Our traditional flower communion service will be held in the sanctuary on Sunday, June 4th at 10AM. The service includes special music for the occasion, welcoming new members, a child dedication, our flower communion, blowing bubbles on the church front lawn followed by a potluck cookout and barn party at Mary and Marion Blocher’s with special music provided by Bertrand Lawrence. Please bring a fresh cut flower to contribute to the ritual. 

This Unitarian tradition originated in 1923 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Dr. Norbert Capek asked his parishioners to bring and receive flowers as a symbol of their shared life as a spiritual community. We are especially excited to welcome six new members to UUHoulton and bless a child. Please come and join us for this special service. Our spiritual community of long-time and new friends is a marvelous garden of variety and beauty. Each one of us has a special place in the garden. We are also continuing our flower communion tradition of “Flashy Shirt and Splashy Skirt Day.” Wear something fun!

The YouTube Channel content for this week 

is a service with Rev. Mary Blocher from last winter. Our production team kept an extra service in “the vault” for when needed and we’ve decided to use it this week. Our YouTube Channel now has 131 services on the content list. That’s remarkable! The title of Mary’s service is “Please Understand Me!” You will find the link for YouTube listed below. 

Please join us for one of the services this weekend. 

June is here!!

In Ministry,Dave

UUHoulton Cookout at the Blocher’s

June 4 following the serviceLive Music with Bertrand Lawrence

Come and join us for a potluck cookout and barn party at Mary and Marion Blocher’s property in Hodgdon after the service.

Marion (and friends) built a barn last summer and it is the host location of this year’s summer party. Please bring something to share for the potluck and there will be grills available in case you’d like to cook some meats, veggies or kabobs. You might also want to bring a comfy portable chair and don’t forget the bug spray!

The event will be held rain or shine. Our good friend Bertrand Lawrence who has played several times at the Houlton Coffeehouse is joining us at the barn party to supply his unique brand of music and entertainment. All are welcome and encouraged to come. You will find the address listed below for your travel app.

See  you there!!!

Mary & Marion Blocher

1124 Calais Road (US Route 1), Hodgdon, ME

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/WcVzDesb7H0

THERE IS NO ZOOM COFFEE HOUR THIS WEEK DUE TO OUR COOKOUT AND BARN PARTY.ZOOM COFFEE HOUR WILL RETURN NEXT WEEK…

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

June 4   Flower Communion Service   Welcoming New Members Ceremony        BBQ & Barn Party at the Blocher’s 1124 Calais Road (US Route 1) in Hodgdon       Live music with Bertrand Laurence

June 11   Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson 

June 11   Sunday Concert at Noon: Ewan Dobson, instrumental guitar    On the coffeehouse stage, lunch available in the cafe    No charge for the concert, donations encouraged.

June 13     Meditation Group  4PM     (online)

June 17     Houlton Coffeehouse   7-9PM    Open-mic night

June 18     Sunday Service:  Rev. Mary Blocher

June 25     Sunday Service:  Steve Kinney   “Atomic Mysticism”             This is also a Pride Service led by Rev. Dave

June 30     Midnight Madness: UUHoulton Chicken Curry Night                     (Starting at 4PM on the church front lawn)

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 Houlton61 Military Street
Flower Communion Greeting from the UUA

Dear Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton,

In June of 1923, worshippers at the Unitarian Church in Prague, in the then-Czechoslovak Republic, were introduced to a new ritual by their minister, Rev. Norbert Fabian Čapek (pronounced “CHOP-eck”). That ritual has endured and is treasured by Unitarian Universalists around the world who are now eager to celebrate its centennial.

The meaning of the Flower Ceremony, or Flower Communion–in Czech the name translates as Flower Celebration–is rooted in its powerful simplicity: each person brings a flower to church, where they’re mingled in a single vase. After being blessed–often using Čapek’s own words–the flowers are redistributed so that everyone takes home a flower different from the one they brought. 

All of us hope that your celebration of the one-hundredth flower ceremony will be as meaningful and unique as possible. May you feel both grounded in our Unitarian history and enlivened to send forth new shoots for the generations to come.

In faith,

Erika

Rev. Erika Hewitt (she/her/hers) is the UUA’s Minister of Worship Arts, and Editor of the Braver/Wiser weekly spirituality series. Erika lives in Maine, where she also serves as a wedding officiant.

