The Sanctuary Arch Here we are at the mid-point of March and the forecast for the weekend is in the fifties! Snow is starting to melt fast and Spring fever is in the air. I know this might be premature (and things can change pretty quick around here), but for now, I say enjoy the unseasonable temperatures. Who said you can’t have mud season in March?
Sunday Service this week is a presentation led by Keith Helmuth and Stuart Kinney on “The Life and Times of Tappan Adney” who was a journalist, artist, environmentalist, researcher and activist who lived in Woodstock, NewBrunswick in the first half of the 20th century. Keith Helmuth is one of the authors and general editor of the new biography titled “Tappan Adney: From Birchbark Canoes to Indigenous Rights” published by Chapel Street Editions in Woodstock. Adney wrote of his first visit to New Brunswick in 1887:
“Nothing had a more positive influence on my life… when I set out to earn a livelihood it supplied the experience of greatest service to me. Here was a whole new world thrown open to me, a kind of air I had never breathed before. No woods had ever impressed me as these woods did.”
YouTube Channel content for this week is the second part of a back to back presentation on our theme, “The Science of Religion and our UU Shared Values (part nine). The minister will be reading from our new hard copy edition of Love at the Center edited by Sofia Betancourt and focusing our discussion on what it means to shift a theology of love into the practical application of the day to day. We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.
Spring is coming!
In Ministry,
Dave
LGBTQ+ LuncheonMarch 15 Saturday at Noon
We hope you will join us this Saturday, March 15 from 12:00 – 2:00 PM for NOA’s LGBTQ+ potluck luncheon open to all generations and allies! If you would like to bring a dish, you’re more than welcome to but there is no cost to attend. There will be plenty of food to share!We hope to see many of you there! If you have any food allergies, dietary preferences, and/or accessibility needs/requests and feel comfortable sharing, please contact izzy@equalitymaine.org!
HOULTON COFFEEHOUSE
March 15, Saturday Evening 7-9 PM
The Cup Cafe, 61 Military Street OPEN-MIC NIGHT
It’s open-mic night this Saturday night at the Houlton Coffeehouse. If you are an aspiring musician, poet, stand-up comedian or writer you won’t find a better stage (or more supportive audience) to try out your material. On the menu at the cafe we have French Onion Soup and Homemade Chili (beef). Frank is our barista on Saturday night and he can take care of your coffee drink and espresso needs. Irish Cream Latte is the special.
Come early for supper and hang out before the show. Cafe doors open at 5:30PM. Wear something green!
See you at the Cup!
Feel the buzz…Menu
French Onion SoupHomemade Beef Chili Irish Cream Latte
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)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour & check-inTime: Mar 16, 2025 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/82212331998?pwd=zE8zFMyPs0UHVkSQuMVZhoi1YG1zDb.1
Meeting ID: 822 1233 1998Passcode: 570739
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
March 15 LGBTQ+ Luncheon Noon
March 15 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
March 15 Houlton Coffeehouse 7-9PM
March 16 Sunday Service: Keith Helmuth & Stuart Kinney
March 18 Meditation Group (online) 4PM
March 23 Sunday Service: Annual Meeting (Abbreviated Service Followed by Potluck & Meeting)
March 30 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson April 1 Meditation Group (online) 4PM
April 2 Climate Group Meeting 6PMApril 5 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
April 6 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
April 13 Sunday Service: Dale Holden
April 15 Meditation Group (online) 4PM
April 19 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 Noon
April 19 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
April 20 Sunday Service: Easter 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, Houlton ME 04730
Sunday Service
March 16 10AM The Life and Times of Tappan Adney Presented by Keith Helmuth and Stuart Kinney
Tappan Adney in Nome, Alaska 1902
It is not unusual for writers, artists, and other historically significant figures to be strongly associated with particular cultural regions from which they draw inspiration. But the coming of Tappan Adney to the central St. John River (Wolastoq) Valley of New Brunswick was an event of unique and extraordinary importance in Canadian cultural history. It was here at the mouth of Lane’s Creek where it meets the Wolastoq in Upper Woodstock that Tappan Adney first met Peter Joe and saw him building a Wolastoqey (Maliseet) birchbark canoe. It was here he began to document how these canoes were made. It was here he began to build his 1/5-scale models that preserved every detail of construction using only traditional materials gathered from the forest. All those who have returned to the art of building birchbark canoes in recent times are in debt to Tappan Adney for his devotion to the preservation of this Indigenous heritage.
