I came across this photograph in my files showing the Houlton Unitarian Church in late summer. I’m not sure of the exact date, but it was taken before 1974. That is when the large tree to the right of the front walkway was replaced by two young maples on the front lawn planted by Rev. Scott Alexander who was minister at the time. Those trees have since been removed (they grew so large they covered the front visage of the building) and the cherry tree is now the dominant tree on the left corner of the church. The original tree on the right (as seen in this photo) framed the building magnificently for many years.Our Ingathering Service (the UU version of Homecoming) is Sunday in the sanctuary. There will be special music, organ, congregational singing and a water ceremony. Please bring a small bottle of water you have collected from special places nearby or far away during your summer adventures. We individually pour waters into our collective basin and reflect upon our life as a spiritual community. The four elements will be represented on the altar as we explore our relatedness to each other and the world around us. Following the service there will be a lawn party on the church grounds. Lawn party hats are encouraged for the occasion. Please bring something to share for an outdoor potluck and a comfy lawn chair. A grill will be available and hot dogs provided. If we get rain, the lawn party will move indoors to the church basement. Hope to see you there!  YouTube 

Channel content for this week is a service led by Joshua Atkinson titled “Embracing the Tapestry of Consciousness: A Labor Day Weekend Reflection.” Joshua even adds an instrumental solo on his hand pan. We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.
See you at Ingathering!

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)

THE LINK WILL GO OUT LATER IN THE DAY 

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour & check-inTime: Sep 8, 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

Sept 8 Sunday Service:  Ingathering Service     Rev. David Hutchinson                Lawn party following the service  (potluck)

Sept 14 LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the cafe     12 Noon

Sept 14 Houlton Coffeehouse   7PM  

Sept 15    Sunday Service:  TBA

Sept 22Sunday Service:  David Hutchinson

Sept 24Meditation Group   4PM   (online)

Sept 29 Sunday Service:  TBA

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

Message from the UUA for Ingathering 

Beloveds,

It is my joy to bring you greetings, celebration, and welcome as we lean into a new congregational year. We are in a time of great transition and great need in the world, and this can put immense pressures on all of us. The work that lies before us is a long journey work and how we are with one another, how we support each other, will have everything to do with how we meet the moment. 

In my first year as your UUA President, we’ve laid groundwork together for new initiatives like the Climate Justice Revival that is coming at the end of September, we’ve carried forward ongoing processes like responding to the Widening the Circle of Concern report from our Commission on Institutional Change, and we just held a historic General Assembly, all virtual, this past June.

After a democratic process involving thousands of Unitarian Universalists discussing our faith, values, and core theology, delegates at our 2024 GA voted decisively to approve a new statement that articulates those historically grounded promises and commitments in accessible and compelling invitational ways. One of the most significant actions we took at GA this past year was to approve, with overwhelming votes of support, our Business Resolutionembracing Transgender, Nonbinary and Intersex and Gender Diverse people is a fundamental expression of UU religious values. This vote – your vote as Unitarian Universalists – solidifies and strengthens our ministry to and with Transgender, Nonbinary, and Intersex members of our communities. And it strengthens all of us in our commitments to our liberal and liberating faith.  

At this time of ingathering and beginning again, this time of renewal, our call is not to do more things. It is instead to be together to make a commitment to our communities. The simple act of joining together in community is a significant expression of faithfulness in such divided times, and it lies at the heart of how we practice our Unitarian Universalism.

Welcome, Beloveds, to the promise of a new congregational year.

Yours, 

Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt, UUA President 

Through the Gateway of the Senses

Francesca Fremantle on sight, sound, touch, and other sensory miracles that occur when we cleanse our perceptions of grasping and attachment.

FRANCESCA FREMANTLE

William Blake famously wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite, for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”

That purified perception, looking out into the “immense world of delight” that Blake communicated to us through his paintings and poetry, sounds very much like the sacred vision practiced in Vajrayana Buddhism, the experience of everything around us as a pure land. It is a realm beyond our ordinary senses, yet one which our intuition instinctively recognizes, and which comes upon us from time to time like a gift.

How is it that we have become separated from this realm, so much so that spirituality is often thought to be unrelated to sensory experience, or even opposed to it? A Dzogchen poem tells us: “Appearances are not mistaken; error comes through grasping.” In other words, the senses and sense-objects are no problem.

