Old postcard of the Houlton Unitarian Church This photograph of the Houlton Unitarian Church was taken sometime in the first half of the 20th century and appeared as part of a Houlton postcard series. I think 38 is the postcard number and not the year, 1938. As you can see, the building has not changed much since its early days. There is the notable addition of the accessibility ramp on the northeast corner of the building, and, of course, our new heat pump along the same wall. The rooftop of the former neighboring house on Kelleran is also visible, which is now our parking lot. Things change, but sometimes, not that much.
The minister leads the Sunday Service this week and the message is titled “Tea Mind.” In a stressful and jittery world, a calm state of mind is sometimes difficult to maintain. Tea mind is an attempt to bring balance and increased awareness to our living. In today’s Support Page you will find an article on “How to Drink a Mindful Cup of Tea. YouTube Channel content for this week is an open pulpit service. I believe this is the third one we’ve done this summer.
There is no specific theme or topic for the service, we’ll consider it “summer reflections.” We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.
Enjoy summer everyone!
In Ministry,
Dave
Several UUs attended the Ecumenical Service last year which was alongside the river at the boat launch.This year it is right next door at the amphitheater.
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 & check-inTime: Aug 25, 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
Aug 25 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
Sept 1 Sunday Service: Joshua Atkinson
Sept 3 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Sept 8 Sunday Service: Ingathering Service Rev. 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
How to Drink a Mindful Cup of Tea
A cup of tea or coffee is a nice break. Drinking it mindfully is a real break. Joseph Emet teaches us this five-step practice.
19 MAY 2024
Here is a homemade koan for drinking tea: Who is enjoying this tea?
Ask yourself this question with each sip. When you encounter that person, let them go. You need a break from their story now and then. Otherwise your tea break will not really be a break at all.
Constantly rehearsing the story of our roles, obligations, and commitments wears us down. Yes, we may be mothers, doctors, servers, or office workers, but at the core, we are more than these things. We are “breath-breathing humans,” as the Sufi poet Rumi said. Whatever your story, you are more than that story. Get in touch—and stay in touch—with the breath-breathing human you are as you enjoy your tea.
“Just this,” remind yourself with each sip. “Just this.” Sit and breathe like a flower in a meadow, enjoying the sun.
If you have ever watched one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s talks, you have probably witnessed elements of tea meditation. Halfway through a talk, Thich Nhat Hanh will pause and pour himself a cup of tea. Then, as several hundred listeners watch his every move, he will slowly raise the cup to his lips and enjoy a few unhurried sips. He sometimes holds the cup with both hands as if to illustrate that his whole attention is on it.
Thich Nhat Hanh truly takes a break when he drinks his tea. He is not using the time to prepare his next topic. Paradoxically, taking a true break is more effective than using the time to think of your next move. As you disengage even momentarily from your surface mind, you access deeper layers of your self to include in your discourse or journey. That allows you to talk, move, and act more authentically as a whole person.
Thich Nhat Hanh can do this in the presence of hundreds. See if you can do it when you are having tea with someone (or alone, for that matter). Here’s a five-step practice you can do once your tea is ready.
1. Pause
Take a few moments to sit with your cup of tea before you start drinking it. You want this time to be a meditation break as well as a tea break. Even if you meditated that morning, by 3 p.m. it’s a dim memory. With a few conscious breaths now, you can reconnect with that meditative space.
2. Touch the interbeing nature of the tea
See the soil, rain, and sun that went into creating this drink, and the women and men whose hands harvested, prepared, packaged, shipped, and sold it. “The entire universe can be seen in a flower,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Love Letter to the Earth. This vision is rewarding in itself, and is good training for seeing everything with the same eyes, including the person sitting in front of you.
3. Touch your own interbeing nature
Your stress, happiness, and unhappiness are made up of your opinions and attitudes. In turn, your state of mind affects how others feel around you. Let go of your opinions and attitudes. Feel your stress dissolve. Feel it float away. Feel it drop to the ground.
4. Enjoy the first sips
“To be here and now, and enjoy the present moment is our most important task,” says Thich Nhat Hanh in Being Peace. Let the aroma of the tea fill the space of your mind until there is no room for thoughts. Let the thinking mind become a tea- enjoying mind.
5. Relax and expand your vision
Be silent for the first few sips. Notice how expanding the context of your vision puts your momentary concerns and problems in perspective. When you are relaxed, you are more creative and see more possibilities in each situation. See this moment as an important and productive part of your day. If you can step outside the box for a few moments now, you will return to your task with a fresh mind.
Breaks for meditation throughout the day act as pressure valves for emptying your mind and finding freedom. So you can apply these steps to other activities in your daily life, such as eating dinner, washing dishes, or even riding the bus. They are all great opportunities to practice stillness in motion, our natural condition on the spinning earth.
Joseph Emet is a Buddhist teacher and author of Finding the Blue Sky: A Mindful Approach to Choosing Happiness Here and Now (TarcherPerigee).
Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”
Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.
It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.
The paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) channels this idea with uncommon loveliness and lucidity in one of the essays found in his superb 1969 collection The Unexpected Universe(public library).
Writing at the dawn of the space age, when the human animal with its “restless inner eye” first reached for the stars, Eiseley observes:
The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.
Picking up Dante’s thread, Eiseley offers a sweeping meditation on what ennobles our small stardusted lives, beginning with the story of a seemingly mundane accident that thrusts him, as sudden shocks to the system can often do, toward transcendence.
Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself facedown on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling. And then, with that wonderful capacity we humans have, he surprises himself:
Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.”
The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems.
I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.
It is often like this, in some small sudden experience, that we awaken to reality in all its immensity and complexity. Eiseley’s blood-lensed realization is elemental and profound: We are not the sum total of the tiny constituent parts that compose us — we are only ever-shifting and regenerating parts operating under the illusion of a sum we call a self. Any such awareness — whether we attain it through science or art or another spiritual practice — is an act of unselfing, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perfect term. And every act of unselfing is an act of love — it is how we contact, how we channel, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” It is the self — the prison of it, the illusion of it — that keeps us trapped in lives of less-than-love. But a self is a story, which means we can always change the story to change, to dismantle, to be set free from the self — and it might not even require a bloody face.
Observing that while other animals live out their lives by obeying their nature, the human animal has the freedom to define and redefine its own humanity, Eiseley considers both the gift and the danger of our malleable and impressionable self-definition. A decade before James Baldwin admonished in his superb conversation with Margaret Mead that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and half a century before Maya Angelou wrote in her staggering poem to the cosmos that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Eiseley reminds us of something fundamental that we so easily forget, so easily abdicate, in these times of social imaging and performative selfing:
To the degree that we let others project upon us erroneous or unbalanced conceptions of our natures, we may unconsciously reshape our own image to less pleasing forms. It is one thing to be “realistic,” as many are fond of saying, about human nature. It is another thing entirely to let that consideration set limits to our spiritual aspirations or to precipitate us into cynicism and despair. We are protean in many things, and stand between extremes. There is still great room for the observation of John Donne, made over three centuries ago, however, that “no man doth refine and exalt Nature to the heighth it would beare.”
With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets. (A particularly countercultural point, given he is writing in the middle of the Cold War — an ideology of hate, like all war, under which humans on both sides are taught that those on the other are devils, that power and not peace is the pinnacle of our humanity.) Drawing on his singular access to deep time as a scientist who studies fossils long predating Homo sapiens, he considers what made us human — what keeps us human:
A great wealth of intellectual diversity, and consequent selective mating, based upon mutual attraction, would emerge from the dark storehouse of nature. The cruel and the gentle would sit at the same fireside, dreaming already in the Stone Age the different dreams they dream today.
[…]
Some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved — they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here — not with the ax, not with the bow — man* fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds — the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
Millions of years later, Eiseley finds himself one of the lovers as he befriends a large old seagull, grey as himself. Day after day, he sits on an old whiskey crate half-buried in the sand at the edge of the ocean — that crucible of life, that ultimate lens on its meaning — and watches the gull. “I came to look for this bird,” he recounts, “as though we shared some sane, enormously simple secret amidst a little shingle of hard stones and broken beach.” And then, one day, the gull is gone.
With an eye to what remains — which is what always remains when something or someone we love leaves — Eiseley writes:
Here, I thought, is where I shall abide my ending, in the mind at least. Here where the sea grinds coral and bone alike to pebbles, and the crabs come in the night for the recent dead. Here where everything is transmuted and transmutes, but all is living or about to live.
It was here that I came to know the final phase of love in the mind of man — the phase beyond the evolutionists’ meager concentration upon survival. Here I no longer cared about survival — I merely loved. And the love was meaningless, as the harsh Victorian Darwinists would have understood it or even, equally, those harsh modern materialists… I felt, sitting in that desolate spot upon my whiskey crate, a love without issue, tenuous, almost disembodied. It was a love for an old gull, for wild dogs playing in the surf, for a hermit crab in an abandoned shell. It was a love that had been growing through the unthinking demands of childhood, through the pains and rapture of adult desire. Now it was breaking free, at last, of my worn body, still containing but passing beyond those other loves.
Here, in this scientist’s farewell to life, we find an echo of Dante and of Larkin’s timeless insistence that “what will survive of us is love,” we find the first truth of life, which is also its final truth. (This too is why we, fallible and vulnerable to the bone, ought to love anyway.)
Cathy Quist made a delicious Maine blueberry crumble dessert for coffee hour last week. (It was still warm when she brought itover from her house next door.) I tried to get a photo, but by the time I got back with my camera it was mostly gone!
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 Prayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for those affected by the ongoing heat waves (India, Pakistan, Middle East, Europe and North America) Prayers for those affected by Hurricane Beryl and Debby Prayers for those affected by the forrest fires in western United States and Canada
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.
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