January 12, 2025

“The South Wall in Winter” (photo by Dave)While the front of the church facing Military Street is the more visible (and more frequently photographed) side of the building, the back view lends itself to the camera in equal fashion. On the south side of the building, where the parking lot is now, there used to be a large physical structure that essentially blocked the view. In our archives I have never found a photograph taken of the south side. Now, when you drive north by the church on Kelleran Street you have an open view of the building and it’s quite striking. In this photo, if you look closely, you can see the outline of the roofline highlighted by snow. It’s one of my favorites.
This week’s Sunday Service is an Open-Pulpit format. I plan to introduce a sub-theme on “time in the new year” during the early part of the service and then we will open it up for sharing readings, poetry, and personal insights for the remainder. If we have time, we may even use our flip chart and think-tank “components of religion” related to our theme and see how many we can come up with…

YouTube Channel content for this week is a continuation of our theme “The Science of Religion and our UU Shared Values” (part five). This week we introduce Paramahansa Yogananda’s book “The Science of Religion” and how it relates to our Unitarian Universalist heritage of religious pluralism. We will view a short video clip from the 2014 documentary “Awake: The Life of Yogananda” and discuss the importance of the scientific method in religious formation. We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.

Enjoy the week-end and keep warm!

In Ministry,

Dave

MLK Observation January 20 Monday at Noon -3PM Cup Cafe at the UU Church of Houlton

Dear Friends,

We’d like to invite you to a small event we are holding to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and reflect on his legacy of justice and peace and what that might be asking of us.

This will take place on Monday January 20 from noon to 3 at the Cup Café at the Unitarian Church. There will be readings, reflections, music, prayers, crafts, and food. The attached invitation contains all the (important) details.

If you know someone who would find this gathering meaningful, please feel free to share this invitation with them.

If you know you are coming, please rsvp to this email to help us plan how to set up the space. If you can’t be sure until closer to the event, just come. It will be fine.

If you have questions, please contact Mary Beth DiMarco, Christy Fitzpatrick or David Hutchinson.

We hope you can join us!

THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:

HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE

“The Science of Religion” 01-12-25

(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: Jan 12, 2025 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/87221608739?pwd=V1HcigYLRIuRiNQd433DGJyYUm1QMg.1
Meeting ID: 872 2160 8739Passcode: 516402

Calendar of Events @UUHoultonJan 12 Sunday Service: Open-Pulpit ServiceJan 13 UUHoulton board meeting 4PMJan 18 There is no LGBTQ+ luncheon this monthJan 18 Houlton Coffeehouse 7-9PMJan 19 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury & Ira DyerJan 20 MLK Observation in The Cup Cafe (Noon until 3PM) Jan 21 Meditation Group 4PM (online)Jan 26 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 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

The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration

Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.

In such times, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to the process that is the pause, trust the still dark place to kindle the torchlight for a new path and vitalize our forward motion toward a new system of being. The poet May Sarton knew this when she observed in her poignant reckoning with despair that “sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.” James Baldwin knew it when he contemplated how to live through your darkest hour, insisting that such times can “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” on the other side of which is a life more alive.

This shift from suffering to surrender can never be willed — it can only be achieved through the willingness we call humility. That is what the influential British ethnologist and cultural anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (June 13, 1866–February 18, 1943) — a pioneer in the study of the evolutionary origins of religion — addressed in his inaugural Oxford University lecture, delivered on October 27, 1910 under the title The Birth of Humility (public domain).

Marett considers the spiritual value of such periods of suffering:

There is at work in every phase of [life] a spiritual force of alternating current; the energy flowing not only from the positive pole, but likewise from the negative pole in turn… At times, however, a vital spurt dies out, and the outlook is flat and dreary. It is at such times that there is apt to occur a counter-movement, which begins, paradoxically, in a sort of artificial prolongation and intensification of the natural despondency. Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality.

Echoing William James’s insistence that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” — a radical refutation of Cartesian dualism, which science has since confirmed by revealing psychological trauma as physiological trauma and illuminating how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma — Marett observes that every such crisis of the spirit is a “psycho-physical crisis,” marked by “heart-sinking” and “loss of tone” in body and mind alike, and rooted in an evolutionary adaptation of our biology:

The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane. Regeneration, in fact, typically spells advance, the pauses in the rhythm of life helping successively to swell its harmony.

Marett notes that both the sacred rituals of tribal cultures and the theological doctrines of so-called civilized societies invite that painful yet regenerative pause between the poles of the spirit as a way of redirecting the current from the negative to the positive — a pause riven by fear, for the paradox of transformation is that we are always terrified of even the most propitious change, yet a pause capable of turning fear into a “spiritual lever” for reaching the next stage of spiritual development.

With an eye to the “widespread human capacity to profit by the pauses in secular life which Religion seems to have sanctioned and even enforced in all periods of its history,” Marett writes:

Pause is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.

[…]

Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can he emerge a new and glorified creature, who, by spiritual transformation, is invested alike with the dignities and the duties of [being human].

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet, and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.

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The Power of Presence

Scientific materialism prevents you from knowing you’re inseparable from the cosmos. A teaching by Brother Phap Linh on what we can discover in the present moment.

BROTHER PHAP LINH

As a Zen Buddhist, my starting point is: do not be sure. If I think I know the answer, I’ve fallen into a trap. If I think I “know” what spirituality is, or if I think I can say what it is, then I am no longer in touch with spirituality. The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing, and the word is not the nonthing. Try to find a single “thing” and you will instead find a web of interrelations and mutual dependencies. From an electron to a galaxy, nothing has a clear, definite boundary—the “thingness” of a thing is only an artifact of our perception, reinforced by language, by naming, to give the appearance of separateness.

