Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton, Maine, Sunday Service Support Page, February 9, 2025 - Unitarian Universalist Church of Houlton Maine

on February 9, 2025

February 8, 2025

“Steeple in Snow” photo by DaveThis is one of my favorite photographs of our church in winter. The gray sky and the color of snow on the roof barely define a line of separation. It looks like a calm (and probably cold) day in winter, yet the soft layer of snow seems to provide insulation from the outside elements. Although we don’t heat the sanctuary in the winter season, it still feels like a refuge from whatever is happening outside; the sunlight streaming through the skylights, the sacred calm of silence in the space. I don’t linger for long on the coldest of days, but just walking through the unheated space (and all of its beauty) to the heated space is something I appreciate this time of year. There is a lot going on in the news lately and many of you have expressed your concerns. With that in mind, Sunday’s service will focus on one of the UU Shared Values that seems relevant to our interests right now, justice. This was also one of the “components of religion” that made it onto our list, so now seems like a good time to discuss it. I will also share a story from skiing on the river earlier this week. It just happens to relate to the topic (funny how that works). You will also find two articles in this week’s Support Page, that might be more political than usual, but unfortunately, we are in the middle of a national crisis that demands a response. You will recognize the names; Rebecca Solnit who was one of our featured authors last year, and Timothy Snyder who is one of our featured authors this year. Each of them are busy writing material on new platforms trying to keep up with the daily headlines.

YouTube Channel content for this week is a slightly different format from our regular Sunday lecture. It’s called “Sunday Morning Conversations” based on a New England Transcendentalist model from the 19th century. Margaret Fuller, a famous writer and social activist from that era, delivered a short talk followed by a guided discussion on the topic. These were called “conversations.” We’ve tried this model before at UUHoulton, usually on a Monday night on various topics of interest, and we called them “Monday Evening Conversations.” In this case, we’re doing it on a Sunday morning. Continuing with our theme, the topic question is “What is Religion?”
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

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: zoom coffee hour and check-inTime: Feb 9, 2025 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/86724930976?pwd=xTHkiygRqoZdVMnnlyay89vmzxPd4I.1
Meeting ID: 867 2493 0976Passcode: 916899

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

Feb 9 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Feb 10 UUHoulton Board Meeting 4PM

Feb 15 LGBTQ+ Luncheon Noon

Feb 15 Houlton Coffeehouse 7-9PM Feature: Jann

Feb 16 Sunday Service: MaryAlice Mowry

Feb 18 Meditation Group (online) 4PM

Feb 23 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

March 2 Sunday Service: TBA

March 4 Meditation Group (online) 4PM

March 5 Climate Group Meeting in the cafe 6-7PM

March 9 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

March 15 LGBTQ+ Luncheon Noon

March 15 Houlton Coffeehouse 7-9PM

March 16 Sunday Service: TBA

March 18 Meditation Group (online) 4PM

March 23 Sunday Service: Annual Meeting (Abbreviated Service Followed by Potluck & Meeting)

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, Houlton, Maine, 04730

Rebecca Solnit is a noted American writer and activist. Her book “Not Too Late” (2023) was one of our featured resources during our Earth Care study last year.

She started a newsletter just last week titled “Meditations in an Emergency” on a new website (you will find the link listed below). In this initial post she explains the background of the newsletter and why she feels compelled to share it.

Meditations in an EmergencyRebecca Solnit

February 2, 2025

We are very clearly in a lot of emergencies right now. They demand action. But action demands thought and thoughtfulness: who are we, what are our values, our goals, our allies, our possibilities, and our powers? What can we learn from those who’ve faced similar crises, what’s distinct about this one, and what equipment is at hand? The title of this newsletter I’m launching today, the lovely oxymoron of “Meditations in an Emergency,” I borrowed from a poem by the great gay poet Frank O’Hara. It felt like exactly the description for what I hope to do here: think for and with you about the emergencies we’re in and what to do about them, to meditate on causes, meanings, openings. Sometimes even in an emergency, or rather especially in an emergency, meditation as gathering ourselves and deepening our understanding is exactly what we need to do.

It’s worth noting that the word emergency is built out of emerge, as in to exit or rise out of something, the opposite of merge, when things come together. An emergency is when things come apart–it can be breakage but also opening. and it’s related to the words emergence and emergent. “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of multiplicity of simple interactions,” writes Adrienne Maree Brown in her book Emergent Strategy.

Here’s why I’m hypervigilant, alarmed, and outraged about what’s happening in the USA right now, heartbroken about the devastation to targeted communities and the climate itself–but far from defeated. We are in an emergency. The nature of this emergency is pushback against the long emergence of a new, more egalitarian, inclusive, empathic, and aware society, of the way that new ideas and new rights and policies add up to nothing less than a better society. Better when it comes to justice because it protects rights that were previously not even recognized, better when it comes to truth because it includes historically excluded voices, better when it comes to nature, because it recognizes both the elegant intricacy of natural systems and our inseparability from them.

This new society is offensive to an elite who perceive enough for the many as deprivation of the few, who are driven by a mindset of scarcity, a hungry-ghost insatiability for power and wealth. By an inability to perceive how their own moral, spiritual, and emotional poverty is inseparable from the brutality of the unequal society they want to impose to aggrandize that power and material wealth. Who perceive the centuries of affirmative action for white men as meritocracy and the steps to grant more equal access as unfairness. Who while being beneficiaries of unearned privilege imagine themselves as naturally superior even while demonstrating their clownish mediocrity again and again. Who furiously deny the truth that is not only moral but scientific that everything is connected to everything else, which is why they take the facts of climate change as an insult to their notion of freedom as the ability to do whatever they want without consequences.

