This is an old postcard of the Houlton Unitarian Church before the national merger with the Universalists when we became UUHoulton. As you will notice, there have been a few changes since this photo was taken, but not many!
Our Ingathering Service (the UU version of Homecoming) is on September 10th in the sanctuary. There will be special music, organ, congregational singing and a water ceremony. Please bring a small bottle of water you have collected from special places nearby or far away during your summer adventures. We individually pour waters into our collective basin and reflect upon our life as a spiritual community. The four elements will be represented on the altar as we explore our relatedness to each other and the world around us. Following the service there will be a lawn party on the church grounds. Please bring something to share for an outdoor potluck and a comfy lawn chair. If we get rained out, the lawn party will move indoors to the parlor. (Please note there will be no grill on site.) Hope to see you there…YouTube Channel content for this week is a service led by Debra Frazier titled
“Where Do We Draw the Line?” No two people share exactly the same experience even if they’re standing right next to each other, and we each have our own perspective. One of our shared UU values is respecting the opinions of others and encouraging people to express their viewpoint. But when do we (or don’t we) draw the line? Deb discusses how we as humans can and do create artificial separations between “us and “them” and some of the mechanisms we tend to employ to do this. The idea is to provide tools so we can make informed decisions, be more inclusive, or recognize toxic habits where we use or have them used against us. You will find the link for YouTube listed below. Please join us for one of the services.
Have a good weekend!
In Ministry,
Dave
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/QkIjR-N5Fv4
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-in
Time: Sep 10, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87513206672?pwd=eUh4VzZ4SUhkbU8vaXFXejFudTltdz09
Meeting ID: 875 1320 6672
Passcode: 732312
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
Sept 10 Ingathering Service; Water Ceremony and potluck lawn party
Sept 10 Social Justice Group meeting after coffee hour
Sept 11 UUHoulton Board Meeting 7PM
Sept 12 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Sept 16 LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the basement (12 noon)
Sept 16 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM
Sept 20 Sunday Service: MaryAlice Mowry
Sept 24 Sunday Service: Rev. Dale Holden
Sept 26 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
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
Poetry Corner
I shared one of Deborah Banks’ poems in a recent service and thought I’d include another one in this week’s Support Page. Deborah Banks resides in Port Hilford, Nova Scotia and is a friend and close by neighbor of Janet and Donald Brushett. Janet also happens to be Deborah’s editor.
Sermon:
Everything Tries to be Round
Tonight I stand under the membrane of sky.
So many stars!
They stretch along the hill behind the house,
a canopy that I can trace
from the root of the spruce trees
twitching beneath boughs
to the mighty bowl overhead
telling stories of how round the earth really is.
Down below in the bay
water is wreathing the rocks -they too have their own roundness,
and the place where roundness is meant to find itself.
Just watch the way the tide rolls up to a rockand surrounds it, then tugs away again and again:
forever making proclamations to roundness.
Everything that goes away
comes back again.
Everything that comes
goes away.
This is my faith,
my big round ball of faith:
the roundness of cupped hands -hands that are always full.
Maria Popova Weekly Observations
I thought Popover’s weekly column “The Marginalian” included some timely observations that pertained to our Water Ceremony at this weekend’s Ingathering Service. In our water ceremony we recognize the inter-relationship between the Four Elements; fire, earth, air and water. What is our relationship to all of that? Here is part of a book review that Popova wrote on “Notes on Complexity” by Neil Theise.
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote as he bridged his young science with ancient Eastern philosophy to reckon with the ongoing mystery of what we are.
A century later — a century in the course of which we unraveled the double helix, detected the Higgs boson, decoded the human genome, heard a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds beyond our Solar System — the mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. Each day, we eat food that becomes us, its molecules metabolized into our own as we move through the world with the illusion of a self. Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced. Each day, we find ourselves restless miniatures of a vast universe we are only just beginning to fathom.
In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (public library), the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”
Theise defines the core scientific premise of his inquiry:
Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world… Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining… how life self-organizes from the substance of our universe, from interactions within the quantum foam to the formation of atoms and molecules, cells, human beings, social structures, ecosystems, and beyond.
[…]
Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.
[…]
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment.
