October Colors at the Unitarian Universalist Front Door (2023)

The autumn colors are dissipating quickly (depending where you look) and late October is transitioning to gray and brown. Just this week I removed the large container of mums from the front steps of the church leaving our front entrance a bit bare, for now. In this week’s Sunday Service we observe Samhain, the pagan festival marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of the “darker half” of the year. Our CUUPS group at UUHoulton will lead the service, facilitated by Leigh Griffith, Fred Griffith and Jodi Scott. CUUPS is the abbreviation for Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, which identifies with the precepts of classical or contemporary Paganism celebrating the sacred circle of life and guiding people to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. All are welcome.

YouTube Channel content for this week is a continuation of our theme for the year (The Science of Religion and UU Shared Values) with Part Three; Love at the Center. We look at dynamics of the spiritual life; in this case, the two dimensions of religion. You will find study material related to the topic included in last week’s Support Page from Love at the Center; Unitarian Universalist Theologies. The minister also has another rock/crystal to facilitate our discussion and practice. We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.Enjoy the week-end!

In Ministry,

Dave

Arts and Craft Show

Saturday, November 2 9AM-3PM
For more details or to reserve a vendor table speak with Betty White.

During the month of October we are designating our weekly Pishke donations for two specific projects; on October 13 our donation went to the Maliseet Tribe Food Bank and on October 20 and 27 our donations will go to the UUA Disaster Relief Fund for recent hurricane victims. The Pishke is our UUHoulton effort to collect funds for local needs in our community and our own group as well as specified social justice needs. Our shared life benefits us all.

UUA Disaster Relief Fund

The scale of destruction in the wake of Hurricane Helene has been utterly devastating to many communities in the southeastern United States. Some Unitarian Universalist congregations have been seriously impacted and others are still trying to assess the damage. You can help support Unitarian Universalists and their communities as they recover from this storm by giving generously to the UUA’s Disaster Relief Fund.

Sunday plate collections are an important way to support this fund and we encourage all congregations that are able, to consider taking up such a collection. Disaster Relief Fund donations become grants to Unitarian Universalists, their congregations, and their communities. All gifts granted in the course of immediate crisis response will be extended directly to impacted communities. While an immediate collection is ideal given the immediacy of the need, please consider a gift or dedicated collection at any point, now or in the coming months.

Our hearts are with everyone struggling to get through these days and begin recovery efforts, especially our siblings in LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, who have consistently been the least supported by local institutions. We know that some UU communities experiencing lesser impacts have already been organizing support for more directly-impacted folks. Thank you for being a beacon of hope for so many.

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: Oct 27, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87336332721?pwd=PZwnNux5R5wVRzdMSQDWoaWtLHPHtS.1
Meeting ID: 873 3633 2721Passcode: 313710

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

Oct 27 Sunday Service: UUHoulton CUUPS Group

Nov 2 Arts and Craft Show 9AM-3PM UU fellowship hall Food and Refreshments available in The Cup Cafe

Nov 3 Sunday Service: Brigitte Rivers

Nov 5 Meditation Group 4PM (online)Nov 10 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Nov 16 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 noon

Nov 17 Sunday Service: Pledge Drive Kick-Off Sunday Group-Led Service Potluck Meal Following the Service

Nov 19 Meditation Group 4PM (online)

Nov 24 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Nov 24 Art Class @The Cup 1-3PM

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 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

Pema Chödrön’s Wisdom to Wake Up to Your World

Pema Chödrön shares why the simple practice of taking a break from our usual thoughts is the most important thing we can do with our lives.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

15 OCTOBER 2024

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time.

Awakened mind exists in our surroundings, but how often are we actually touching in with it?

What is the best use of each day of our lives? In one very short day, each of us would become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could bury all these qualities more deeply and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon.

Every time a habitual pattern gets strong, every time we feel caught up or on automatic pilot, we could see it as an opportunity to burn up negative karma. Rather than as a problem, we could see it as our karma ripening, which gives us an opportunity to burn up karma, or at least weaken our karmic propensities. But that’s hard to do. When we realize that we are hooked, that we’re on automatic pilot, what do we do next? That is a central question for the practitioner.

One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.

