“pipes and beams” (photo by Dave)Palm Sunday and Easter are a little later this year, but there is still snow on the ground in the woods if you know where to look. One of the backwoods traditions I have observed for years is the ceremonial “tossing of the greens” into the north branch of the Meduxnekaag River in front of our cabin. On Palm Sunday I take the Christmas wreath from Advent (sometimes it’s not very green by then) and toss it into the river and watch it float downstream. Some years, if the ice hadn’t gone out I would just toss it onto the frozen river, which didn’t have as much dramatic effect. This year the water is high and fast.
Our Sunday Service this week is a Palm Sunday Service led by Rev. Dale Holden in the parlor and there will be lots of music, The Unitunes along with traditional palms for everyone to take home for Holy Week. The title of the homily is “All In.”
YouTube Channel content for this week is a continuation of our theme “The Science of Religion and our UU Shared Values” (part 11) as we explore the topic of forgiveness, one of the basic components of religion. Special guest speaker Heidi Carroll, a minister, shamanic practitioner, intuitive healer, pranic healer and author
assists in the service which is titled “Opening Your Heart; Release and Forgiveness.” Tune in and learn about heart-math and how to connect to your own heart-center.
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 coffee hour & check-inTime: Apr 13, 2025 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/83348399635?pwd=cC4JJrpfIOWPb37MSVUsVMZXSTi1xF.1
Meeting ID: 833 4839 9635Passcode: 109968
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
April 13 Sunday Service: Dale Holden (Palm Sunday)
April 14 UU Houlton Board Meeting 4PM
April 19LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 Noon
April 19 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
April 19 There is no coffeehouse this month (Hip Hop Event)
April 20 Sunday Service: Easter Service David Hutchinson
April 22Meditation Group (online) 4PM
April 27 Sunday Service: Kathryn Harnish
May 3 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PMMay 3 Unitarian Concert Series: James Mullinger 7PM
May 4 Sunday Service: Leigh & Fred (Maypole Service)
May 6 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
May 7 Climate Group Meeting in the cafe 6PM
May 11 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
May 17 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 Noon
May 17 “Restore” Group Meeting 2PM
May 17 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM Feature: Just Us (Janice, Doug & Ira)
May 18 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury & Ira Dyer
May 25 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
June 1 Sunday Service: MaryAlice Mowry & Friends (Pride Service)
June 8 Sunday Service: Flower Communion 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
Hands Off! rally in Houlton draws close to 100
HOULTON, Maine — The Houlton Hands Off! Rally, one of 28 across the state, nearly doubled the number of people attending a similar downtown rally last month.
Carrying signs that called for the Trump administration and Elon Musk to take their hands off a long list of freedoms as well as pleas to leave their Canadian neighbors alone, the nearly 100 participants talked about fears for the nation’s future and the importance of standing up to protect democracy..
According to organizers, more than 15,000 Mainers are estimated to have attended the events on Saturday, with nearly 11,000 from Portland, Augusta, Bangor and Brunswick alone. In Aroostook County, a more conservative area with many supporters of President Donald Trump, there were rallies in Houlton and Presque Isle drawing nearly 300.
Houlton co-organizer Mary Miller and a handful of others are part of a statewide peace and justice group that also coordinated March rallies in every Maine county.
“This is our country, with all its painful and glorious history, its wonderful diversity, its possibilities, and realities, for good,” Miller said. “We will not let this brutal administration wreck it. We are proudly joining with people across this land today — I have heard there were around 1,200 demonstrations — to say “Hands Off!”
During the early March Houlton rally, people expressed shame regarding the way Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was disrespected while meeting with the president and vice president in the Oval Office.
A month later, the concerns were more personal, relating to job losses, disruption to Medicaid funding, strained relationships with Canada and European allies, and fears about Social Security.
Others worried about the Trump administration’s apparent retaliation against the state by withholding funding that helps Mainers with costs including emergency heating and school lunches.
Miller said they are anxious about so many actions and policies by the Trump administration that are “dangerous and cruel and devastating. We are determined to oppose them. We are fearful for so many — children, veterans, farmers, immigrants, federal workers, senior citizens, LGBTQ folks, people overseas who are no longer benefiting from our aid and for the earth,” she said.
Mary Alice Mowry of Patten made several Hands Off! signs for participants with messages supporting human rights, gay rights and dignity for the four dead troops whose bodies were returned to America while Trump was golfing.
Marilyn Roper’s message, “Hands off Canada!,” was a shared sentiment among the participants, with many carrying Canadian flags.
Bev Chapman, wearing her pink “pussy hat” and pink Women’s March on Washington T-Shirt from her first Trump administration protests said that silence is the voice of oppression.
Others bemoaned what they see as devastating losses since the January inauguration.
As part of the rally, they collected food and financial donations to support local food pantries because food programs have been cut, Miller said.
“Hopefully, we can take other positive actions toward mitigating the harm coming from the Trump administration,” she said.
A core group of local organizers has been meeting regularly over the years to plan this and other activities related to issues of social justice and democracy. Following Saturday’s rally that lasted longer than projected, organizers met at the Unitarian Universalist Church to plan future actions, said Miller.
Look for UUs in the background; Lou Ellis Grant, Cyndie McCarthy, Jim Coffin
(Bev Chapman in her pink pussy hat and sign..)More UU friends; Laura and Kathryn
Dave & Linda
(sign made by MaryAlice Mowry)
Lou Ellis Grant (and Don)
Gaining Perspective on Habitual Patterns
by Joan SutherlandMarch 2, 2025
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.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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