Here is a recent article in the New York Times by columnist Ross Douthat on the current state of religion in American life titled “Where Should Agnostics Go On Sundays?” It raises an interesting question along with its implications for groups such as ours. Unitarian Universalists are even mentioned in the article (ever so briefly). Why do we assemble on a Sunday morning and what are we looking for?
Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?
Sept. 1, 2023
| How to get beyond the stasis of regretful unbelief |
| By Ross Douthat |
| Perry Bacon, a columnist for The Washington Post, has an essay about his experience with Christianity entitled “I left the church — and now long for a ‘church for the nones.’” The “nones,” as this newsletter’s readers probably know, are the growing share of Americans who don’t identify with any religious tradition, and the sense that we’re losing something when churchgoing lapses has shown up in recent essays by my colleagues Jessica Grose and Nick Kristof. |
| Bacon is a case study for this post-religious angst: After decades spent attending first charismatic and then nondenominational Protestant churches, he has drifted into the no-religion camp, and he doesn’t particularly like it. He has a young daughter and he misses the social and ethical benefits of churchgoing, but at the same time he feels alienated from moral and theological conservatism, even the attenuated form in the churches he recently attended, and he doesn’t have specific Christian certainties to keep him in the pews. So what he’d like — well, here’s the quote: |
| I can easily imagine a “church for the nones.” (It would need a more appealing name.) Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional post-church brunch.During the week, there would be activities, particularly ones in which parents could take their kids and civic-minded members could volunteer for good causes in the community.I don’t expect the church of the nones to emerge. It’s not clear who would start it, fund it or decide its beliefs. But it should. |
| As is often the case on social media, I encountered this passage before I read the essay as a whole, and it filled me with frustration. Doesn’t Bacon know that people have been trying this kind of thing for generations, and it always fizzles out? Hasn’t he heard of the Society for Ethical Culture or the Unitarian Universalists? Does he really think you can sustain an institution on vague appeals to tolerance and brunch? All the usual conservative complaints about the angst of semi-believing liberals, in other words. |
| But then I read the whole essay, and it’s more subtle than just the fragment above in isolation might suggest. Bacon has an accurate sociological sense of what churches and church life have often offered to America: not just a generic form of community but specific kinds of class mixing, intergenerational bonding, dating markets, cross-partisan solidarity and really good music. He has interesting things to say about how he’s reinterpreted his own professional ascent — from a miraculous, God-granted leap and the perspective of his religious family members to a more conventional story of a hardworking family boosting a smart kid up the ladder — and how he’s been affected by the secularizing arc of African American intellectual life in the Black Lives Matter era. And he has, of course, heard of the Unitarians and appreciates what they’re trying to do; he’s just found their churches to be aging and un-diverse and lacking in “the wide range of activities for adults and kids found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.” |
| Reading Bacon’s lament, I recalled a column I wrote six years ago called “Save the Mainline,” a somewhat puckish call for lapsed Protestants on the secular left to return to the country’s declining liberal churches and reinvigorate mainline Christianity. The interesting thing is that Bacon himself basically endorses my various arguments but still can’t quite bring himself to actually be the change he seeks: |
| I know I could be a member of a congregation if I really wanted to. I could attend a Christian church on Sundays and teach my daughter about other beliefs the rest of the week. Or make churchgoing something I do alone […]I’ve also thought about starting some kind of weekly Sunday-morning gathering of nones, to follow in my father’s footsteps in a certain way, or trying to persuade my friends to collectively attend one of the Unitarian churches in town and make it younger and more racially diverse.But I’ve not followed through on any of these options. With all my reservations, I don’t really want to join an existing church. And I don’t think I am going to have much luck getting my fellow nones to join something I start. My sense is that the people who want what church provides are going to the existing Christian churches, even if they are skeptical of some of the beliefs. And those who aren’t at church are fine spending their Sunday mornings eating brunch, doing yoga or watching Netflix. |
| Again, I have my default conservative reaction here, which is that of course you can’t expect to fully garner the benefits of church without some kind of real commitment, some actual dogma or belief. |
| But the individual life isn’t just a sociological generalization; there’s no reason Perry Bacon personally can’t buck these trends, can’t turn his yearning for church into a provisional reality, reservations and all. Nor that some others couldn’t make the same leap with him — especially because on the evidence of trends in mental health and happiness, he’s wrong that most nonreligious Americans are simply “fine” with the current post-Christian modes of meaning-making, even if they don’t see churchgoing as a natural solution to their distress. |