Before I talk more about consciously pausing or creating a gap, it might be helpful to appreciate the gap that already exists in our environment. Awakened mind exists in our surroundings — in the air and the wind, in the sea, in the land, in the animals — but how often are we actually touching in with it? Are we poking our heads out of our cocoons long enough to actually taste it, experience it, let it shift something in us, let it penetrate our conventional way of looking at things?

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate.

Whatever it is you are doing, the magic, the sacredness, the expansiveness, the stillness, stays with you.

Or maybe not. Maybe you are already caught up in the work you have to do that day, the projects you haven’t finished from the day before. Maybe you worry about something that has to be done, or hasn’t been done, or a letter that you just received. Maybe you are caught up in busy mind, caught up in hesitation or fear, depression or discouragement. In other words, you’ve gone into your cocoon.

For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day to day. Nevertheless, if you connect with the blessings of your surroundings — the stillness, the magic, and the power — maybe that feeling can stay with you and you can go into your day with it. Whatever it is you are doing, the magic, the sacredness, the expansiveness, the stillness, stays with you. When you are in touch with that larger environment, it can cut through your cocoon mentality.

On the other hand, I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing — to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.

You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!

The great fourteenth-century Tibetan teacher Longchenpa talked about our useless and meaningless focus on the details, getting so caught up we don’t see what is in front of our nose. He said that this useless focus extends moment by moment into a continuum, and days, months, and even whole lives go by. Do you spend your whole time just thinking about things, distracting yourself with your own mind, completely lost in thought? I know this habit so well myself. It is the human predicament. It is what the Buddha recognized and what all the living teachers since then have recognized. This is what we are up against.

“Yes, but…,” we say. Yes, but I have a job to do, there is a deadline, there is an endless amount of e-mail I have to deal with, I have cooking and cleaning and errands. How are we supposed to juggle all that we have to do in a day, in a week, in a month, without missing our precious opportunity to experience who we really are? Not only do we have a precious human life, but that precious human life is made up of precious human days, and those precious human days are made up of precious human moments. How we spend them is really important. Yes, we do have jobs to do; we don’t just sit around meditating all day, even at a retreat center. We have the real nitty-gritty of relationships — how we live together, how we rub up against each other. Going off by ourselves, getting away from the people we think are distracting us, won’t solve everything. Part of our karma, part of our dilemma, is learning to work with the feelings that relationships bring up. They provide opportunities to do the most important thing too.

If you have spent the morning lost in thought worrying about what you have to do in the afternoon, already working on it in every little gap you can find, you have wasted a lot of opportunities, and it’s not even lunchtime yet. But if the morning has been characterized by at least some spaciousness, some openness in your mind and heart, some gap in your usual way of getting caught up, sooner or later that is going to start to permeate the rest of your day.

If you haven’t become accustomed to the experience of openness, if you haven’t got any taste of it, then there is no way the afternoon is going to be influenced by it. On the other hand, if you’ve given openness a chance, it doesn’t matter whether you are meditating, working at the computer, or fixing a meal, the magic will be there for you, permeating your life.

As I said, our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice — the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck — is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.

Just pause. Let it be a contrast to being all caught up. Let it be like popping a bubble.

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

When you are waking up in the morning and you aren’t even out of bed yet, even if you are running late, you could just look out and drop the storyline and take three conscious breaths. Just be where you are! When you are washing up, or making your coffee or tea, or brushing your teeth, just create a gap in your discursive mind. Take three conscious breaths. Just pause. Let it be a contrast to being all caught up. Let it be like popping a bubble. Let it be just a moment in time, and then go on.

You are on your way to whatever you need to do for the day. Maybe you are in your car, or on the bus, or standing in line. But you can still create that gap by taking three conscious breaths and being right there with the immediacy of your experience, right there with whatever you are seeing, with whatever you are doing, with whatever you are feeling.

