June 7, 2025

Flower Communion Sunday     (photo by Dave)Our traditional flower communion service will be held in the sanctuary this Sunday, June 8th at 10AM. The service includes special music for the occasion, welcoming new members and our flower communion followed by a potluck cookout at Randi and Ira’s. Please bring a fresh cut flower to contribute to the ritual. 

This Unitarian tradition originated in 1923 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Dr. Norbert Capek asked his parishioners to bring and receive flowers as a symbol of their shared life as a spiritual community. We are especially excited to welcome five new members to UUHoulton. Please come and join us for this special service. Our spiritual community of long-time and new friends is a marvelous garden of variety and beauty. Each one of us has a special place in the garden. We are also continuing our flower communion tradition of “Flashy Shirt and Splashy Skirt Day.” Wear something fun! (Bow ties are always welcome.) YouTube Channel content for this week is our Pride Service celebrating diversity, inclusion and our UU Shared Values. 

Service leaders are MaryAlice Mowry, Stephen Kinney, B. Rivers, Regan Nelson and Emily Transue with special music by Nick Foster and Dale Holden. 

We hope you can join us for one of the services online or in-person.

In Ministry,Dave

UUHoulton Cookout at Randi & Ira’sJune 8 following the service5 Elm Street, Houlton Come and join us for a potluck cookout at Randi and Ira’s on 5 Elm Street after the service. Please bring something to share for the potluck and there will be a grill available in case you’d like to cook some meats, veggies or kabobs. You might also want to bring a comfy portable chair and don’t forget the bug spray! The forecast looks favorable (which is saying something this year!).  All are welcome and encouraged to come. 
See  you there!!!

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)

– YouTubeyoutu.be

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton zoom coffee hour & check-inTime: Jun 8, 2025 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)      Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/86124829981?pwd=Qjcj4CwqxrDO7ecH6qVkeYoBFBLfl9.1
Meeting ID: 861 2482 9981Passcode: 760323

Calendar of Events @UUHoultonJune 8 Sunday Service: Flower Communion   David Hutchinson BBQ cookout & party at Randi and Ira’s after the serviceJune 9     UUHoulton Board Meeting   4PMJune 10   Meditation Group  4PM   (online)June 14   No LGBTQ+ Luncheon this month June 14   “No Kings” Rally by the Peace Pole in Monument Park   1PMJune 14   “Restore” meeting after the rally in The Cup Cafe    2PMJune 14   Houlton Coffeehouse  7PMJune 15   Sunday Service:  Open Pulpit ServiceJune 22 Sunday Service:  Kathryn HarnishJune 24   Meditation Group   4PM (online) June 29   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 Colors of Communion

by Jennifer Pratt-Walter

Flowers chant their wordless songs
of color and scent, delighting like
a joyful choir at dawn.
I breathe in with my whole body, feeling
how it is we grow, quietly rising together
among spring’s green and dew.
The rhythm of seasons rolls ahead
and I, a shy blossom, voice my small
prism of song. I am singing
of the wonder of how roots
so love the buds they bid them grow,
unseen as they are,
while the buds never look back.

The True Nature of a Flower

BY VALERIE BROWNI would rather go without food than without flowers. Sounds dramatic and it is. I recall a time years ago when I was desperate to touch the natural world. I was living in a third-floor walk-up in Queens, working at Burger King, and going to City University in Manhattan. On my way to class one day, I passed a street vendor selling roses by the bundle in shades of peach, scarlet, and magenta. Time stopped as I heard them whisper two words to every part of my body: “Take me.”In those days I had a skin-tight budget and lived mostly on chicken livers, which I bought at a cut-rate grocery store for less than one dollar a container. I looked at the flowers. They looked at me. I calculated the cost in my head. Twenty bucks. TWENTY BUCKS! The flowers would cost me my entire food budget for the week. Although I knew the flowers were outside my budget, I bought them anyway because they weren’t just roses. They were the luxurious fulfillment of the desire to touch and smell something beautiful—warm rain pooling in the moonlight or a slow lifting fog—and that was priceless, so the roses were a bargain.