| For Bacon himself, the key obstacle to a return to churchgoing seems to be the fear of a kind of intellectual inconsistency or hypocrisy, for himself but especially as a parent. “I don’t want to take her to a place that has a specific view of the world,” he writes of his daughter, “as well as answers to the big questions and then have to explain to Charlotte that some people agree with all of the church’s ideas, Dad agrees with only some and many other people don’t agree with any.” |
| To which I might respond: Why not? The desire to bring up your child inside a coherent world picture that parents and schools and churches all mutually reinforce is an admirable one; it speaks to the natural human desire for wholeness and integration. But if that kind of environment doesn’t exist for you, if you yourself don’t have a world picture that fully integrates the political and the moral with the metaphysical, then introducing your kids to a multiplicity of experiences and values, and acknowledging upfront that people have different answers to the big questions and you can value institutions without fully agreeing with them — all this seems like an entirely responsible way to parent. (I hope so, at least, since thanks to various accidents of ancestry and geography and professional life — their father is a conservative-leaning New Englander living in a liberal-academic town, etc. — my own kids will live with a version of this pluralism throughout childhood, and no matter how solid their Catholic faith, they’ll always know their dad wrote a book criticizing the pope.) |
| Obviously, you don’t want to lay too much ambiguity on a 3-year-old. But if you’re going to raise your kids with some metaphysical ambiguity no matter what, then “We go to a church that believes X because we think church has a lot to offer you, even though Dad only believes in some of X” seems like an entirely honest thing to tell children. And any difficulty they have in handling it seems better than the alternative of just leaving what Bacon feels is a hole in his family life where religious community is supposed to fit. |
| But the challenge does run a little deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions get involved. |
| And that does seem to be (maybe?) where Bacon has ended up. In his account of his own life journey and intellectual progression, he seems to cast the religious stage as the unsophisticated, not-fully-developed phase, while the more secular phase is the serious, realistic one, whatever its deficits of community and meaning. In which case the problem with churchgoing isn’t just that Bacon would have to tell his daughter that her dad doesn’t agree with a particular dogma or moral teaching at their hypothetical church. It’s that to be honest, he’d eventually have to tell her that he thinks the primary theory for why the church exists at all is probably just a pleasant fancy, and in their quest for community they’re free riding somehow on other people’s faith. |
| Even here, though, especially if you’re talking about a nondenominational church where there aren’t issues of sacramental communion to wrestle with, I think this “free riding” guilt shouldn’t be a fundamental obstacle to churchgoing. If you’re spiritually open-minded, an agnostic rather than a hard atheist, and you say “It would be nice if something like this were true” and then act (to whatever extent) as though it were true, I’d say you’re engaging in a sincere quest for God, the kind of quest that America’s many “seeker-sensitive” churches especially exist to cultivate. And I don’t see why you couldn’t tell your children, older ones especially, “I doubt that there’s a God, but I think it’s good to keep an eye out for him,” and feel like you’re being responsible and sincere with them. |
| But I also understand why this deeper sense that real belief just isn’t reasonable, that churchgoing’s social and communal benefits are probably founded on pleasant mythmaking, is a durable impediment to getting up on Sunday morning, getting your kid up on Sunday morning, doing the church thing week in and week out — to say nothing of actually starting something on your own, a church of the nones or any other spiritual enterprise. I think agnostic churchgoing would be good for Bacon, good for his daughter, good for America. But were I an agnostic, I’m not sure I’d be anywhere on Sunday morning except home. |
| Which means that the future of religion depends, in some way, on thoughtful people like Bacon coming around to the realization that this skeptical sense of things, this default to nonbelief, is itself just an intellectual fancy, a myth and a mistake.AboutDescriptionRoss Gregory Douthat is an American political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of topics, including the state of Christianity in America and “sustainable decadence” in contemporary society. |
Smiling faces at UUHoulton
Birthdays for the month of September were celebratedduring coffee hour; Nicole Hutchinson, Debra Ball,Rudi Spear and Joshua Atkinson
take 2…
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continues
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 Israel
Prayers for the firefighters in Canada and the US fighting fires this FallPrayers for those affected by the heat dome in the American southPrayers for the Hawaiian island of Maui after the recent wildfiresPrayers for those affected by Hurricane Idalia along the eastern coast
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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