UUHoulton Maypole

Since Sunday is the last day of April and closest day to May 1st, that means it’s Maypole weekend. We’ve been celebrating this spring ritual for several years now at UUHoulton and with the guidance of Leigh and Fred Griffith we are circling the pole once again. It’s a great event for children and adults alike and no matter how many times you have done it (or if it’s your first time) it’s special every time. The above photo is from several years ago, but what I find interesting is how far along the leaves are on the trees and how green the front lawn is. We’re not quite there yet this year!

May Day or Beltane is one of eight Sabbats that falls halfway between the spring equinox (Ostara) and the coming summer solstice (Litha). The holiday celebrates spring at its peak and the coming of summer, which is on its way. 

The YouTube Channel service for this week celebrates Earth Day themes as well as part ten of our continuing series on Belongingness. The title of the talk is “Best Practices” and helps build a shared vocabulary for building and participating in community. You will find the link listed below. Please join us for one of the services this weekend. 

Have a great weekend!

In Ministry,

Dave

In last week’s service we shared a video meditation by Erin Bullock and the Blue Cliff Monastery Ensemble. If you would like to watch the video send me an email dave@backwoodsblog.com and I will send you the link. I’ve included the modified lyrics below along with a 5 step meditation practice outline. 

Hello Sadness , by Erin Bullock and the Blue Cliff Monastery Ensemble

Hello Sadness

Hello Anger

Hello Fear

I know you’re there in me

And I can clearly see where you come from.
Hello old friend.

I’ll make a space for you inside my heart

This warm embrace for you.

And I also feel the joy,

as well as the love, the calm, the laughter, the compassion and the peace.

And I also have the mindfulness for all of these.

I also have the mindfulness for all of these.

So I will move on.

5 Step Practice 

1.  Recognition

2.  Invitation       (open space)

3.  Inclusion       (embrace)

4.  Mindfulness  (care and awareness)

5.  Carry On

Our Spring concert is May 13th on the sanctuary stage. Make plans now to attend and tell your friends! If you would like to help pre-sell tickets we have tickets available at the church. 

THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:

HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR 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/lQDOlJkmaSA

(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning) THE SERVICE LINK WILL GO OUT LATER IN THE DAY

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:

Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check inTime: Apr 30, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85971502254?pwd=N2JPTXpsM1lTckd3MUlQWENqbzhOQT09
Meeting ID: 859 7150 2254 Passcode: 311948

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!  
UU Church of Houlton

61 Military Street, Houlton, ME 04730

Here is a recent post by Maria Popova from her weekly column “Brain Pickings.”

The Transcendent Brain: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Spirituality for the Science-Spirited

“That is happiness,” Willa Cather wrote, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” We have many names for that dissolution, all revolving around some sense of spirituality and they all involving what Iris Murdoch so splendidly termed “unselfing” — experiences, most often furnished by art, music, and nature, that allow us to “pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

At the heart of both our spirituality and our science lies this eternal yearning to know the world as it really is — a yearning with an infinite vector, pointing always just past the horizon of our knowledge, anchored always in the most elemental nature of the human animal: our curiosity, our restlessness, our hunger for truth and transcendence. 

And yet the reflex of selfing, which stands so often between us and elemental truth, between us and transcendence, is hard-wired in our physiology — our entire experience of reality is lensed through our individual consciousness, housed in the brain and tendrilled through the body. Coursing through our nervous system as electrical signals beckoning to neurons are the tremors of falling in love and the anguish of grief, all of our feelings meted out by charged particles moving at eighty feet per second. The stuff of poetry and the stuff of dreams, all a particulate cloud of coruscating matter.

In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (public library), the poetic physicist Alan Lightman sets out to illuminate how these atomic constellations can be capable of such exultant spiritual experiences, aglow with such shimmering feelings. From the prescient atomic materialism of Lucretius to Maxwell’s equations, from the poems of Emily Dickinson to the synchronized firing of neurons in recognizing a loved one’s face, from the Hindu concept of darshan — the beholding of a deity or sacred object — to the cosmic wonders we have beheld through the “oracle eye” of our majestic space telescopes, he argues that spiritual experiences “are as natural as hunger or love or desire, given a brain of sufficient complexity.” Radiating from the millennia-wide inquiry is a revelation about how mere atoms and molecules can give rise to the very persuasive experience of a self, of a soul, of something that feels so vast and complex and magnificently irreducible to matter. 

He writes:

I’m a scientist and have always had a scientific view of the world — by which I mean that the universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff, and that stuff is governed by a small number of fundamental laws. Every phenomenon has a cause, which originates in the physical universe. I’m a materialist. Not in the sense of seeking happiness in cars and nice clothes, but in the literal sense of the word: the belief that everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more. Yet, I have transcendent experiences. I communed with two ospreys that summer in Maine. I have feelings of being part of things larger than myself. I have a sense of connection to other people and to the world of living things, even to the stars. I have a sense of beauty. I have experiences of awe. And I’ve had transporting creative moments.

The aggregate of these very different types of experiences, echoes of which reverberate through every human life, is what he terms “spirituality” — a notion he nests inside the paradox of materiality and irreducibility:

I believe that the spiritual experiences we have can arise from atoms and molecules. At the same time, some of these experiences, and certainly their very personal and subjective nature, cannot be fully understood in terms of atoms and molecules. I believe in the laws of chemistry and biology and physics — in fact, as a scientist I much admire those laws — but I don’t think they capture, or can capture, the first-person experience of making eye contact with wild animals and similar transcendent moments. Some human experiences are simply not reducible to zeros and ones.

