“Caravan” painting by Leigh Griffith
The first Sunday of Advent is this weekend as we prepare the historic brown building on the corner for the holidays. Seasonal adornments are starting to go up in the parlor and we have the Christmas tree standing in the corner (although it still needs decorating). We also have a change in our original Advent Service lineup; Dale Holden was scheduled for the First Sunday of Advent, but she is not feeling well, so Dale and I have switched Sundays. I’ll be doing the First Sunday of Advent and Dale will be doing the Second Sunday of Advent. Our theme for the Advent season is based on a painting by our very own Leigh Griffith. The painting is titled “Caravan” and captures the feel of a journey in the Middle Eastern desert, similar to the wise seekers in the biblical story of Jesus’ birth. I’ll be introducing the theme in Sunday’s service titled, “Caravan; A Journey Through Advent.” We’re going to wait for Dale to join us next week before we decorate the tree (which is something she originally wanted to do during coffee hour after her service). We have church decorations for the tree, but If you’d like to bring in additional ornaments we will hang those as well.
There is a special Holiday Brunch after coffee hour at the downtown apartment of Rand Bradbury and Ira Dyer (62 Main Street). Everyone is invited and food/goodies are provided. This is a “must not miss” event of your holiday season. A dog and two cats will also be in attendance, in case you happen to have allergies to either. Also note, that the second story apartment is only accessible by one long stairway. Thank you Randi and Ira for hosting!
YouTube Channel content for this week is a service with George Peabody who will be reading from his book-length poem “Atlantis” about the construction of the Mactaquac dam on the St. John River in the1960s and its consequent effects. George is the founder and administrator of the Meduxnekeag River Association, a community based, non-profit, land trust organization in Woodstock, New Brunswick, dedicated to preserving the Appalachian Hardwood Forest and riparian environments of the river’s watershed. The link for YouTube is listed below. Please join us for one of the services.
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)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-in
Time: Dec 3, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/86732617469?pwd=8xYZPtmkpOtgQaMLxsIenwLappwlMA.1
Meeting ID: 867 3261 7469
Passcode: 611194
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
Dec 3 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson (1st Sunday of Advent)
Dec 3 Holiday Brunch @ Randi and Ira’s after coffee hour
Dec 9 Holiday Craft Fair
Dec 10 Sunday Service: Rev. Dale Holden (2nd Sunday of Advent)
Dec 12 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Dec 16 LGBTQ+ Luncheon at noon
Dec 16 Houlton Coffeehouse Feature: Ira Dyer
Dec 17 Sunday Service: Joshua Atkinson (3rd Sunday of Advent)
Dec 21 Winter Solstice Celebration Drumming 6:30PM Ceremony 7:00PM
Dec 24 (No Sunday Morning Service)
Dec 24 Christmas Eve Candlelight Service 4PM Potluck in the fellowship hall following the service
Dec 31 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
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 (aka U.S. Route 2), Houlton, ME 04730
Embracing Courage in a World in Crisis
BY SINGHASHRI GAZMURI| NOVEMBER 28, 2023
When the suffering of the world knocks at our door, says Singhashri Gazmuri, we must be courageous enough to open it.
Many of my students come to me asking how they are meant to respond to the world? “What can little old me do anyway?” They are depressed, in despair, overwhelmed, and immobilized. It’s a good question.
How do we re-learn and re-claim our humanness and our interconnectedness?
It’s understandable that, given the current state of our world, our initial reaction might be to look away and hide. Who wants to witness the immense suffering of so many beings? Why would we choose to turn toward so much confusion, hatred, and greed?
The part of us that simply wants to be happy and well feels threatened by the state of our world, a world that reminds us over and over again that there is nothing that can be relied on in samsaric existence. And yet, this has always been true. Even before the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Even before the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Even before the coronavirus pandemic. Even before the election of Trump.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself what I was doing before all this began? But I can’t find the exact moment when things started to feel so out of control. I can’t find the source of all this hatred and heartbreak. When I look more deeply, all I find is my direct experience and the ways in which I am still cut off from myself and the world. All the ways I have used my practice to hide away and shore up some false sense of self and safety. Soothed myself into thinking it’s possible to “resilience” my way out of samsara.
We must ask, How am I hiding from reality right now? In what ways have I cut myself off from my own suffering and the suffering of others? What are the costs of doing so?
If we take the teachings on conditionality seriously, we begin to find the truth of what’s happening to us right now. We have been deeply conditioned over countless years and across hundreds of generations into alienation and obliviousness. We have been cut off from land and body, culture and beloved community. Societal forces like patriarchy, white supremacy, ablism, homophobia, and xenophobia all depend on the false view that some people are inherently better than others. And all these forces have conditioned us, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not.
And so, we hide: from ourselves, from our conditioning, from each other, and from our fullest potential. Or, perhaps, we’re hidden, and we continue to collude with our hidden-ness. Our true nature has been hidden from us and from each other under layer upon layer of delusion, and we’ve been habituated to go along with it, etching the grooves of ignorance deeper and deeper into our individual and collective psyches. As if we’ve been enchanted by an ancient spell.
So how do we break the spell? How do we re-learn and re-claim our humanness and our interconnectedness? This is a crucial question for anyone privileged enough to have encountered the dharma and chosen to follow it. If we aren’t asking ourselves this question, we risk using the teachings to stay comfy and safe. We risk a further cutting off and retreating into the false refuge of a peace built on lies, a peace we can only experience under very specific conditions, a peace that can’t be shared with anyone else.