Texts such as these describe how mind can either rest in the awakened state of openness, clarity, and sensitivity, or suddenly feel afraid of such vastness, seeing itself as separate. This is said to occur “in the beginning,” but it is taking place at the most subtle and hidden level of our mind at every instant.

This is the root of all confusion, the moment in which grasping arises. Grasping is both internal and external. Internally, it creates the sense of an unchanging “I.” externally, it projects the concept of “other,” seeing everything as a challenge to its existence, either a threat to be overcome, an object of desire to be seized, or some- thing to be ignored in the hope that it will go away.

Having deceived ourselves into believing in the existence of ego as subject, we project a world of objects. In the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s graphic expression,we have “solidified space.” Instead, he suggests, we could dance with space as our partner. In this dance we ourselves are part of the ever-changing magical display of appearances, ungraspable, transparent, and luminous as rainbows, which arise spontaneously and unceasingly as the creative activity of space.

The buddhas, who remain always in this state, do not need the senses; they experience directly with jnana, the five wisdoms. These include the ability to see everything throughout all of space and time simultaneously, as in a mirror, and at the same time to focus on each individual part of the display.

For us, though, the senses are part of our manifestation as sentient beings, and, in the way we normally experience them, they are obstructions to genuine knowledge. Trungpa Rinpoche called them “unnecessary complications of existence.” Yet he wrote of another way of experiencing, in which:

All the miracles of sight, sound, and mind
Are the five wisdoms and the five buddhas.

For the doors of perception can be cleansed. Blake said, “The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” He gives us a clue as to how this can be accomplished in his much-loved verse:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Infinity. Eternity. These are the words Blake uses to point toward an indescribable state where space and time collapse. Space (or place): the sense of location, direction, and distance. Time: the sense of flowing from the past to the future. These are powerful basic assumptions that we make about the world, but that in fact only limit our knowledge.

For we do not really know what the world is at all. We each create our own world through our sense perceptions and mind, with all its conditioning, memories, expectations, reactions, and so forth. When we look at a tree, we do not actually see a tree. We know only our own experience of it, arising from the complex physical processes of sight and the equally complex operations of our mind. A “tree” is a concept of our human consciousness. Blake would have seen its spiritual form, perhaps as an angel; this is an intermediate level, corresponding to the Buddhist sambhogakaya imagery. Behind that is the ultimate level, the totally mysterious and ungraspable aspect of openness, the inherent nonexistence of all that seems to exist.

Yet it is only through the senses that we can penetrate beyond the surface appearance of things. The Buddha himself gave a meditation on the senses to the wanderer Bahiya:

In the seen, there is only the seen,
In the heard, there is only the heard,
In the sensed, there is only the sensed,
In the cognized, there is only the cognized.

Meditating in this way, the Buddha said, Bahiya should realize that “There is no thing here … no thing there… nor in any place between the two. This alone is the end of suffering.” There is no longer the illusion of a grasping ego, nor any object that can be grasped. There is simply pure perception itself—“the miracles of sight, sound, and mind” that are the living expression of the primordial awakened state.

We can begin to move ourselves in this direction by focusing on the simplicity and immediacy of our perceptions—just the bare experience of sound, color, shape, smell, taste, and bodily sensation. Then we can notice the ways in which we obscure this directness: how we immediately label every sensation (how unsettling we find it to catch a glimpse of something and have no idea what it is!); how we continually react with attachment, aversion, or indifference to whatever occurs; how our expectations and preconceptions affect what we perceive; and how habituation dulls our responses.

But since awakening is our natural and original state, ego is not nearly as powerful as it thinks it is. our day-to-day experiences are never entirely confused. Although we may perceive the world in a distorted manner, even that distortion points to the reality that lies behind it. Trungpa Rinpoche often spoke of “natural symbolism,” meaning that everything points to this deeper truth of its own being. He said that the universe is always trying to tell us something, but we do not listen. or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in a Christian context, but in words so beautiful that they surely transcend religious differences:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flare out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

We all experience moments of heightened perception, when it seems the universe has a message for us, one that is filled with profound but inexpressible meaning. suddenness, the sense of being taken by surprise, before ego has a chance to put up its barriers, is often important here. Any of the five bodily senses can open this door for us. The sense of smell, in particular, is well-known for arousing deep-buried memories, which, if we let go and do not grasp at them, can open up the dimension of timelessness. such experiences are often intensely emotional, and we should not forget that in Buddhism the mind too is a sense-organ, whose objects are thoughts, feelings, memories, and so forth. These too can act as symbols.