But they are few and we are many. A coup, which is what we are having this week, is never the end of the story: all across the world we can find examples of how people resisted kings and dictators and wrote the next chapter themselves as civil society. I’m here to coauthor those chapters with you here in the USA. And we will be writing them soon. This coup stands out for its stupidities. The belief that nothing is connected to anything else is idiotic; right now we’re seeing it as the inability to understand consequences. Which I think is part of not understanding that everything is connected and that true power comes through alliance and persuasion, not attack and isolation. Not understanding that alienating relationships with other nations weakens this nation and its economy, that Greenland is part of Denmark, politically, which is part of NATO and the EU, and you fuck with them at your peril. That tariffs against Canada and Mexico are not primarily punishments of those countries; they are punishments of American people and industries and are already incurring retaliation. That attacks on immigrants are also attacks on the crucial industries that depend on immigrant labor. They do not understand what the federal government does, how healthcare and environmental protection at home and across the world protect the whole, including the economies that their wealth is inseparable from, how wrecking the economy will put them at odds with even many among the wealthy and powerful.

They do not understand that the reason they need to be authoritarian is because they are at war with the will of the people (not all the American people, of course, but a whole lot of us). Much of what they are doing is wildly unpopular and will only become more so. They do not understand power itself, and the limits on theirs. They do not understand that they cannot strong-arm all of us into abandoning our beliefs, values, commitments, and knowledge. Jason Stanley writes in his book How Fascism Works, “Fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.” Authoritarians see fact, truth, history, science and law as rival systems of information and power that they must vanquish so that they alone can rule. One way we resist and check that power is by holding onto and speaking up about fact, truth, history, science and law, as well as preserving our independence of mind and pursuing good sources of information and analysis outside the propaganda hose. A sad part of the state of things is that a lot of powerful institutions, including major news media, are watering down the truth or amplifying the lies as they genuflect to power or just operate within their own elite worldviews. Which is why so many of us have turned to other sources–including newsletters like this one.

No one knows what happens next. But I do know what happens next can and must be in part what we do next, in a thousand ways, depending for each of us on our situations and resources. On how we find solidarity and understand possibility. I say this not as a promise that it will happen of its own accord, only as a belief that there are possibilities in the face of this would-be dictatorship. There always are. I’m here to explore them and act on them with you. We are in an emergency right now. That emergency is, as I said above, an attack on the long emergence of a new society, and I do not believe they can stop it no matter how much they harm it. Trump’s promise all along, to “make America great again,” has been a promise to make time run backward, to restore the old inequalities, repressions, hierarchies, and silences, to make most of us shut up and knuckle under.

Time does not run backward. And we do not have to surrender.

In 2018, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay that’s stayed with me as a touchstone. She wrote that we are not the resistance, they are. She used the metaphor of rivers and dams, to say we are not trying to dam the river of change they are: “Donald Trump’s election represents a surge of resistance to this rapidly swelling river, an effort to build not just a wall but a dam. A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.” And less than a month ago, Anand Giridharadas wrote a similar essay on his (highly recommended) newsletter The Ink, with the ringing title “January 6 was a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.” He writes, “We must understand that what we’ve been living through is backlash. Backlash. It’s not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history.” I’m with them. You can dismantle the institutions, violate the law, attack the vulnerable. But you can’t convince most of us we don’t deserve our rights or our democracy; you can’t convince us to forget what we know.

A few more words about Meditations In an Emergency. Part of why I love this wide-open title is: I’m not committing to one kind of essay or subject here; during the current emergency I will do my best to keep people informed and encouraged (a word a writer friend reminded me means to instill courage) with up-to-date short essays and analyses. But that’s not all you’ll find here. Expect political essays and analysis, on the current crisis, links to actions and campaigns, but also on the great emergence, on what Michelle Alexander described as a river of change, on feminism and climate, on places where victories are possible or realized, on the nature of power and change, on the case for hope or, when hope seems too much, on being resolute in the face of destruction. And also the more personal and lyrical and literary stuff I’ve been looking for a home for, outside my books.

I can’t promise a regular schedule but I can promise that I have a lot to say, and I’ll be saying a lot of it here. I’m also starting this because I’ve long felt compromised by how present I am on Facebook–it is a platform on which I connect with many wonderful people and follow organizations and movements, but it is also one owned by one of the sinister oligarchs of our age. I want to step back from it to some extent and let who are not there at all or don’t want to be there much find this content of mine here instead. There have been many periods over the past decade where I’ve been day after day posting essay-analyses there, and that content will now appear here instead (probably with links there to come here).

Thank you for joining me.

(You can find her website by clicking below)One of the books we added to our UUHoulton “feature list” this Fall is “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder who

is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. It’s a small book (just 125 pages) with big ideas. We have two copies that were donated to the Unitarian Society Library which are available to borrow. Snyder also writes material which you can find on Substack.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times)

“Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

The Logic of DestructionAnd how to resist it
Timothy SnyderFebruary 2, 2025

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow.

In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate.

The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas.

Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted.

Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.

Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens.

Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken.

Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.

As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

Timothy Snyder’s material is available on Substack (free of charge)