The summer days are in all their glory and each one is amazing! I spent a couple of days in Bar Harbor biking the carriage trails in Acadia National Park and blueberries were everywhere along the trail (that’s a bonus).
Our Unitarian day lilies are still flourishing around the perimeter of our building and they are showing no signs of letting up. As you enter the building in upcoming weeks be sure to “stop and smell the lilies.”
We head to Fredericton today for our tour of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and lunch. I’m are you will hear more about our adventures in tomorrow’s service. Thanks again to Steve Kinney for organizing the trip and keeping track of logistics and assorted details. Joshua Atkinson speaks at Sunday Service. This is his first service at UUHoulton and his talk is titled “The Witness; Being a Mirror of Grace.” Dave will be assisting. Here is a short excerpt from the message:
Be a mirror with grace so that when others look into your eyes they can see their own soul being accepted, healed, and freed…separate from compulsive behavior and karma, with free real estate available in the heart for the person behind the mind and body.
YouTube Channel content for this week
is a service led by Rev. Mary Blocher titled “How Do You Sing the Blues? After you learn and practice the Law of Mind Action you will find that you have lost the right to sing the blues in an old way. You will be transformed and will be able to sing the blues in a brand new way. You will find the link for YouTube listed below. Please join us for one of the services this weekend.
In Ministry,
Dave
Still two days left at the Dooryard Arts Festival!
There is a music and arts festival in Woodstock, New Brunswick July 20-22 that we’d like to help promote; The Dooryard Arts Festival.
(See information below and check out the website)
Dooryard Arts Festival 2023 is taking place July 20-22 in Woodstock.
Tickets are currently on sale ($15-$25) and so are festival passes ($60).
Tickets and schedule can be found at www.dooryardfestival.com
Here are some events:
Dooryard Presents: James Mullinger
Dooryard – Friday Night Main Stage
Dooryard – Saturday Night Main Stage
Dooryard – Saturday Street Market – FREE
Seth Anderson Live @ The Legion
The Last Lucivee Film Screening – FREE
Pallmer @ Connell House – FREE
Dooryard Presents: The Tin Pan Darlings
Hope to see you in the dooryard!
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/7eCPbZlYStw
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check -in
Time: Jul 23, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87255285441?pwd=NUpMeGM2ZS85VWp4b3QwbUtTT0FCZz09
Meeting ID: 872 5528 5441
Passcode: 109650
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
July 22 Trip to Beaverbrook Art Gallery 8AM
July 23 Sunday Service: Joshua Atkinson
July 25 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
July 30 Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson and Joshua Atkinson
August 6 Sunday Service: Dan Crawford
August 8 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
August 13 Sunday Service: Rev. Mary Blocher
August 19 Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards Concert 7PM Performance is on the coffeehouse stage (no admission fee, but donations are encouraged)
August 20 Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson
August 22 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
August 27 Sunday Service: Dave Hutchinson
Sept 3 Sunday Service: Debra Frazier
Sept 10 Ingathering Service; Water Ceremony
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, US Route 1 also known as 61 Military Street
| UUA NewsletterUnitarian Universalist Association |
July 2023
Dear Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton,
It is with great enthusiasm that the UUA welcomes the Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt as the tenth UUA President! We also note that this is not the first time the Rev. Dr. Betancourt has served as leader of the Association. She was appointed co-president for an interim period in 2017 and provided guidance and care during a significant moment in our history. This time, she will be in the presidential role for a six-year term and we are eagerly anticipating her leadership, working together to continue to advance Unitarian Universalism and live our values deeply in the coming years.
Her presidency comes with a number of historic firsts – she is the first openly queer person and first woman of color to be elected UUA president. She has served Unitarian Universalism for more than twenty years as a religious educator, minister, scholar, and member of the UUA national staff and many volunteer committees at the regional and denominational levels. She most recently served as Resident Scholar and Special Advisor on Justice and Equity at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
Rev. Dr. Betancourt holds a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics and African American Studies from Yale University as well as an M.Div. from Starr King School for the Ministry, where she also served on the faculty. She is the author of Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics (2022). You can learn more about her in a new Q & A with UU World magazine, including how early life experiences shaped her path to ministry.
As significantly, she also brings to the role theological depth, a commitment to communal care, and a pledge to continue to organize for justice. She has also expressed an appreciation for the diverse voices and leaders in our community as well as for the hard work that UUA staff does every day. We know that Unitarian Universalists (UUs) across the country and UUA staff will all benefit from her experience, wisdom, and sense of care.
Carey McDonald, our Executive Vice President, expressed his keen anticipation in this way, “we are excited to have the Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt at the helm as UUA President to lead us in the next chapter of our faith’s journey. We are already inspired by her deep theology and commitments to community care and imagining the way forward together.”
We are entering an exciting time for both the UUA and Unitarian Universalism. Rev. Dr. Betancourt’s presidency and the General Assembly vote by delegates to continue consideration of changes to the Article II bylaws mark a key moment in our faith tradition. With her leadership, we are positioned to move forward in faithful community, in recognition of our shared values and the important work ahead.
Ancient and Modern Maps of the Mind
Tara Bennett Goleman looks at the parallels between of Buddhist psychology and modern cognitive science, revealing their shared insights that illuminate a hidden path towards inner freedom.
I’d been putting off riding my horse, Bodhi, for days. But one pleasant morning, riding him was my first thought. After my coffee and morning meditation, I found myself reflecting on the way our desires and thoughts lead us to act. I noticed how the pull of pleasant weather had led to my desire to go outside and enjoy the day on my horse.