Through the gateway of our senses, we can enter a realm infinitely wider and deeper, where the limitations of time and space dissolve and the whole universe is present in one moment, in one single point.

Forms are released from the constraints of solidity; floating in dimensionless space, they become transparent and interpenetrating.

Colors glow with a power that transforms our ordinary way of seeing, or draw us into limitless depths where the sense of self and other becomes lost.

Music frees itself from the laws of time, suspended in a beginningless and endless stillness, where every tone can sound simultaneously yet individually.

Physical sensation escapes the limits of the personal, so that one cannot tell where one’s own body ends and the body of another, or of the world, begins. We feel that we have touched some essence of pure sensation in itself. Because of our human form, they manifest to us as sound, color, touch and so on, but they really lie beyond the characteristics of the individual senses. The senses are its channels or its messengers, but they cannot contain it.

Marcel Proust is the author who has perhaps written most perceptively about this hidden dimension. In his great novel In Search of Lost Time, all the senses appear in this way. The most famous example is the taste of tea and the little madeleine cake, which eventually leads the narrator into the lost world of his past. He is overwhelmed by the power and mystery of the experience:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather

This essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature.

In the final minutes of Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner hints at this state in his music and poetry (words that otherwise seem incomprehensible) when Isolde perceives the essence of the dead Tristan as he dissolves into the five elements. First she sees him become a body of light, then she is submerged in waves of sound and billows of sweetly scented air. The senses merge together as she surrenders herself to the waves of pure sensation. she does not know whether to breathe them in, to listen to them, drink them, or dive under them into “the billowing space of the world-breath.”

Isolde’s final words, “highest bliss” (in German, höchste Lust), could even be seen as a translation of the sanskrit mahasukha, a Vajrayana term referring to the “great bliss” of the awakened state. This has nothing to do with our ordinary idea of happiness. It transcends joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. It is the ultimate form of responsiveness or sensitivity, entirely free from bias toward attachment or aversion. every sensation, every movement of thought and feeling, even those that we normally consider painful, can produce mahasukha. To experience perceptions in this way would be like making love to the world, which is indeed exactly what Wagner’s music suggests.

Experiences such as these are glimpses of awakening, which may reveal themselves to us unexpectedly at any time but which we are unable to stabilize and sustain. Indeed, in our present state, we could not bear such intensity for long. As George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

That which gives us the greatest joy can become the most powerful means of letting go of grasping. This is why the intensity of sexual pleasure, along with the surrender to the being of another that it requires, is used in Vajrayana as a means to awakening. But at the same time, such experiences can bind us more tightly to delusion, as we grasp at them ever more desperately and try to repeat them, not caring who gets hurt in our search for satisfaction.

Nevertheless, our body, mind, and senses are the only means we have to practice dharma, and to develop sacred vision. Insofar as mahasukha can be experienced by beings in the six realms, it comes through the body and senses. The Hevajra Tantra asks: “Without the body, how could there be bliss? one could not speak of bliss.” Only the element of grasping needs to be abandoned. Then (and only then!), as the Guhyasamaja Tantra says, “By devoting oneself to the enjoyment of all the senses, one can quickly reach buddhahood.”

FRANCESCA FREMANTLE

Francesca Fremantle received her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She is a Buddhist teacher, scholar, and translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan works and was a student of Chögyam Trungpa starting in the late 1960s. Together with Trungpa Rinpoche, she translated The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She is also the author of Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She lives in London, England.
Photos from last week’s Ecumenical Service in the Amphitheater:

Christoph shares a reading representing the UUs 

Celebrating God’s creation and the bounty of harvestMac showing off a UU squash…

We also had a wedding at the church last weekend. The flowers were abundant and the church looked beautiful!

Joshua playing the hand pan in last week’s Sunday Service.

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 CanadaPrayers for those affected by the tragic school shooting in Georgia earlier this week.Prayers for those affected by the tragic school shooting in Maryland on Friday.

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.