In my garden, nirvana manifests when I behold the true nature of a flower.

Roses remind me of the importance of beauty for beauty’s sake. Beauty is complete and gives generously. Growing up in Brooklyn, the natural world, generous and beautiful, seemed distant and inaccessible to me. The sun came up and set over the parched terrain of Bushwick’s row homes, concrete sidewalks, and chain-link fences. To see and feel grass, my brothers and I would run through The Evergreens Cemetery on Bushwick Avenue, one of the great urban forests of New York City, paying little or no mind to the tombstones. We were there to smell the green grass and feel it under our sneakers and to get close to muscular trees. We were chasing an emerging feeling, a fleeting sense of the timeless present—moments that glow in their luminosity and that cannot be possessed.During this time spent at Evergreens, I was safe among the trees and flowers. They wanted nothing from me and gave me beauty not as a luxury concept but as a birthright to be known, felt, and lived.My mother, a single parent working two jobs to support four kids, took in boarders who’d seen better days. Our sturdy brick house had oak doors with beveled glass, and nearly every room, including the tiniest, the hall room, which was little more than a closet, was occupied by boarders, older men. Innocent and available, I was left in the house and subjected to sexual abuse by these tenants until they left or ran out of money to pay rent. The terror of the abuse was in contrast to the beauty of Evergreens, to the daffodils and cherry blossoms in spring. Because of the terror, I held onto the beauty of Evergreens, which could not be damaged, destroyed, or diminished, which was beyond the physical landscape and pointed instead to a horizon within me, tranquil and unstained.That is why, many years later, when I moved from Brooklyn into my barn-like home outside Philadelphia, I set out to create something beautiful—a garden to transform the “mud” of life into a “lotus.” To paraphrase Wendy Johnson, one of the founders of the Garden Program at Green Gulch Zen Center in California, there are three good reasons to grow flowers: for beauty, for the coming apart of beauty, and to begin again. This wisdom aligns with the three seals: impermanence (anitya), nonself (anatman), and nirvana. These are the three seals that, according to many East Asian Buddhist traditions, are the essential teachings present in all authentic practices of the Buddha. Growing flowers is a living lesson on each of these three seals.

Impermanence

As a dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, I’ve learned the inescapable reality of impermanence, not as a theory but as an ongoing practice. Ultimately, everything and everyone changes, despite resistance to change. Flowers decompose; a child becomes an adult; day becomes night. The shifting nature of reality calls on us to practice—to love, to care, to accept, to occupy space and time, to release, to let go.This loving and letting go is the essence of gardening, and it’s a lesson I relearned in my garden through an old flowering wisteria that was growing over the cottage roof and threatening to rip off the shingles with its branching, leafless, wooden tentacles. Slowly, little by little, I cut back the vine and trained it over a substantial wooden pergola. In late spring it bloomed a voluptuous cascade of blue to purple flowers, perfuming the air for a time, until the petals fell. Impermanence teaches me that things ripen, flower, and fade away in a continuous cycle of beauty, being, and becoming. It teaches me gratitude and appreciation for each day, each moment. I’ve learned that I can change my relationship to the abuse that happened to me like I can shape a vine, with love, understanding, patience, and practice. There is hope, healing, and growth.

