“wax and sand” (photo by Dave)
A few years ago after a service, one of our members noticed an interesting meltdown of prayer candles in our wooden bowel that we use for joys and concerns. They stood up the curious formations in the sand and it created an almost artistic liturgical moment. The sliding wooden doors were open to the sanctuary creating a wind current moving across the bowl of candles into the parlor space, melting them quicker than usual.
Several of us took photos with our phones and I’ve included one in today’s Support Page.
This Sunday’s service is a continuation of our theme “The Science of Religion and our UU Shared Values” (part ten) as we explore the topic of virtue, one of the key components of religion. Study material in the Support Page includes an essay by Rev. Sheri Prud’homme from Love in the Center titled “There Is a Love Holding Us” and a short article on ethics by Zen teacher Sylvia Boorstein titled “Still a Schmuck?” You may have noticed we had delivery problems with last week’s YouTube Channel content, but we have that straightened out and here it 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.”
We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.
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)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour & check-inTime: Mar 30, 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 30 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
April 1 Meditation Group (online) 4PM
April 2 Climate Group Meeting 6PM
April 5 “Restore” Group Rally in Monument Park 1PM
April 5 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
April 5 International Food Fair, Houlton High School, 2 to 5PM
April 6 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
April 13 Sunday Service: Dale Holden (Palm Sunday)
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 StreetUPCOMING EVENT:
May 3 Saturday Night 7PM, James Mullinger on the Sanctuary Stage
With Opener John Thompson on Harp from Woodstock$20 tickets (children under 12 are free)
James Mullinger was one of the UK’s top comedians and the Comedy Editor for GQ magazine when he moved to The Canadian Maritimes in 2014. Since his arrival, he has taken the country by storm. He has sold out shows across the country, made appearances on CBC’s The Debaters, movies, Television shows, festivals, award shows and stand up specials for Prime… he’s done it all. Irreverent, honest, unpredictable but always hilarious, James is a Canadian citizen now and the gloves are off! In this far-reaching show celebrating 10 years living in his favorite place in the world, James shares his unique insights into the province and the world. Looking back and looking forward, this is your last chance to see some of James’ classic routines and first chance to see some of his newest. For longtime fans and newcomers alike, this is a show for everyone! Be prepared to laugh, feel inspired and uplifted.A rare chance to catch the award-winning, record-breaking British comedian in an intimate venue (Houlton Unitarian Sanctuary Stage). James Mullinger is one of the top comics in the UK and Canada where he now lives and this is his first ever show in Maine, USA!
Study Material
(session ten)
There Is a Love Holding Us
by Rev. Sheri Prud’homme
Chapter 13 Love at the Center
When we speak of love today, what do we mean? The new Article II that places love at the center presents our religious tradition with an opportunity to reflect theologically together more deeply about love. Theological reflection is a living process that arises at the intersection of religious tradition and life experience. Such reflection becomes a necessity when one’s long-held, traditional beliefs about love, for example, prove to be inadequate in the face of a profoundly difficult life circumstance. Pastoral theologians call such an experience spiritual impasse and regard it as important and fertile ground for faith development. During spiritual impasse, one of three things can happen: we can abandon our beliefs, we can hold rigidly to our beliefs but deny our experience, or we can “do theology” and evolve our beliefs. We do this by opening to new discoveries or coming to know more deeply in our own experience what our forebears taught. In my case, that is what happened to my beliefs about love over the course of the past few years…
Facing so intimately the limitations and distortions of love, I began to reckon with the wobbly foundations of my prior understandings of love. It is admittedly, hard to talk about this larger love because words seem close but never quite right…Now I sometimes call it the presence of love inherent in the universe. I have returned to the writings of the Universalists of the nineteenth century and their sense of a love that does not let us go, ever. Emerita professor of theology and former president of Starr King School of Ministry Rebecca Parker has called it “the great love that holds us all.”
