on July 28, 2024

“UU Cherries”The last days of July are winding down and there are still cherries on our tree on the front lawn. It’s been a bumper year, as they say, and there have been plenty of cherries for UUs, birds and passersby alike who happen to stop for a moment and pick the fruit. The cherry tree, which was planted twenty years ago, has become part of our summer culture and a delight to all who partake.
The minister leads the service this Sunday with organ music by Dale Holden on a hymn. The title of the message is “The Practice of Nature; How Nature Can Be a Model for Spiritual Development.” YouTube Channel content for this week

is an open pulpit service titled “Ripples and Ramblins” as members of our group share their insights, poems and reflections. Ripple by The Grateful Dead was one of the featured songs. The version we used was by Playing For Change which included Jimmy Buffet and David Crosby on vocals with The Grateful Dead’s original drummer Bill Kreutzmann joining them. The lyrics are included below.

We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.

Ripple

by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung

Would you hear my voice come through the music?

Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken

Perhaps they’re better left unsung

I don’t know, don’t really care

Let there be songs to fill the air

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand, if your cup be empty

If your cup is full, may it be again

Let it be known there is a fountain

That was not made by the hands of men

There is a road, no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night

And if you go, no one may follow

That path is for your steps alone

You who choose to lead must follow

But if you fall you fall alone

If you should stand then who’s to guide you?

If I knew the way I would take you home
Enjoy summer everyone!

In Ministry,

Dave
Connell House & Old County Courthouse Tour

Woodstock, New Brunswick

August 9 10 AM – 2PM

We have selected a date for our Woodstock day trip to the Connell House and Old County Courthouse. It is on Friday, August 9th. We will meet at the church around 10AM to organize a carpool with the tour starting at 11AM (Eastern Standard Time) in Woodstock. After the tour we plan to have lunch in Woodstock at The River Restaurant. There is a sign up list in the coffee room if you would like to join us. You can also register by sending me an email dave@backwoodsblog.com

or Steve Kinney skinney4467@gmail.com

Organ Concert July 28, Sunday Afternoon @4PMHoulton United Methodist Church 57 Military Street (right next door)
Ryan Slocum

Dear Friends,
I am pleased to be writing to let you know about an organ concert scheduled for Sunday, July 28, from 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. at the Houlton United Methodist Church.

The organist is Ryan Slocum, a senior at the University of Southern Maine Osher School of Music. Ryan will be presenting a program of sacred music, including favorite hymns, arranged for organ and piano. He is a very talented keyboardist and arranger. Jacob Hotham, a freshman at USM Osher School of Music, will also be playing a few hymns on the organ, and I will join Ryan for the organ and piano duets.

I would be grateful if you would share the poster and concert information with your networks and anyone you think might be interested. The concert is free and a goodwill offering will be taken to support these wonderful, talented, and earnest music students.

Kind regards,
Susan Laurence

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 hour & check-inTime: Jul 28, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/83077271581?pwd=NAvo65oG1iInvnNdmwbMTrrOsdih6n.1
Meeting ID: 830 7727 1581Passcode: 689058

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

July 28 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Aug 4 Sunday Service: Stephen KinneyAug 9 Woodstock Day Trip 10 AM

Aug 11 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Aug 17 LGBTQ+ luncheon 12 NoonAug 17 Summer Concert at Cafe 7-9PM Mark Mandeville and Raiaane Richards

Aug 18 Sunday Service: Bill White

Aug 20 Meditation Group 4PM (online)

Aug 25 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!

Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton, 61 Military Street, Houlton Maine 04730

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world.

Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016), who thought deeply and passionately about the cracks in democracy and its redemptions, shines a sidewise gleam on this eternal challenge of the human spirit in a couple of pieces found in his Book of Longing (public library) — the collection of poems, drawings, and prose meditations composed over the course of the five years he spent living in a Zen monastery.

In a timeless passage that now reads prophetic, he writes:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.

In such periods, he goes on to intimate, love — that most intimate and inward of human labors, that supreme instrument for magnifying the light between us and lighting up the world — is an act of courage and resistance.

Cohen takes up the subject of what resistance really means in another piece from the book — a poem titled “SOS 1995,” that is really an anthem for all times, a lifeline for all periods of helplessness and uncertainty, personal or political, and a cautionary parable about the theater of authority, about the price of giving oneself over to its false comfort. He writes:

Take a long time with your anger,
sleepyhead.
Don’t waste it in riots.
Don’t tangle it with ideas.
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune.
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here —
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain.
The Devil ties my tongue.
I’m speaking to you,
“friend of my scribbled life.”
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invincibly.
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know —
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
You are listening to Radio Resistance.