compared to the many problems facing the planet. The challenges are so overwhelming that we see no way out. What do we do with that frustration?
If you stay with the energy of the impulse to act, you can see that it is a positive irritant. We need a little provocation or creative restlessness in order to connect with what underlies our impulse to act and open up to its message.
So you can take your urge to help as a good sign. But you need to take a clear look at what you really have to offer. You need to start with a self-assessment and a bit of humility.
The great Buddhist teacher Shantideva made the point that if you can do something about an issue, then go ahead and do it. But if you can’t do anything, then acknowledge that and let it go. It doesn’t help to dwell on everything that is going wrong or obsess about wishing you could do more.
It is better to do one small thing that you can actually pull off than to fantasize about all the great things you would like to be able to do but can’t.
Captured by powerful emotions and flurries of speculative thought, we can work ourselves into a frenzy by obsessing about events we have no direct connection with or control over. This is an important pattern to notice. We can see that we are mostly responding to what is in our own head, to our mental chorus of what-if’s. How easily our tender little pebbles of empathy can get buried under a mountain of thoughts.
It is one thing to engage in analysis or try to read the handwriting on the wall so you can respond appropriately to developments in the world. But it is quite another to engage in mental cud chewing, which warps your initial tender response and makes it about yourself.
Notice how obsessive, what-if thinking can take you over, then bring yourself back to the here and now.
It may not seem like it, but when you are stuck in fearful and despairing thoughts, you do have a choice. You do not need to let your thoughts and reactions run wild. You can interrupt the pattern. You can slow down enough to investigate the cascade of thoughts, speculations, opinions, and emotions aroused by hearing about all the troubles in the world.
You can understand more clearly your own particular default patterns, with all their complexities, and bring yourself back to the simple natural arising of care and empathy.
It is possible to walk a path between the extremes of pessimism and optimism.
In order to respond with skill and compassion, you do not need to come to a solid conclusion about the nature of the world. You do not need either to cling to your view of how bad things are, or to close yourself off from whatever disturbs your rosy view of things.
If you look at your own experience from day to day, you can see the shifty quality of such judgments. “I had a good day. It was warm and sunny and I felt great. But yesterday I had a crummy day. It was rainy, I got the flu, and I fell behind in my work.”
In any individual life, there are easier and harder times. Circumstances are always changing. They change slowly and inexorably, and they change suddenly and unexpectedly. Often we see our own hand in the circumstances we experience, and sometimes we are blindsided by situations beyond our control.
When things are going relatively smoothly, it is easy to become complacent and assume that our good fortune will automatically continue. When things are not going well, we also assume that nothing will ever change, and we succumb to defeatism. In both cases we take whatever we are experiencing currently and project it into the future, selectively recalling past experiences that reinforce our view of the way things are.
Our struggle to pin down our living on-the-spot experience of life is futile. We may attempt to get a grasp on life, to pin it down or make it manageable in some way, but it is hard to see beyond the circumstances and mood of the moment.
There seem to be only two alternatives: the glass is half full or the glass is half empty. But a glass with water up to the midpoint is not making a statement either way. It is neither half full nor half empty. Neither is it both half full and half empty. Such a water glass is not elated by being half full, nor discouraged by being half empty. It just is: a glass with water in it.
The world just is. It is not a this-versus-that, good-versus-bad world. It is an interdependent world.
This interdependent world is the dancing ground of bodhisattvas, who thrive in the dynamism of life. By recognizing that every sorrow invites a fresh compassionate response, the bodhisattva path gives us a much broader perspective on our situation. Bodhisattvas are the ones who see the depth and breadth of suffering and confusion most clearly, yet they place themselves right in the midst of it.
I have often wondered: how can bodhisattvas sit there so elegantly and smile? It may be because they have learned that no matter how bad things become, it is possible to change one’s attitude on the spot. The flow of compassion cannot be interrupted. In fact, with each new crisis, its flow is increased.
At any moment, as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once told me, “You could just cheer up!”
ABOUT JUDY LIEF
Judy Lief is a Buddhist teacher and the editor of many books of teachings by the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She is the author of Making Friends with Death. Her teachings and new podcast, “Dharma Glimpses,” are available at judylief.com.
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
The war in Ukraine is now in its ninth month
Prayers for political unrest in the Middle East
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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