Fear festers beneath all this hiding. Perhaps we are scared because we can no longer ignore the precariousness of our situation. We end up doing all sorts of things to mask the fear; we turn away as it grasps onto the deepest parts of us. We keep ourselves distracted with food, work, Netflix, drugs and alcohol, the stories we tell over and over about ourselves and each other. Even our meditation practice can become a distraction. We can become very good at blissing out. Blissing out to check out.
Paradoxically, in order to go beyond our conditioning, our practice calls to us to delve more deeply into it. And the best way I know how to do that is in and through the body. When the forces of delusion are strong and I recognize the familiar patterns of turning away and hiding from suffering—my own suffering and that of others—I could ask myself, What’s going on in my body right now? What don’t I want to be with? What am I running away from? What does it feel like to be cut off?
Often, when I explore my somatic experience in this way, I find the contraction of fear in my belly, numbness in the heart, gripping in the throat. Here it is right now and it is deeply unsatisfying. Yet at the heart of my own alienation lies the key to my liberation. If I can acknowledge it, stay with it, keep meeting it with compassion, slowly it begins to melt. The freeze response begins to loosen, and I begin to relax into a more spacious, transparent way of being and relating.
As I begin to get curious about the specific ways these energies are held in the body right now, I’m taken to the root of my delusion, the “karmic knots” that have formed over my lifetime, the lives of my ancestors, and perhaps even my past lives. Without awareness, we inhabit these knots, retreat into them, hide in their creases.
Once I identify these places of holding, I gently use awareness to turn toward and meet these energies directly. I notice the sensations with patience and love—the tension, churning, burning, whirling, tingling, tightness, hardness, numbness. I familiarize myself with the uncomfortable aspects of the experience and with the sense of possibility that comes when I notice them beginning to change, soften, move, and liberate.
In this process, I also open to any thoughts, emotions, memories, and images that may appear in the mind as I continue to attend to the changing sensations. I work to hold these with curiosity, learning to relate to them from a place of awareness, rather than rejecting or indulging them, allowing them to move through me in their own time, their own way.
Insights into my habits and their impacts may arise through the process. I forgive myself and resolve to ask forgiveness from others. Finally, I practice resourcing myself with pleasant sensations in the body, kindness and compassion practices, writing, dancing, art, and spending time in nature or with loved ones.
Over time, in unlocking the energy bound up in unhelpful hiding habits, I’ve felt a fuller alignment of my thoughts, words, and behavior with my deepest heart-wish for liberation and justice for myself and all beings. I have found that I am much more effective, less bound by fear and ambivalence; I am able to respond more creatively and with less inhibition to the pain of this world.
And so, when the world knocks on our door and we wonder, “What can little old me do?”, we may instead ask, “Am I courageous enough to open that door?” Are we brave enough to see and be fully seen? Can we stop hiding from ourselves, from one another, from reality? In choosing not to hide we may just begin to manifest a different world, one built on love, truth, and a return to wholeness.
ABOUT SINGHASHRI GAZMURI
Singhashri is a queer, Latinx-American Dharma teacher and writer ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Community. She teaches mindfulness and compassion as means to awakening to love, beauty and truth and has committed her life to supporting collective healing and transformation and the joy and freedom found there. She currently lives in London with her partner.
From Maria Popova’s weekly column “Brain Pickings.”
The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking
Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with the self-righteous fist of zealous subjectivity. Instead, he devoted himself to the search for objective truth, pure and impartial, taken from the open hand of Mother Nature — the study of reality raw and rapturous, unmediated by interpretation.
Eight centuries before the birth of photography, Alhazen gave the first clear description of a camera obscura, which he constructed to observe a partial solar eclipse. Drawing on his experiments with pinhole projection, he became the first person to proffer a correct theory of vision, refuting the two competing theories that had been dominating since Ancient Greece: that we see by emitting rays of light from our eyes, as Euclid and Ptolemy believed, and that sight is the product of objects entering the eye as physical forms, as Aristotle believed. After conducting various experiments on reflection and refraction with lenses and mirrors, he correctly described the anatomy of the eye as an optical system, laying the groundwork for the entwined history of vision and consciousness.
To avoid persecution by the tyrannical caliph whose ire he had spurred, Alhazen feigned insanity and was placed under house arrest. There, he spent a decade detailing his experiments and reckoning with their far-reaching implications in his revolutionary seven-volume Book of Optics, which went on to influence Galileo and Kepler, Descartes and Newton, Da Vinci and Chaucer.
Half a millennium before Copernicus, he criticized Ptolemy’s cosmology in a treatise titled Dubitationes in Ptolemaeum (Doubts on Ptolemy). On its pages, he formulates what is essentially the first succinct description of the scientific method, five centuries ahead of its bloom in the Renaissance. In this regard, Alhazen could be considered the first true scientist, eight centuries before the word itself was coined.Here is a quote by Alhazen:
Truth is sought for itself; and in seeking that which is sought for itself one is only concerned to find it… The seeker after the truth… is not he*who studies the writings of the ancients and… puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. It is thus the duty of the man who studies the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. If he follows this path, the truths will be revealed to him, and whatever shortcomings or uncertainties may exist in the discourse of those who came before him will become manifest.
Dan Crawford stopped by the church before the service last Sunday morning on his way back to Hudson, New York.
Fireside in the parlor with poet George Peabody
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal change
Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continues
Prayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its second month
Prayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for those affected by the mass shooting in Lewiston in October
Prayers for the homeless and hunger challenged during the upcoming holidays
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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