But then I became aware of the crisp air suddenly turning damp and cool. The sky darkened with clouds — a harbinger of a rainy day — and with this forbidding sky I noted a radical shift: the stirrings of unpleasant feelings and thoughts like, “Maybe it’s going to be too cold to ride. It might rain and I and my saddle would get wet.” I thought of a dozen other things I might do with the morning.
Awareness can break the chain between impulse and action. It gives us the choice between acting on our emotional impulses, or observing our thoughts and feelings.
To my surprise, however, the clouds started to break up, and rays of sun shone through; plants came to life again. I had an image of myself on my horse, delighting in the day. I hurried to get my riding boots.
And so it goes through the round of our days, with our feelings, thoughts, desires, and whims so often playing us like a puppet on a string, leading us to do one thing after another.
In Buddhist psychology the way thoughts and desires lead to action is called the chain of dependent origination. In one interpretation, the close links between our feelings, desires, and actions form a chain of interdependent cause-effect links, where thought leads to what we do. On a moment’s notice we’re acting on a whim, one dictated by an underlying sense of pleasure or pain, pleasantness or unpleasantness – all from our habitual conditioning.
My initial urge to ride, and then my hesitation, and finally my going out on horseback were each the result of changing causes and conditions as filtered through my impulse of the moment. As those conditions changed, so did my impulses.
For the most part these chains of habit are benign. But some of these habits are self-defeating, and so have consequences in our lives. The Buddhist view sees that the links of the chain of dependent origination offer a way to break free of this recurring round of conditioned habit. It’s a hidden path to inner freedom.
This Buddhist analysis of our mind begins when the senses register something – a sight, sound or taste, say. From sensing comes contact, which then links to our feelings. When they are pleasant, the feelings often lead us to crave more and cling, which leads us to act in ways we think will lead to more pleasure (or, if the feelings are unpleasant, we do what we think will end the pain).
I found a strikingly similar parallel in cognitive science and its model of how we process information, which reports much the same sequence. Sensations lead to thoughts about what we sense, and then to our emotional reaction to it. These thoughts and feelings in turn become intentions and plans for action.
Neuroscience tracks information processing in terms of the flow of activation through complex circuitry. Some key nodes include the thalamus, where physical waves first enter and are translated into the language of the brain. Another critical junction is the circuitry that impinges on the amygdala, where the brain stores emotional reactivity that can lead us to action.
In both the Buddhist and cognitive science maps of consciousness, the door to inner freedom lies in bringing awareness to these sequences. An active awareness shifts our attention from being immersed in our emotional reaction to becoming aware of the relationship between our state of mind and what we are perceiving, and our impulse to act from that. With craving, anger, or fear, this moment of awareness gives us an option other than acting on the feeling on the one hand, or suppressing it on the other. We can interpose a reflective consciousness between our emotional impulse and our resulting action.
This lets us be aware of a feeling like fear, just watching the feeling grow and blossom, and then whither and fade away. In terms of the chain of dependent origination, this intervention by awareness gives us an all-important choice point: Bringing an active attention to our otherwise knee jerk habits can be emotionally freeing.
Awareness can break the chain between impulse and action. It gives us the choice between acting on our emotional impulses yet again, or just observing the thoughts and feelings as they bubble up and dissolve.
This act of attention lies at the heart of modern interventions, including the many ways mindfulness integrates with psychotherapy. All these parallel an ancient insight into dependent origination, one which also applies to our modern understanding of how we process information.
I wrote about this connection between dependent origination and information processing in more detail in my book Emotional Alchemy (Harmony Books, 2001).
The architecture of the mind, it seems, has not changed in over two millennia.
ABOUT TARA BENNETT-GOLEMAN
Tara Bennett Goleman, MA, is the author of the NY Times best-seller Emotional Alchemy, and Mind Whispering. Tara is a psychotherapist who teaches workshops integrating perspectives and practices from Eastern and Western psychologies that repattern emotional habits that separate into ones that connect, individually and collectively. She studied at the Cognitive Therapy Center of NY; Dr. Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, recognized her as a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and mindfulness. She is a longtime meditator who has studied with acclaimed masters of the insight meditation and Dzogchen traditions. Tara, with Daniel Goleman, will be giving an in-person workshop at the Aligned Center in Irvington, NY, September 30 and October 1, 2023.
Words of Rachel Carson written along the Maine coast;
Rachel Carson (1951)
Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know — rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.
Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality — earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
On all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before; of the sea’s eternal rhythms — the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents — shaping, changing, dominating; of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.
[…]
Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us — a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.
When we go down to the lowest of the low tide lines and look down into the shallow waters, there’s all the excitement of discovering a new world. Once you have entered such a world, its fascination grows and somehow you find your mind has gained a new dimension, a new perspective — and always thereafter you find yourself remember[ing] the beauty and strangeness and wonder of that world — a world that is as real, as much a part of the universe, as our own.
Do you recognize these feet?
Ira at coffeehouse last Saturday night.
coffeehouse sign-up list with amazing performances!!
I spent a couple of days biking in Acadia National Park this week and spent the night with UUHoulton transplants Laney and John Lloydin Bar Harbor.
The birthday boys on the trail:Dave (July 24)John (July 25)ages classified…
Prayer List
For 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 year
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 recent train crash in India
Prayers for the five lives lost in the Titan submersible off the coast of NewfoundlandPrayers for the firefighters in Canada and the US fighting fires this summerPrayers for those affected by the flooding in Vermont and the NortheastPrayers for those affected by the heat dome in the American south
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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