Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton, Maine, 10:00AM Sunday Service Support Page, June 30th, 2024 - Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton Maine

on June 30, 2024

June 30, 2024

Wild roses on the Meduxnekeag (2024)

The July 4th holiday is approaching, and along with it, many of the events and activities that make Houlton a great place to live (or visit).

Midnight Madness is one such event, and once again, we will have the canopies set up on the church front lawn and we will be serving curry (vegan and chicken) along with assorted iced drinks and slushies. The Cup Cafe will also be open serving chili and our full line of espresso drinks inside. See more details below. The fireworks display downtown at 9PM is one of the highlights of Midnight Madness.

This Sunday we wrap up our year long theme on EarthCare with part 10 of the series titled “Summary Points.” This week’s Support Page includes a summer reflection by environmentalist Rachel Carson written on the Maine coast. Our connection to nature and our world is an enduring experience that extends throughout time and place. It seems like an appropriate writing to conclude our study and move forward to what lies ahead into a world of wonderment.

YouTube Channel content for this week is our special LGBTQ+ Pride Service led by MaryAlice Mowry. Stephen Kinney assists with

special music by Rosalind Morgan and Nicholas Foster. It was a truly amazing, meaningful and colorful service.

The title of MaryAlice’s message is “The Gift of Pride.” 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

MIDNIGHT MADNESS

July 3, 2024 Wednesday Night 4-9 PM

The Cup Cafe & UUHoulton Front Lawn

Join us for Midnight Madness at The Cup Cafe and the UUHoulton front lawn. We have our famous curry available (vegan and chicken) which has become a Midnight Madness must-have. I don’t know how many years we’ve been doing this, but we’re doing it again. Get there early before we sell out! The cafe will also be open inside with chili and vegan chili available to eat in or to go. Curry outside. Chili inside. There will also be hot and cold beverages, iced lattes and slushies to cool your cravings. If you don’t have a total solar eclipse t-shirt we still have them available. Get one at Midnight Madness!

Celebrate Midnight Madness.

Feel the buzz…

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)

– YouTube youtu.be

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hourTime: Jun 30, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87201599041?pwd=hon9Fb9YanmSn66Ya6thubiGDFdU9R.1
Meeting ID: 872 0159 9041Passcode: 066387

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

June 30 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

July 3 Midnight Madness 4PM-9PM

July 7 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson & Janice Santos

July 9 Meditation Group 4PM (online)

July 13 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 Noon

July 13 Houlton Coffeehouse Open-Mic Night

July 14 Sunday Service: Open-Pulpit Service

July 20 Nirvana Tribute Night 7PM (Cup Cafe)

July 21 Sunday Service: Bill White

July 23 Meditation Group 4PM (online)

July 28 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

EarthCare Study Material:

“In Praise of Indirect Consequences”

by Rebecca Solnit

Activism routinely consists of a movement, a manifesto a group demanding something and not getting it, at least not at first. Too often, people seem to think that if there are not immediate and obvious consequences, there’s failure. In reality, what happens in response is often fore subtle, delayed, unpredictable, incremental, and indirect – and yet still valuable and significant, sometimes more so – than simple formulas and short timelines account for.

The climate crisis is an emergency. We need some very direct action and some very big change, and we need it fast. If you look at all the small pieces – this wind farm launched, this pipeline defeated, these trillions divested, this public engaged, this election won, these measure passed – it adds up a lot. The struggle is long, and boundaries are important. Still, a huge shift form where we were a decade ago, in terms of broadly shared understandings and agendas, the improvement and implementation of renewable energy and electrification, the growth of the movement not just in scale but in sophistication and intersectionality.

What we aspire to seems hard to reach, but the improbable, for better or worse, is not the impossible. An essay on activist leadership taught me, “Moses Maimonides, the Jewish scholar of the twelfth century, argued that hope is belief in the ‘plausibility of the possible’ as opposed to the ‘necessity of the probable.’ While it is always ‘probable’ that Goliath will win, it is also true that sometimes David wins, a sense of the ‘possible’ that we experience in our own lives as well. Hope emerges from this sense of possibility, freeing us from the shackles of probability.’

The story is not finished and we do not know how it ends. But we can help decide that. Doing the work matters. Knowing how and why it matters, why it’s worth it, means including its indirect consequences and bringing that along with it. The hard work ahead.

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.

Pride Cake!!