UUHoulton Support  PageDecember 5, 2020

As we enter the second week of Advent we light our candle for connection. One of the most challenging areas in our personal life is connection; making a connection and maintaining that connection with the numerous and varied relationships we have with people. As if we needed it, Covid-19 has added an additional complication to the challenge with physical distancing and increased reliance upon virtual means of communication and connection.  We are social creatures, we need connection, but we are not always good at making it happen. I share another story from my travels and food stops and ponder a ten dollar question. I’ve also included articles by Thich Nhat Hanh and Joanna Macy related to our topic.  I hope you can join us for the service. 
Special music for the Sunday Service is a recording from our Unitarian Concert Series featuring The Gawler Family from Mid-Coast Maine and the title of my talk is “Connection…” The recorded parlor service will be available to view at 10AM on Sunday morning and archived so it can be watched later at your convenience.  I will send out the service link to YouTube later today and the link will be live on Sunday morning at 9:45AM (in case you want to come to the service early).  If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you can locate it automatically on your YouTube home page under subscriptions. The 10AM service will be followed by a Zoom coffee hour and check-in at 11AM for those who are interested in discussing the service or just want to check in. I’ll send the Zoom links out today. Have a great week-end everyone!
Practice patience and kindness.

In Ministry,
Dave

Virtual Offering Plate

If you would like to send in your pledge or donation (we still have to pay the bills) simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below.  Thank you from the treasurers!
Mary Blocher1124 Calais RoadHoulton, ME  04730

Greetings from UUA President:
As we embark on this season of holidays and holy days, I hold you and our faith community in deep care. This season will be different than any we can remember. We cannot gather in our sanctuaries and sacred spaces, bedecked with greenery and poinsettias. We cannot gather close together in candlelight and song. Our dearly held traditions that bring so much joy to this season of magic and beautiful darkness will be pared down, virtual, even canceled altogether. It’s heartbreaking to think of going through this season without the company of extended family and friends. And for so many of us who have lost loved ones, our grief will be heavier during the holidays—especially in a year such as this.
My hope for each and every one of us, in the midst of a season so often marked by hectic to-do lists and the recreation of some “perfect holiday,” is that we give ourselves permission to rest, to simply be, rather than always doing. To tend to the grief and the joy that is a part of our lives. To make room in our days for our spiritual care and renewal.

Just as the earth takes time to rest in the winter, let us remember the gift of darkness that is part of this season—a reflective moment in the cycle of life. In the words of Buddhist teacher Stephanie Nobel:

“Dark is the rich fertile earth
that cradles the seed, nourishing growth.
Dark is the soft night that cradles us to rest.
Only in darkness 
can stars shine across the vastness of space…
There is mystery woven in the dark quiet hours.
There is magic in the darkness…
We are born of this magic.”

I send you all my love and many, many blessings during this holiday season.
Yours in faith and solidarity,Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Since our topic this week is on connection, here is a short teaching by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on non-separation. 

Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love Letter to the Earth

BY THICH NHAT HANH|  DECEMBER 1, 2020

The earth is you. You are the earth. When you realize there is no separation, says Thich Nhat Hanh, you fall completely in love with this beautiful planet.

At this very moment, the earth is above you, below you, all around you, and even inside you. The earth is everywhere.

You may be used to thinking of the earth as only the ground beneath your feet. But the water, the sea, the sky, and everything around us comes from the earth. Everything outside us and everything inside us come from the earth.

We often forget that the planet we are living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies. The water in our flesh, our bones, and all the microscopic cells inside our bodies all come from the earth and are part of the earth. The earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the earth and we are always carrying her within us.

The earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the earth and we are always carrying her within us.

Realizing this, we can see that the earth is truly alive. We are a living, breathing manifestation of this beautiful and generous planet. Knowing this, we can begin to transform our relationship to the earth. We can begin to walk differently and to care for her differently.

We will fall completely in love with the earth. When we are in love with someone or something, there is no separation between ourselves and the person or thing we love. We do whatever we can for them and this brings us great joy and nourishment. That is the relationship each of us can have with the earth. That is the relationship each of us must have with the earth if the earth is to survive, and if we are to survive as well.

If we think about the earth as just the environment around us, we experience ourselves and the earth as separate entities. We may see the planet only in terms of what it can do for us.

We need to recognize that the planet and the people on it are ultimately one and the same. When we look deeply at the earth, we see that she is a formation made up of non-earth elements: the sun, the stars, and the whole universe. Certain elements, such as carbon, silicon, and iron, formed long ago in the heat of far-off supernovas. Distant stars contributed to their light.

When we look into a flower, we can see that it’s made of many different elements, so we also call it a formation. A flower is made of many non-flower elements. The entire universe can be seen in a flower. If we look deeply into the flower, we can see the sun, the soil, the rain, and the gardener. Similarly, when we look deeply into the earth, we can see the presence of the whole cosmos.

A lot of our fear, hatred, anger, and feelings of separation and alienation come from the idea that we are separate from the planet. We see ourselves as the center of the universe and are concerned primarily with our own personal survival. If we care about the health and well-being of the planet, we do so for our own sake. We want the air to be clean enough for us to breathe. We want the water to be clear enough so that we have something to drink. But we need to do more than use recycled products or donate money to environmental groups.

We have to change our whole relationship with the earth.

Why We Need the Great Turning

BY JOANNA MACY

It’s the movement of all those who want to create a life-sustaining society, writes Joanna Macy, and it’s even more important at a time when the future looks so bad.

