Flower Communion altar    (2024)

This week’s Support Page is going out a bit late, Linda and I have been on vacation this week and we are just returning. It’s always good to get away, but it’s good to get back too (and I think the cat missed us). We were attending a concert at the new Sphere venue in Las Vegas and the temperatures ranged from 104 to 108 degrees each day. Our taxi driver said it felt more like mid-August than early June and referenced how often climate concerns come up in conversations lately in Vegas. It felt good to be back in Houlton. 

Sunday service this week is lead by Randi Bradbury and Ira Dyer titled “Happy Hunting,” an exploration into maintaining a positive mindset in a negative world. YouTube Channel content for this week 

is an

 our traditional Flower Communion service which includes special music on the organ and by the UU Flower Communion Singers (Unitunes).

We also welcome seven new members to our UUHoulton community and the minister shares a short homily for the occasion titled “Sidewalk Flower Garden.” You will find the link for the YouTube Service included below. 

We hope you can 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 zoom coffee hour

Time: Jun 9, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)       

Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87201599041?pwd=hon9Fb9YanmSn66Ya6thubiGDFdU9R.1
Meeting ID: 872 0159 9041

Passcode: 066387

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

June 9 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury & Ira Dyer

June 11 Meditation Group  4PM  (online)

June 15 Aroostook Pride Event in Presque Isle  

June 15 Houlton Coffeehouse:   Janice Santos

June 16 Sunday Service:  Jodi Scott

June 23 Sunday Service:  MaryAlice Mowry   (LGBTQ+ pride service)

June 25 Meditation Group  4PM   (online)

June 30 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, Houlton, ME 04730

Poetry Corner:

The Change

by Matthew P. Taylor

I can feel the change coming
Like growing pains
I feel the change in my bones
Pulling me
Stretching me
Forming me
Into the true I am 
Can you feel it?

The change in our bodies
As we adapt
Grow
Change
The weight shifting and molding to fit
This evolving body that we are in
Guided by faith that this too will pass
We can survive this because our ancestors survived
Can you feel them in your DNA?
You, a mixture of their particles that was molded to
fit your spirit
Change and shift
Mold and grow
Yet in some ways
we stay the same

In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times

Perspective to lift the blinders of our cultural moment. 

BY MARIA POPOVA

It has been a difficult year — politically, personally. Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.When I was growing up in Bulgaria, a great point of national pride — and we Bulgarians don’t have too many — was that an old Bulgarian folk song had sailed into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft, the 1977 mission NASA launched with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighborhood. Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.But the Voyager also had another, more romantic mission. Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and that Bulgarian folk song.

Bulgaria is an old country — fourteen centuries old, five of which were spent under Ottoman yoke. This song, sung by generations of shepherdesses, encodes in its stunning vocal harmonies both the suffering and the hope with which people lived daily during those five centuries. You need not speak Bulgarian in order to receive its message, its essence, its poetic truth beyond the factual details of history, in the very marrow of your being.

Carl Sagan, who envisioned the Golden Record, had precisely that in mind — he saw the music selection as something that would say about us what no words or figures could ever say, for the stated objective of the Golden Record was to convey our essence as a civilization to some other civilization — one that surmounts the enormous improbabilities of finding this tiny spacecraft adrift amid the cosmic infinitude, of having the necessary technology to decode its message and the necessary consciousness to comprehend it. 

But the record’s unstated objective, which I see as the far more important one, was to mirror what is best of humanity back to itself in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when we seemed to have forgotten who we are to each other and what it means to share this fragile, symphonic planet. 

When the Voyager completed its exploratory mission and took the last photograph — of Neptune — NASA commanded that the cameras be shut off to conserve energy. But Carl Sagan had the idea of turning the spacecraft around and taking one final photograph — of Earth. Objections were raised — from so great a distance and at so low a resolution, the resulting image would have absolutely no scientific value. But Sagan saw the larger poetic worth — he took the request all the way up to NASA’s administrator and charmed his way into permission.

And so, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, just after Bulgaria’s Communist regime was finally defeated after nearly half a century of reign, the Voyager took the now-iconic image of Earth known as the “Pale Blue Dot” — a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his beautiful “Pale Blue Dot” monologue from Cosmos — that great masterwork of perspective, a timeless reminder that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was… every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician” lived out their lives on this pale blue dot. And every political conflict, every war we’ve ever fought, we have waged over a fraction of this grainy pixel barely perceptible against the cosmic backdrop of endless lonesome space. 

In the cosmic blink of our present existence, as we stand on this increasingly fragmented pixel, it is worth keeping the Voyager in mind as we find our capacity for perspective constricted by the stranglehold of our cultural moment. It is worth questioning what proportion of the news this year, what imperceptible fraction, was devoted to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for the landmark detection of gravitational waves — the single most significant astrophysical discovery since Galileo. After centuries of knowing the universe only by sight, only by looking, we can now listen to it and hear echoes of events that took place billions of lightyears away, billions of years ago — events that made the stardust that made us. 

I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal 

both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.

Early lupine in the flower communion basket  (2024)

Welcoming new members at the Flower Communion Service 

Alien glasses out take…

Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continuesPrayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its seventh monthPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for those affected by the recent tornados in the Mid-West and American SouthPrayers concerning the protests and turmoil on US college campuses Prayers for the city of Houston after the recent storm Prayers for Iowa after recent tornados Prayers for those affected by the ongoing heat waves (India, Pakistan, American Southwest) 

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 delusion.