At the age of 18 Tappan Adney was already a serious student of natural history and a skilled artist. When he came to Woodstock, he was struck by two features of the environment that called out to him for further study: the vast wilderness that lay at his doorstep, and a community of Indigenous people still practicing some of the cultural and material skills that had long enabled their successful adaptation to the region.
Tappan Adney was especially taken by the art and craft of the birchbark canoes that a few older men and their families were still building in the Woodstock area. Over the following decades he devoted himself to documenting every detail of design and construction used by the Wolastoqey people to build their canoes. He eventually expanded his model building to include every type of Indigenous bark and skin boat of North America. It is no exaggeration to say that Tappan Adney is the man who saved the Indigenous knowledge of how to build birchbark canoes from extinction.
But he also did much more. He documented a wide range of Wolastoqey cultural knowledge and skills. He worked persistently at documenting the Wolastoqey language. Although he went on to make significant contributions in other areas of cultural research, art, and journalism, he always returned to his work of preserving the birchbark canoe. By his direct testimony, it all started for him when he came to Woodstock, New Brunswick. His life and times, a remarkable convergence – an unusually talented man and an environment rich in cultural and natural history.
Keith Helmuth is the publisher and managing editor of Chapel Street Editions. He worked for two decades managing independent bookstores that served university communities. He was library manager and faculty member at Friends World College and coordinator of its Independent Studies Program. He was a founding trustee of Quaker Institute for the Future and served for two decades as co-editor of its book publishing program.
The Helmuth family operated North Hill Farm at Speerville, New Brunswick, for almost thirty years. Keith is the author of Tappan Adney and the Heritage of the St. John River Valley, Tracking Down Ecological Guidance, and Working in the Commonwealth of Books:1960-2024, A Cultural Memoir(forthcoming in 2025). He is a co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy and How on Earth Do We Live Now? Natural Capital, Deep Ecology, and the Commons. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick.
Gaining Perspective on Habitual Patterns
When you’re caught in your habitual patterns, says Joan Sutherland, try not to fixate on your reactions. Instead cultivate awareness of everything that is happening in the moment.
Sometimes it can seem as though being human is a problem that spiritual practice is meant to solve. But Buddhist meditative and related practices actually have a different focus: developing our human faculties to see more clearly the true nature of things, so that we can participate in and respond to how things are in a more generous and helpful way. Our individual awakenings become part of the world’s awakening. This means leaning into life, and to do that we have to recognize what gets in the way. For each of us, this is likely to include certain habitual patterns of thinking and feeling in reaction to what we encounter.
Meditation and inquiry are methods, ways to have direct experiences of the deepest insights of our tradition—of the interpermeation of all things and the way things, including our habitual reactions, rise into existence for awhile and then fall away again. Everything is provisional, and everything influences everything else. The implication for our inner lives is that they are seamless with the outer world, and constantly changing with it. We’re not encapsulated consciousnesses bouncing around in a world of other consciousnesses and inert matter, but part of a vibrant, ever-changing field that encompasses everything we can experience, and more. Everything is rising and falling in this field, sometimes for a nanosecond and sometimes for a geological age, but still appearing and disappearing in an infinitely complex web of other things doing the same. To the extent that we experience, in the ordinary moments of our lives, the seamlessness of our inner states and outer circumstances, we’re being more realistic, more in tune with the way things actually are.
A reaction is just one thing among many appearing in the field at that particular moment, no more or less important than anything else.