Once I experienced this larger love, my theological perspective and spiritual practices began to constellate around this new possibility. It did not diminish the importance of love generated and expressed within and among living beings. Rather, a new dimension opened. Sometimes I experience a larger love flow through human form in open-hearted deep listening, loving touch, wise counsel, and offerings of care and presence from friends and family; in the care of myriad teachers, friends, mental health, and spiritual care professionals who have supported our family; in the gift of music received as both mantra and blessing. At the same time, spiritual practices that I once engaged in out of an abstract sense that they were a good idea became essential and life sustaining. My meditation and movement practices began to include ways to connect with a larger love and to be held by it.
Love comes to me in my morning meditation with an energy that appears in my religious imagination as deeply pink, shimmering, woven with shining gold threads, and the words warmth, love, and caress. Resonant with the assertions of some of the great nineteenth-century Unitarian Transcendentalists, I also experience non-human nature as drawing me into communion with this love that they called God. I connect with this expansive love among the redwood, bay laurel, and live oak trees of the Berkeley and Oakland hills where I hike on trails in the open spaces of the regional parks. The parks exist thanks in large part to the religious vision of Unitarians and Universalists of Berkeley and Oakland in the early twentieth century who believed all people needed access to the natural world to know god more fully. I feel connected with this love at the edge of the ocean or along streams and rivers. I reach for it in prayer and in gratitude.
The process theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries also gave depth and some contemporary theological framework for my emerging understanding of a larger love. The process theologians understand God and all of reality as always changing and mutually affecting one another. In this theological worldview, God is not a discrete being, nor does God know any more than the rest of us what will happen next. Instead, the process theologians understand God as the ultimate reality that receives the world, is moved by the world, and holds everything that has happened in an all-encompassing embrace. In response, in every moment, God offers back to the world an unending flow of possibilities for creativity, healing, beauty, and love. A key proponent of process theism, Charles Hartshorne, himself a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in his later years, returned repeatedly in his writings to the assertion that “God is love.” In a way that is congruent with the insights of more recent philosophy and physics, process theology offered me another way of understanding the idea of a larger love that holds us all.
There are real limits to human love and loving just as there are great blessings and surprises. We can do our best to love one another and to be a force of love in the world while growing our capacity to be with the messiness, contradictions, disappointments, and paradoxes of living and loving in human communities. It is my hope that our religious communities will become more practiced at offering the kinds of adult faith development and mutual support that will encourage growth in our spiritual lives, including our abilities to experience being held and nourished by love within, among, and beyond ourselves.
Rev. Sheri Prud’homme is core faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry and an ordained minister of religious education. She has published books and articles related to UU history, theology and nature.
Still a Schmuck?
As part of the #MeditationHacks series, a reader asks Sylvia Boorstein: “What’s the point of practice if it’s not making me a better person?
Sylvia Boorstein
I’ve been meditating for a long time, but I don’t seem to be a better person than when I started. And to be honest, my non-Buddhist friends seem to be just as good people as my Buddhist friends. If I’m not acting and treating people better, what’s the point of practice?
Sylvia Boorstein: His Holiness the Dalai Lama likes to say, “The point of life is to be happy.” Recently, I heard him emphasize that it does not matter to him whether a person is a Buddhist or not. “What matters,” he said, “is whether someone is an ethical person.” Here is the connection between ethicality, practice, and happiness, as I see it.
I was brought up to be fundamentally ethical. My parents were kind and moral, and nonharming behavior is what they admired. Since then, I’m sure that my mindfulness practice has strengthened my commitment to ethicality and kindness. It alerts me, sooner than it used to, to the arising of unwholesome states (greed and anger) in my mind so that they do not, for the most part, find expression in word or deed.
I did not start my practice because I wanted to learn kindness. I wanted to be less anxious. I am less anxious. But I am also kinder. And happier.
I feel bad when I do something motivated by greed or anger. Greed and anger are painful, just by themselves. So also are the guilt and shame I feel afterward when I realize I have behaved heedlessly and caused pain.
My husband asked me, many years into my practice and study of Buddhism, “How has all of this changed you?”
I replied, “I became kind.”
He said, “You were always kind.”
I said, “Then, I became kinder.”
I did not start my practice because I wanted to learn kindness. I wanted to be less anxious. I am less anxious. But I am also kinder. And happier.
Floral bouquet from the annual meeting potluck last week.
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 affected by the earthquake in Myanmar
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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