Poetry Corner

The Life of FlowersDave Hutchinson
Stepping out the back doorin the early days of Junethe lush field of long green grassis splashed with bursts of yellowunder deep blue sky.

These common flowers are the mass majority of the colorscapeoutnumbering the modestly dispensedreds, blues, oranges and whites.
The human eye is one more colorin the field.Eye lids wide openWe seeWe contemplateWe view the full expanse of our gaze.
The flower does not exist for next week.The flower does not exist for last week.It exists for the short duration of the days at hand.
It is yellow.It is red.It is light pink.
Open your eyes and see.Open your heart and touch the life of flowers

The True Nature of a Flower

BY VALERIE BROWN|  MAY 24, 2023

I would rather go without food than without flowers. Sounds dramatic and it is. I recall a time years ago when I was desperate to touch the natural world. I was living in a third-floor walk-up in Queens, working at Burger King, and going to City University in Manhattan. On my way to class one day, I passed a street vendor selling roses by the bundle in shades of peach, scarlet, and magenta. Time stopped as I heard them whisper two words to every part of my body: “Take me.”

In those days I had a skin-tight budget and lived mostly on chicken livers, which I bought at a cut-rate grocery store for less than one dollar a container. I looked at the flowers. They looked at me. I calculated the cost in my head. Twenty bucks. TWENTY BUCKS! The flowers would cost me my entire food budget for the week. Although I knew the flowers were outside my budget, I bought them anyway because they weren’t just roses. They were the luxurious fulfillment of the desire to touch and smell something beautiful—warm rain pooling in the moonlight or a slow lifting fog—and that was priceless, so the roses were a bargain.

In my garden, nirvana manifests when I behold the true nature of a flower.

Roses remind me of the importance of beauty for beauty’s sake. Beauty is complete and gives generously. Growing up in Brooklyn, the natural world, generous and beautiful, seemed distant and inaccessible to me. The sun came up and set over the parched terrain of Bushwick’s row homes, concrete sidewalks, and chain-link fences. To see and feel grass, my brothers and I would run through The Evergreens Cemetery on Bushwick Avenue, one of the great urban forests of New York City, paying little or no mind to the tombstones. We were there to smell the green grass and feel it under our sneakers and to get close to muscular trees. We were chasing an emerging feeling, a fleeting sense of the timeless present—moments that glow in their luminosity and that cannot be possessed.

During this time spent at Evergreens, I was safe among the trees and flowers. They wanted nothing from me and gave me beauty not as a luxury concept but as a birthright to be known, felt, and lived.

My mother, a single parent working two jobs to support four kids, took in boarders who’d seen better days. Our sturdy brick house had oak doors with beveled glass, and nearly every room, including the tiniest, the hall room, which was little more than a closet, was occupied by boarders, older men. Innocent and available, I was left in the house and subjected to sexual abuse by these tenants until they left or ran out of money to pay rent. The terror of the abuse was in contrast to the beauty of Evergreens, to the daffodils and cherry blossoms in spring. Because of the terror, I held onto the beauty of Evergreens, which could not be damaged, destroyed, or diminished, which was beyond the physical landscape and pointed instead to a horizon within me, tranquil and unstained.

That is why, many years later, when I moved from Brooklyn into my barn-like home outside Philadelphia, I set out to create something beautiful—a garden to transform the “mud” of life into a “lotus.” To paraphrase Wendy Johnson, one of the founders of the Garden Program at Green Gulch Zen Center in California, there are three good reasons to grow flowers: for beauty, for the coming apart of beauty, and to begin again. This wisdom aligns with the three seals: impermanence (anitya), nonself (anatman), and nirvana. These are the three seals that, according to many East Asian Buddhist traditions, are the essential teachings present in all authentic practices of the Buddha. Growing flowers is a living lesson on each of these three seals.

Impermanence

As a dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, I’ve learned the inescapable reality of impermanence, not as a theory but as an ongoing practice. Ultimately, everything and everyone changes, despite resistance to change. Flowers decompose; a child becomes an adult; day becomes night. The shifting nature of reality calls on us to practice—to love, to care, to accept, to occupy space and time, to release, to let go.