From this perspective, how do we deal with the habitual patterns of heart and mind that inhibit us from having a more realistic understanding of life, and a more intimate engagement with it? Perhaps it becomes less important to tackle the thoughts and feelings directly, to do something about them, than it is to see them in their true proportion. A reaction, after all, is just one thing among many appearing in the field at that particular moment, no more or less important than anything else.
Simply put, how we react is not the most important element of any situation. When we fixate on our reactions, they pull us away from a primary experience of what’s actually happening, into a small room where how we think and feel about the experience becomes the most important thing, the thing we’re now in relationship with. If you and I are having a conversation and I become angry, I might find my emotions so compelling that suddenly I’m not in a conversation with you anymore, but with my anger. What’s wrong with this person? This must not stand! Then, particularly if I’m involved in a spiritual practice, I’m likely to have reactions to my reactions. After all this meditation, I shouldn’t be getting angry like this! Or, This is righteous anger! Now I’m in the third order of experience, moving further and further away from the actual conversation with you.
If we pull the camera back for a wider view, it’s immediately apparent that a reaction like this is only one of many things rising in any given moment in the field. There’s you and me and our surroundings, your mood, my capacity for misunderstanding, the temperature of the air, the sound of birds or traffic outside the window and the neighborhood beyond that, the most recent calamity in the news, and more other phenomena than we can possibly take into account. The moment is vast, with a lot of space between the things in it. The moment is generous. I don’t have to zero in on my reaction, to act impulsively on it or repudiate it or improve it, all of which tend to reinforce the sense of its importance, but just accept it as one (small) part of what’s happening. Usually that simple shift changes everything. It allows us to step out of the small room of second-order experience and back into a fuller, more realistic experience of the moment.
If reaction is a move into the partial, a privileging of how we think and feel above everything else, response emerges from the whole of oneself, grounded in the whole situation, with each element assuming its true size and shape. In responding we’re not doing something about a situation, but participating in it.
In responding we’re not doing something about a situation, but participating in it.
It’s interesting that our evaluation of a habitual reaction as negative doesn’t arise until the third order of experience, fully two circles away from what’s actually happening: it’s our reaction to our reaction to what’s happening. The ancients called this putting a head on top of your head. Not only are we distancing ourselves from the original situation, but even from our reaction to the situation. That kind of distancing can be a defense against a reaction that’s causing unease out of proportion to its proportion, as it were, and that’s when inquiry can be useful.
The basic inquiry is What is this? And it’s a way back to what we’re trying to avoid. We drop the self-centered focus of the third order of experience and re-enter the second, encountering our reaction directly, without preconceptions and even with interest. We’ve picked up one thing from the field and are taking a closer look for a while. We inquire into whatever What is this? evokes—thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, memories. The unexpected and surprising are particularly valuable, because they come from somewhere other than what we can usually imagine. Habits can be deeply ingrained, but over time it’s possible that even a quite troublesome reaction can assume its proper size and shape as one thing among many, rising and falling with everything else, no longer especially inhibiting or especially fascinating. And we move closer to a life lived in response instead of reaction, closer to participation in the way things actually are.
Joan Sutherland, Roshi, is a founder of the Pacific Zen School (a contemporary koan school), as well as the founding teacher of The Open Source, a network that includes sanghas in Colorado, Arizona, and the Bay Area. Now retired from working directly with students, her teachings continue through Cloud Dragon, an online source for her writings and talks. She is the author of Vimalakirti & the Awakened Heart and Acequias and Gates: Miscellaneous Writings on Miscellaneous Koans.
People have been asking about Baby Sylvie, so Laura and Fensent some of the cutest pics ever from New Orleans. (Look, she’s waving at you!)
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
Prayers for this affected by the tragic aircrash in Washington DC
Prayers for those affected by recent governmental (and policy) changes in DC
Prayers for those seeking food and housing security during the cold winter
Prayers for Mac as he continues his recovery at home from recent surgery
Prayers for Jodi as she is adjusting to the loss of Dwayne
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.
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