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

In any moment you could just listen. In any moment, you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience. You could look at your hand resting on your leg, or feel your bottom sitting on the cushion or on the chair. You could just be here. Instead of being not here, instead of being absorbed in thinking, planning, and worrying, instead of being caught up in the cocoon, cut off from your sense perceptions, cut off from the power and magic of the moment, you could be here. When you go out for a walk, pause frequently — stop and listen. Stop and take three conscious breaths. How precisely you create the gap doesn’t really matter. Just find a way to punctuate your life with these thought-free moments. They don’t have to be thought-free minutes even, they can be no more than one breath, one second. Punctuate, create gaps. As soon as you do, you realize how big the sky is, how big your mind is.

When you are working, it’s so easy to become consumed, particularly by computers. They have a way of hypnotizing you, but you could have a timer on your computer that reminds you to create a gap. No matter how engrossing your work is, no matter how much it is sweeping you up, just keep pausing, keep allowing for a gap. When you get hooked by your habit patterns, don’t see it as a big problem; allow for a gap.

When you are completely wound up about something and you pause, your natural intelligence clicks in and you have a sense of the right thing to do. This is part of the magic: our own natural intelligence is always there to inform us, as long as we allow a gap. As long as we are on automatic pilot, dictated to by our minds and our emotions, there is no intelligence. It is a rat race. Whether we are at a retreat center or on Wall Street, it becomes the busiest, most entangled place in the world.

Pause, connect with the immediacy of your experience, connect with the blessings; liberate yourself from the cocoon of self-involvement, talking to yourself all of the time, completely obsessing. Allow a gap, gap, gap. Just do it over and over and over; allow yourself the space to realize where you are. Realize how big your mind is; realize how big the space is, that it has never gone away, but that you have been ignoring it.

Allow yourself the space to connect with the blessing of the sacred world.

Find a way to slow down. Find a way to relax. Find a way to relax your mind and do it often, very, very often, throughout the day continuously, not just when you are hooked but all the time. At its root, being caught up in discursive thought, continually self-involved with discursive plans, worries, and so forth, is attachment to ourselves. It is the surface manifestation of ego-clinging.

So, what is the most important thing to do with each day? With each morning, each afternoon, each evening? It is to leave a gap. It doesn’t matter whether you are practicing meditation or working, there is an underlying continuity. These gaps, these punctuations, are like poking holes in the clouds, poking holes in the cocoon. And these gaps can extend so that they can permeate your entire life, so that the continuity is no longer the continuity of discursive thought but rather one continual gap.

But before we get carried away by the idea of continual gap, let’s be realistic about where we actually are. We must first remind ourselves what the most important thing is. Then we have to learn how to balance that with the fact that we have jobs to do, which can cause us to become submerged in the details of our lives and caught in the cocoon of our patterns all day long. So find ways to create the gap frequently, often, continuously. In that way, you allow yourself the space to connect with the sky and the ocean and the birds and the land and with the blessing of the sacred world. Give yourself the chance to come out of your cocoon.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

With her powerful teachings, bestselling books, and retreats attended by thousands, Pema Chödrön is today’s most popular American-born teacher of Buddhism. In The Wisdom of No Escape, The Places that Scare You, and other important books, she has helped us discover how difficulty and uncertainty can be opportunities for awakening. She serves as resident teacher at Gampo Abbey Monastery in Nova Scotia and is a student of Dzigar Kongtrul, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and the late Chögyam Trungpa.

With the election less than two weeks away, I thought I would include an editorial piece from David Brooks at The New York Times which provides a helpful (if not hopeful) historical context for the political challenges we face. This is not the first time, we as a nation have struggled to reach our potential, and the work is never finished.

The Election is Happening Too Soon

by David BrooksOctober 24. 2024

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics. When certain sociological and cultural realities are locked in, there is not much politicians can do to redirect events. The two parties and their associated political committees have spent billions this year, and nothing has altered the race. The polls are just where they were at the start. If you had fallen asleep a year ago and woke up today, you would have missed little of consequence, except that it’s Kamala Harris leading the blue 50 percent of the country now and not Joe Biden.

It’s clearer to me now that most of the time politicians are not master navigators leading us toward a new future. They are more like surfers who ride the waves created by people further down in the core society.

Let’s look at America between 1880 and 1910. In the early years of that period, American society had been thrown into turmoil by industrialization and uncontrolled capitalism, which produced awesome economic growth and untold human misery. Waves of immigration swept across the country, transforming urban America. Political corruption was rampant in cities, and political incompetence was the norm in Washington, D.C.