Carl Jung once said that at the core of each life’s journey is one question that we are born to pursue. For me, that question has been How can I be fully present to my world—present enough to rejoice and be useful—when we as a species are destroying it?

This question keeps surfacing in my heart–mind and the responses keep coming. The most resounding have come through the four decades of group work. I continue to be stunned by the strength of community that springs up when people, through their anguish and their tears, open to the immensity of their caring.

While the Great Turning does take form in specific actions and achievements, it essentially lives within us as vision and commitment.

In the 1990s a name emerged for the purposeful and Earth-based solidarity we were experiencing and for the promise it carried—the Great Turning. The term soon came to signify the transition underway to a life-sustaining society—a transition as real and pervasive as the unraveling caused by the industrial growth society. While the Great Turning does take form in specific actions and achievements, it essentially lives within us as vision and commitment.

I think many of us assumed that we could achieve a life-sustaining society without the collapse of the global economy. But given the depth and breadth of destruction, breakdown now seems inevitable and may also be necessary for the emergence of a life-sustaining society. The Great Turning will be more important to us than ever, not only as a light at the end of the tunnel, but as compass and map, as well as a supply house of skills and tools for nourishing our spirit, ingenuity, and determination.

We can start right away, while we can still easily communicate and work together. What we do now in our immediate communities as well as in wider “rough weather networks,” strengthens our capacities, which will be ever more valuable as consumer society falters and fails. Everything we learn from the self-organizing nature of Gaia will serve to guide and steady us. It is our great good fortune that we are beginning to listen to Indigenous voices as they share, despite genocide and betrayal, their millennia-old Earth wisdom traditions.

This leads me to a state of utter gratitude. It is so great a privilege to be here on Earth at this time. I have had the good fortune to drink from three great streams of thought—the buddhadharma, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Each gives me another way to know Gaia and to know myself. Each helps me be less afraid of my fears. I have had the joy of helping others experience this too, of seeing them take the Work That Reconnects further, building our collective capacities and our trust in reciprocity.

Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded in that kind of belonging. We will find more ways to remember, celebrate, and affirm this deep knowing: we belong to each other, we belong to Earth. Even when faced with cataclysmic changes, nothing can ever separate us from her. We are already home.

Our belonging is rooted in the living body of Earth, woven of the flows of time and relationship that form our bodies, our communities, our climate. When we turn and open our heart–mind to Earth, she is always there. This is the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe. My gratitude to all. May we experience “sheer abundance of being,” as Rilke says, and know that we truly belong here.

Joys & Concerns
When one of us is blessed we are all blessed.When one of us experiences sorrow we all feel the pain.

Great Joy!!Erika Faulkner-Green just had a baby this morning (a little baby boy, child #4). She and her husband Nathaniel were on staff at The Cup Cafe and married at our church. 

We had a record-breaking 147 views on our UUHoulton Thanksgiving Service! (and we currently have 37 subscribers) I’m not sure how that happened, perhaps it was because gravy was included in the title…A lot of people “Floated their Gravy Boat!”

The Congregational Church has provided holiday Christmas wreaths to the Unitarian Church since they started having their services at 61 Military Street. Once again they have gifted us with this seasonal speciality. (Coordinated by Rev. Dale) Even though we are not having in-person services this year it looks as if we are still celebrating the season! Thank you Congos, the wreaths are beautiful!

Please pray for our “water-rights protectors.”   This news article is from The New York Times   12.04.20

Indigenous-led water protectors on Friday engaged in multiple direct actions against Enbridge’s highly controversial Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota, on the same day that state regulators denied a request from two tribes to stop the Canadian company from proceeding with the project.”Clean water and unpolluted land capable of providing sustenance is essential to our survival… [and] Line 3 poses an existential threat to our well-being.”
—Minnesota Chippewa Tribe 

Water protectors blocked pipeline traffic and climbed and occupied trees as part of Friday’s actions. Urging other Indigenous peoples and allies to “take a stand,” the Anishinaabe activists at one of the protests told other Native Americans that “your ancestors are here too.”

“Take a moment to speak to her, our Mother Earth is crying out for the warriors to rise again,” they said. “Strong hearts to the front!”

In a statement, Line 3 Media Collective said that the pipeline “violates the treaty rights of Anishinaabe peoples by endangering critical natural resources in the 1854, 1855, and 1867 treaty areas, where the Ojibwe have the right to hunt, fish, gather medicinal plants, harvest wild rice, and preserve sacred sites.”

Does anyone need assistance in setting up their computer or portable device to watch our UUHoulton Sunday Service on YouTube or need a tutorial on attending a Zoom coffee hour?  We have people who can help. Just let us know and we will set up an appointment. 

Please continue to send in joys and concerns during the week to revdav@mfx.net and I will post them on the Support Page.

The joy or the sorrow of one is shared by all. May our hearts be as one on this day.  Let us carry each thought or concern expressed in our heart and may the light of our love and compassion transform suffering into non suffering and ease the difficulties of life.  We radiate love and the light that we are.  Blessed are we all.

Prayer ListLeola BishopElaine Robichaud Mary Annah Joy  (Linda’s Mother is at Leisure Garden in Presque Isle)Richard DesautelDeb Ball and her mother Delores JackinsFor those recovering from COVID-19 in the state of MaineLocal emergency personnel and hospital staffFor our state and national leaders as they respond to the current coronavirus crisisFor those working for social justice and societal change Kalle Petroski

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 exclusion.

UU Classifieds (transportation, helped needed, odd jobs, people to visit etc…)

Individuals available to help with transportation:(include e-mail and telephone#)

Individuals available to assist with tasks:(include e-mail and telephone #)

*