Twenty-five years ago, after the death of my mother, I began to search for spirituality, for “something more,” but quickly ran into problems. I was a child of scientific thinking, rationalism, and skepticism. I believed that everything, including spirituality, could and should be grasped, provable, and defined. I didn’t want to believe in “something more” unless I could prove it to myself. And so, when I went to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Monastery at the age of nineteen, I was full of materialistic hubris, thinking I could find definitive proof of that “something more,” whatever it might turn out to be.

“Anything can be spiritual if we do it with our full presence, our full awareness, and our full sensitivity.”

One afternoon, we were invited to practice “total relaxation” and “touching the earth.” I had low expectations. We lay down on our backs, a monk guiding us in slowly scanning our whole body with our awareness. We gradually released the tension in each muscle, sensation, and feeling, letting go and allowing ourselves to rest more and more deeply on the ground

We then went into child’s pose, all our limbs and forehead touching the earth. The monk invited us to contemplate our ancestors, parents, teachers, friends, and our connection to all living beings. He asked us to recognize the beautiful qualities we have received from them—the love they’ve given us, the insights and skills they’ve nurtured in us, and all the ways we are the continuation of millions of years of the gradual evolution of life, awareness, beauty, and inquisitiveness.

He then invited us to contemplate the uglier things we’ve received from our various lineages—the unskillful habits, reactivity, and negative emotions we may have received from our family and friends, the intolerance, greed, and striving we may have received from our culture and society. He invited us to let all that go and instead give rise to the wish not to pass on what is less beautiful, but rather to pass on only what is most good and true.

I cannot really do justice to the power of this practice. Afterward, I didn’t want to talk to anyone or do anything—I just wanted to be with this feeling. I went to lie down in my tent under the eaves of the forest. My thinking had completely stopped. A nightingale started to sing a few meters away. I’d released so much anxiety, tension, striving, judging, and reacting that I was there in a way I’d never been before.

I was fully present.

The sound of the nightingale came in, without any filter. There was just a glorious, joyous outpouring of sound—like a string of pearls, each perfect, each flowing liquidly into the next, with no interruption of thinking, comparing, or grasping. There was no distinction between me and the sound, me and the nightingale, or me and the cosmos. It was like drinking from the purest source of life and beauty. It was in me and around me and utterly boundless. There was no time, no space, and no need for anything to be other than what it was.

Everything I’d been looking for was not just right in front of me, but just…there, in the present moment arising of experiencing, without any distinction between perceiver and perceived. I realized I was in a world of potential depth and beauty and wonder all the time, but was too distracted and busy and carrying too many emotional scars to recognize it. My conditioning, my reactivity, and my inability to feel and be with my pain prevented me from seeing things as they really were.

I also had not been able to touch it before because of my hubris in thinking I understood the nature of reality. I was trained to see the world as made of matter, which was basically inert, indifferent, and soulless. Matter was just stuff, meaninglessly and endlessly bouncing off other stuff, obeying so-called “physical laws,” eternally, deterministically churning stuff, and producing different configurations of stuff until the eventual heat-death of the universe.

It’s only by stopping our thinking and constant internal narration that we can have a true encounter with reality. Everything can be spiritual, and any moment can be a moment of spirituality. But to get in touch with the dimension of spirituality takes training. Everything we do in Plum Village can be understood to be different aspects of this training. We can look at any daily action, anything that we do, and ask ourselves: “How can I make this action, this moment, into a moment of spirituality, depth, and beauty?”

In Zen we’re invited to suspend all notions and theories about spirituality. Instead of having an idea about it, we can have an experience of it, right now, not later. We can call the awareness of the present moment “mindfulness” and the ability to stay in the present moment “concentration.” When we maintain this training of our attention as a daily practice, the strength of our mindfulness and concentration can gradually increase. This capacity to be present and stably established, with uninterrupted awareness, is in some sense infinite. You can always keep going deeper.

If we can develop the strength of our mindfulness and concentration, then we may touch insight. We children of scientific thinking and skepticism are very interested in insight. We want to see the true face of reality, make a breakthrough, perceive the true nature of things and of ourselves. In wanting to understand reality, we jump too quickly to understanding, without really having developed the capacity of seeing.

Before we’re even able to recognize what is right in front of us, we need a critical perceptual shift and corresponding conceptual shift. Did I find the evidence I was looking for? Or did I learn to see the evidence that was always already there, but which had been until that moment invisible to me?

Something as simple as listening to birdsong can be an infinitely deep encounter with reality—a truly spiritual experience—but we need training to experience it. Anything can be spiritual if we do it with our full presence, our full awareness, and our full sensitivity. The wonderful thing is that because the capacity of being fully there is seemingly infinite, then we are all beginners, and we can just joyfully continue to develop and train this capacity, without striving to get anywhere.

This article was adapted from a dialogue between Brother Phap Linh and David Sloan Wilson for the nonprofit organization ProSocial World.

BROTHER PHAP LINH

Brother Phap Linh is a monastic in the Plum Village tradition. Before ordaining, he studied mathematics at Cambridge University and worked professionally as a composer.Prayer List

For those working for social justice and societal change

Pray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nation

The war in Ukraine continues

Prayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Prayers for peace in the Middle East as the conflict widens

Prayers for post election America

Prayers for those in need or homeless during this winter season

Prayers for those affected by the terrorist event in New Orleans

Prayers for those affected by the fires in Los Angeles this week

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.