This loving and letting go is the essence of gardening, and it’s a lesson I relearned in my garden through an old flowering wisteria that was growing over the cottage roof and threatening to rip off the shingles with its branching, leafless, wooden tentacles. Slowly, little by little, I cut back the vine and trained it over a substantial wooden pergola. In late spring it bloomed a voluptuous cascade of blue to purple flowers, perfuming the air for a time, until the petals fell. Impermanence teaches me that things ripen, flower, and fade away in a continuous cycle of beauty, being, and becoming. It teaches me gratitude and appreciation for each day, each moment. I’ve learned that I can change my relationship to the abuse that happened to me like I can shape a vine, with love, understanding, patience, and practice. There is hope, healing, and growth.

Nonself

Often misunderstood, nonself isn’t about annihilation but rather about interconnectedness or interbeing, a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh. From the pandemic, we’ve learned in a new and deeper way the truth of interconnectedness. What happens to me affects you, and what happens to you affects me.

Interconnectedness can be seen in a garden. A flower doesn’t grow in isolation. It’s permeated by nonflower elements, such as sunlight, soil, water, and air. It cannot exist without these nonflower elements. Living with an awareness of this interconnectedness, I have shifted how I tend plant life to increase the variety of native flowers, trees, and shrubs, which are adapted for local conditions and, therefore, require less maintenance and offer food sources to local native wildlife. Their deep root system holds sediment in place, helping to stabilize the areas where they’re planted and increase the soil’s capacity to store water, reducing runoff and flooding. These native plants are vital to creating a healthy ecosystem that supports a diversity of birds, insects, and other animals. They cohabitate in the garden; they are interconnected.

One of my first native plantings that now has spread in waves throughout my garden is coreopsis tinctoria, a host plant to forty-two different pollinators. In early fall the plant is covered with finches and sparrows that eat the seeds. I also have the lemon-scented yellow flowers of oenothera biennis, a biennial plant. Hummingbirds, honeybees and bumblebees, and several moth species, including the primrose moth, eat the nectar. Several caterpillars eat the foliage, including the pearly wood-nymph, grape leaffolder moth, and white-lined sphinx. The plant’s seeds are eaten by several bird species, including goldfinch.

When you really look at a flower, you begin to see this interconnectedness of the roots stabilizing the soil, the nectar providing food for butterflies and insects, and seed heads offering nourishment for birds. Looking deeper, you appreciate the kinship connecting flower to flower, and flowers to nonflower elements and to everything else.

Nirvana

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that nirvana is the extinction of ideas. The ultimate dimension of existence, nirvana is beyond concepts of right and wrong, coming and going, birth and death. Clinging to any concept, even the concepts of impermanence, nonself, and nirvana, leads to suffering. So, instead of clinging, we can connect with the essence of the three seals. This essence is about living our daily lives with generosity, interconnectedness, and mindful awareness.

In my garden, nirvana manifests when I behold the true nature of a flower, embracing suffering and vulnerability in the light of compassion. I walk through my garden and touch the flowers of the limelight hydrangea. I touch a threshold full of grace, full of aliveness. I exhale and the flowers whisper back: “Take me.”

ABOUT VALERIE BROWN

Valerie Brown is a dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. She’s completing her forthcoming book: Braver Things: Fearless Living for Broken-Open, Pulled Apart, and Turned Upside Down Times.

Newly planted field of potatoes in Houlton across from McDonald’s taken last June

crabapple blossoms laying on the grass…

Candle art from last week’s candles of joy and concern.  

(Fred, Leigh and Christoph were involved in its creation)  

Prayer ListFor those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine is now in its second yearPrayers for those recovering from the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria Prayers for those affected by the mass shooting at the University of MichiganPrayers for those affected by the mass shooting in Nashville 

Prayers to ease the political unrest in the Middle EastPrayers for those affected by the recent violence in the West Bank, the Dome of the Rock and political protests in IsraelPrayers for those affected by the two mass shootings in LouisvillePrayers for those affected by the recent mass shootings in AlabamaPrayers for those affected by the mass shooting in Texas Prayers for peace and reconciliation in this spring seasonPrayers for the Carmichael family with the loss of DillonPrayers for those affected by the tragic train crash in India this weekend

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.