America faced a core civilizational challenge: How do we harness the energy of industrialization to build a humane society?

American renewal began in the hearts of the people at all layers of society. People were desperate for change. “All history is the history of longing,” Jackson Lears writes in his book about this era, “Rebirth of a Nation.” He argued that during these decades a “widespread yearning for regeneration — for rebirth that was variously spiritual, moral and physical — penetrated public life, inspiring movements and policies that formed the foundation for American society in the 20th century.”

Some of the movements that sprang from this longing were evil. Some people believed that they could impose order on an unruly society through bogus race science and white supremacy. This was the era of lynching and racial terrorism.

But other movements did indeed produce rebirth. First there was a cultural shift. The cutthroat social Darwinist philosophy was replaced by the social gospel movement, which emphasized communal solidarity and service to the poor.

After the cultural shift, there was a civic renaissance fueled by its ideals. For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago, eased the plight of poor immigrant families. The temperance movement, also led mostly by women, sought to curb drinking and spousal abuse.

Unions arose to demand fair wages and an eight-hour workday. The environmental movement spread, not only to protect the wilderness but also to nurture the kind of human vitality that comes through contact with nature. At the top of society, moguls like J.P. Morgan imposed order on the corporate world to reduce boom and bust. Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller built libraries, museums and universities.

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, society was heaving with change. The legislative program that we call progressivism — cleaning up local government, breaking up the monopolies, regulating clean food, water and air — grew out of the cultural and civic change that was already underway. The pattern was cultural change first, then civic revival, then political reform.

Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?

I don’t see any cultural movement akin to the social gospel movement of the 1890s. The libraries groan with books diagnosing our divisions, but where is the new social ideal? Where is the set of values that will motivate people to put down their phones and dedicate their lives to changing the world?

Some days I do think the civic revival part of the formula is coming along nicely. Through my work at Weave: The Social Fabric Project, I meet local leaders who are striving to rebuild solidarity and serve the marginalized at the neighborhood level. But so far these kinds of efforts have not been able to reverse the catastrophic decline of social trust. Our nation still lacks the sense of social and psychic safety that would allow us to have productive conversations across partisan difference. We still lack a national creed or a national narrative that would give us common ground among competing belief systems.

A few years ago, there did seem to be a social movement that could bring about fundamental change, which I guess I’ll call the New Progressivism. Groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter burst to the fore. Racial equity programs were sweeping across corporations and campuses. Politicians offered ambitious agendas — the Green New Deal, Medicare for All. Presidential candidates vowed to decriminalize border crossings.

But the New Progressivism turned out to be a dead end. D.E.I. programs are in retreat — or, as at the University of Michigan, in turmoil. Democrats don’t talk much about the radical proposals like Medicare for All that seemed à la mode in early 2020. The country is moving rightward on issues like immigration and economics, and Kamala Harris is moving with it.

This election is happening too soon. It’s happening before cultural and civic preconditions are in place that might turbocharge political and legislative reform. It’s simply unfair to ask Harris, who has been a presidential candidate for all of three months, to lay out a vision for comprehensive national renewal under these conditions. Politicians, especially when running for office, are professional opportunists, trying to please voting blocs. They are rarely visionaries.

And yet this is a nation of perennial rebirth and regeneration: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1980s. Even today we are enjoying a period of economic renewal that makes America, as The Economist put it, the “envy of the world.” It’s our social and political relationships that have turned poisonous, producing exhaustion.

As the Lears book suggests, the fundamental change has to happen in the hearts and minds of people, when they adopt an abundance mentality that drives risk taking and social experiments; when they have before them a comprehensive social vision that arouses vast energies at all levels of society.

In 1902, the psychologist William James wrote a book about conversion experiences called “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Occasionally, he wrote, some belief or vision touches people at “the hot place in a man’s consciousness,” the “habitual center of his personal energy.” These visions arouse great fervor, shake loose existing assumptions and lead, often enough, to heroic action.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

David Brooks, a New York Times Opinion columnist, writes about politics, culture and the social sciences.Aroostook Apple Day photo in the church basement