Therein lies the paradox — given that “all mental sensations are rooted in the material neurons of the nervous system and the electrical and chemical interactions between them,” how can this inescapable materiality wing us with such feelings of spirituality?

He gives a radiant answer in an orientation he calls “spiritual materialism” — the idea that even with a lucid understanding of how nature works, and how we work as material miniatures of nature’s laws, we are capable of transcendent experiences arising from the dazzling tessellation of atoms we call consciousness. Those experiences contour our highest humanity: our investment in living a moral life and stewarding the happiness of others, our capacity for awe and wonder, our sensitivity to beauty.

Recounting his own earliest memory of a spiritual experience as a child enchanted with the scientific method, he writes:

Although as a child I developed a scientific view of the world, I also understood that not all things were subject to quantitative analysis… I was about nine years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis, Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away. Suddenly I felt that I was looking at myself from outside my body. For a brief few moments, I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire planet, as a brief flicker in a great chasm of time, with an infinite span of time before my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation included infinite space. Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space that stretched on and on and on. I felt myself to be a tiny speck, insignificant. A speck in a huge universe that cared nothing about me or any living beings and their little dots of existence — a universe that simply was. And I felt that everything I had experienced in my young life, the joy and the sadness, and everything that I would later experience meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. It was a realization both liberating and terrifying at once… Despite the dismal feeling that the universe didn’t care a whit about me, I did feel connected to something far larger than myself.

Again and again, he returns to this feeling of connection to something beyond the self as the crucible of our transcendent experiences and the beating heart of everything we call spirituality:

A common feature of all aspects of spirituality is a loss of self, a letting go, a willingness to embrace something outside of ourselves, a willingness to listen rather than talk, a recognition that we are small and the cosmos is large.

And yet this too is a psychological paradox rooted in our physiology:

Most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track of our bodies, we lose track of our selves. We dissolve. And yet… spirituality emerges from consciousness and the material brain. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a sense of self, an “I-ness” distinct from the rest of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a thing centered on self creates a thing absent of self.

[…]

More self, less connection to the larger world.

Since the dawn of our species, myths and religions have tried to resolve this paradox with the concept of the soul — a vessel of I-ness that exists beyond the material realm, often conceived of as a kind of supra-energy. And yet despite the long cultural and theological history of belief in an immaterial soul, in reality all energy is accounted for by the forces of nature and their descriptive equations. He considers how our mortality — the entropic fate of all matter, the antipode of the myth of the immortal soul — is the true crucible of our connection to each other and the immensity beyond us, the wellspring of all of our creativity:

For me, the notion that our atoms were once part of other people and will again become part of other people after we die provides a meaningful connectedness between us and the rest of humanity, future and past.

[…]

Our inescapable death may be the single most powerful fact of our brief existence in this strange cosmos where we find ourselves. Indeed, one could argue that much of our thinking, our view of the world, our artistic expression, and our religious beliefs involve coming to terms with this fundamental fact.

The fact of our death is also what binds us to all life, stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, reminding us of the borrowed stardust that we are:

If you could tag each of the atoms in your body and follow them backward in time, through the air that you breathed during your life, through the food that you ate, back through the geological history of the Earth, through the ancient seas and soil, back to the formation of the Earth out of the solar nebular cloud, and then out into interstellar space, you could trace each of your atoms, those exact atoms, to particular massive stars in the past of our galaxy. At the end of their lifetimes, those stars exploded and spewed out their newly forged atoms into space, later to condense into planets and oceans and plants and your body at this moment.

Drawing on his splendid earlier writings about what actually happens when we die, he projects this atomic tagging forward into a future in which his I-ness is no more:

The atoms in my body will remain, only they will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air. And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. So, we are literally connected to the stars, and we are literally connected to future generations of people. In this way, even in a material universe, we are connected to all things future and past.

Radiating from the remainder of The Transcendent Brain, as it traces the history of science and the history of culture, is a largehearted invitation to “stand on the precipice between the known and the unknown, without fear, without anxiety, but instead with awe and wonder at this strange and beautiful cosmos we find ourselves in.” Complement it with Rachel Carson on science and our spiritual bond with nature, then revisit the great naturalist John Burroughs’s century-old manifesto for spirituality in the age of science.

Poetry Corner

KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Maypole 2023!!

Here is a picture of Leigh and Fred from last year’s mayplole… 

Linda and I are out of town this week as Linda’s mother’smemorial service is in North Berwick on Friday (April 29).Here is a photo of Mary Annah Joy and Linda on our wedding 

day back in 2002.

In memory of Charles “Chuck” Dunning who passed last week. Chuck was our lawn care guy, handyman and all around good friend who helped us out at the Unitarian Church for the past ten years. There will be a servicefor Chuck in the Unitarian parlor in the spring. 
Charles Dunning(10.14.77 – 04.22.23)

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 the respond to the current coronavirus crisis

For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation

The war in Ukraine is now in its second year

Prayers for those recovering from the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria 

Prayers for those affected by the mass shooting at the University of Michigan

Prayers for those in California experiencing extreme  weather

Prayers for those affected by the mass shooting in Nashville 

Prayers to ease the political unrest in the Middle East

Prayers for those affected by the recent violence in the West Bank, the Dome of the Rock and political protests in Israel

Prayers for those affected by the two mass shootings in Louisville

Prayers for those affected by the recent mass shootings in Alabama

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.