Nonself

Often misunderstood, nonself isn’t about annihilation but rather about interconnectedness or interbeing, a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh. From the pandemic, we’ve learned in a new and deeper way the truth of interconnectedness. What happens to me affects you, and what happens to you affects me.Interconnectedness can be seen in a garden. A flower doesn’t grow in isolation. It’s permeated by nonflower elements, such as sunlight, soil, water, and air. It cannot exist without these nonflower elements. Living with an awareness of this interconnectedness, I have shifted how I tend plant life to increase the variety of native flowers, trees, and shrubs, which are adapted for local conditions and, therefore, require less maintenance and offer food sources to local native wildlife. Their deep root system holds sediment in place, helping to stabilize the areas where they’re planted and increase the soil’s capacity to store water, reducing runoff and flooding. These native plants are vital to creating a healthy ecosystem that supports a diversity of birds, insects, and other animals. They cohabitate in the garden; they are interconnected.One of my first native plantings that now has spread in waves throughout my garden is coreopsis tinctoria, a host plant to forty-two different pollinators. In early fall the plant is covered with finches and sparrows that eat the seeds. I also have the lemon-scented yellow flowers of oenothera biennis, a biennial plant. Hummingbirds, honeybees and bumblebees, and several moth species, including the primrose moth, eat the nectar. Several caterpillars eat the foliage, including the pearly wood-nymph, grape leaffolder moth, and white-lined sphinx. The plant’s seeds are eaten by several bird species, including goldfinch.When you really look at a flower, you begin to see this interconnectedness of the roots stabilizing the soil, the nectar providing food for butterflies and insects, and seed heads offering nourishment for birds. Looking deeper, you appreciate the kinship connecting flower to flower, and flowers to nonflower elements and to everything else.

Nirvana

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that nirvana is the extinction of ideas. The ultimate dimension of existence, nirvana is beyond concepts of right and wrong, coming and going, birth and death. Clinging to any concept, even the concepts of impermanence, nonself, and nirvana, leads to suffering. So, instead of clinging, we can connect with the essence of the three seals. This essence is about living our daily lives with generosity, interconnectedness, and mindful awareness.In my garden, nirvana manifests when I behold the true nature of a flower, embracing suffering and vulnerability in the light of compassion. I walk through my garden and touch the flowers of the limelight hydrangea. I touch a threshold full of grace, full of aliveness. I exhale and the flowers whisper back: “Take me.”

ABOUT VALERIE BROWN

Valerie Brown is a dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. She’s completing her forthcoming book: Braver Things: Fearless Living for Broken-Open, Pulled Apart, and Turned Upside Down Times.

The Most Dangerous Thing About Fascism? Getting Used to Itby Thom HartmannJune 6, 2025

It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.Let’s not forget:— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour.”— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed. — When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them. — When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it any more. — When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diaryhe wrote:“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence… and yet still hours of pleasure… and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”
Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitlerthat even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”
And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” Mayer wrote, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security….”
He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in politics.“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. …
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”
Sound familiar?Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chroniclesin The New York Times:“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.
“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel banthat targets more than five times as many countries.”
When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.But there is a path forward. The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”
We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say “That’s fascist rhetoric.”When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize.When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and see; we fight back now.If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them out.History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.Don’t get used to fascism.Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Our Pride Service worship team!
Nick Foster on the grand piano singing “I Am What I Am”

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 those affected by recent governmental (and policy) changes in DC

Concern over the increasing tension between India and Pakistan

Prayers for those affected by the recent tornadoes and storms in the American Midwest and South

Prayers for those affected by the Canadian wildfires in Saskatchewan and Manitoba

Prayers for our friend Joe Hogan who is in the Houlton Regional Hospital

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.

*

---

9 attachments

Emails marked as Spam may contain harmful content. To download attachments, please move this email out of the Spam folder.

• IMG_2825.jpegjpeg · 111.9 KB
• pride.jpgjpg · 21.2 KB
• favicon_144x144.pngpng · 4.9 KB
• capek_quote_1.jpegjpeg · 33.5 KB
• valb-100×100.jpgjpg · 3.8 KB
• IMG_5027.jpegjpeg · 42 KB
• IMG_5032.jpegjpeg · 31.7 KB
• IMG_5035.jpegjpeg · 44.3 KB
• IMG_5036.jpegjpeg · 49.3 KB