© Davidson Loehr
November 18, 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
This is the season when we start hearing endless harangues about the “real” meanings of these holidays. I’m not sure there’s only one meaning, though it’s easy to lose patience with all the hokey meanings that get glued to these holidays.
A few days ago I received in the mail from a woodworking place here in town the announcement that they have a Thanksgiving sale on drill bits. So you can use Thanksgiving as sort of a warm-up for the biggest commercial season of the year which is coming up immediately following. Thanksgiving can also be and is usually taken as a time of an annual reckoning when we count our blessings. When we look around and realize that the friends, the families, the life that we have is much more blessing than curse, that we’re lucky to have it and the appropriate response is to give thanks for it. This is good, even better than drill bits.
But I want to take this to another level this morning. This is the fifth in a five part series of sermons, though I think I’ll add a sixth part to the five part series next week, just to keep it confusing. But this is the fifth in a five part series of sermons on stages of grieving something that has died for us. It’s used in a lot of ways, but I’ve been using it primarily to talk about old religious beliefs that may once have served us, that may have been familiar, but that no longer give us life. Things that even if you could say you believe them – which in many cases you can’t – you still wouldn’t have any idea what possible sense they make. It’s an old habit and it may be a rut, but it’s your rut, and you’re not sure how to get out of it. There’s a that was developed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross about thirty years ago for dealing with the stages that people go through in dealing with the loss of something. And these are the stages we have been using and applying to religion.
The first thing we do when we’re threatened with the loss of something important and life-giving and from which we have derived our identity is to pretend that nothing really happened. That’s the stage of denial, otherwise known as “the ostrich school” of response. When denial doesn’t work, we can get angry about it. You can see two-year-olds throwing these tantrums where they are trying to use anger to control everyone around them to do things their way: two-year-olds of any age. We have all done it. When anger doesn’t work, we try to make a deal. We try to keep what we can of the old ways so that we don’t have to make the major change that is still scary. So we make a deal, we play at Bargaining.
There are a lot of deals going on in religion where people who have outgrown beliefs of their past, whatever their beliefs were, still go through the motions and still pretend that they really believe things that they have no idea how to make any sense at all of because they want so much to remain a part of the world that once gave them life. And they make a deal and the deal seems to feed them. Some deals are good deals as long as you don’t lose yourself in them. But a lot of times the deals don’t work.
And then you come to the fourth stage which is really the most frightening of the bunch. Elizabeth Kubler Ross called it depression but it was severely under-named. It’s at least a despair and it’s sort of a terrified despair at that. This is what happens when you realize that you have lost a world. You have lost who you were and how you thought things were and you don’t have a story to live within and you don’t know who you are and if you don’t know who you are and what your story is you literally don’t know how to go on. Our stories are our road maps through life.
I told you a story three weeks ago from some of the works of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen about this kind of despair, this kind of losing a world and how severe it is. There’s nothing romantic about it. This isn’t Hallmark greeting card stuff. It was a story about a young college athlete, quite a football star in California, who had his right leg amputated above the knee because of cancer, and who didn’t want to go on, he lost his entire life. His life had been big man on campus, fast cars, fast women and the rest of it, and it was over for him. That’s the despair of losing a world. He would never be again who he had been until then. Never. And you’ve got two choices, you accept a different kind of life that you never thought you would have accepted just a year earlier, or you don’t go on.
So the acceptance that comes isn’t something light and fluffy. The kind of acceptance involved in this stage means that you’re accepting an identity for yourself and an identity for life that you would not have found acceptable a year ago. This doesn’t mean that you’re defining yourself at a lower level at all. It’s usually at a higher level. It does mean that you’re defining yourself at a deeper level.
I like the Thanksgiving story as one of the most powerful, classic stories of at least the last two stages, though all of the stages were involved in this. I think it’s a classic story not only for Americans, but for the human condition and one we should know and know well. And we should tell ourselves this story at least once a year. I also like the story of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving because when you learn more about them you realize there’s a lot about the pilgrims you can not respect or like.
Now we see them dolled up on posters and matching gray costumes with big, white collars cooking a twenty six-pound Butterball turkey and making happy with the Indians. We see the pilgrims wrapped in the American flag. Many fundamentalists will talk about the vision of the country’s founders that we have lost; they don’t mean the founders. Those are the people in the eighteenth century who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When fundamentalists look back nostalgically for the image of a nation made in their image, they mean the pilgrims.
And one of the things we can be thankful for every Thanksgiving is that we don’t live in the kind of country the pilgrims wanted! The pilgrims were what today we would call fundamentalists. And the social agenda, and I’ve said this before, the social agenda of fundamentalisms are the same worldwide regardless of their religion. We saw it in the Taliban, we saw in that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And we can see it 380 years ago in the story of the pilgrims.
So let me tell you about the pilgrims. They started in England, but they left England because they didn’t have the freedom to believe what they wanted to believe. Now so far they sound like our kind of people. We’re all about religious freedom and freedom of belief and will go to great lengths to make sure that people have them whether their beliefs agree with ours or not.
From England the pilgrims went to Holland because Holland in the early seventeenth century was a wildly pluralistic kind of country, much closer to the United States of today than England was. And they certainly had freedom of belief in Holland. You could believe anything you liked in Holland but no belief was going to take precedence. And that’s when one of the dark sides of the pilgrims was shown because while they wanted freedom to believe their things, they did not want the freedom for anyone else to believe things that were wrong. And they were lucky enough to know what was right.
So when the pilgrims left Holland to come to this country, they left it ironically because it had far too much freedom of belief. More than they wanted in the new country. They came here to civilize the Indians after they got here, to civilize the wilderness, and to Christianize America and to establish a country where there was freedom only to believe what they believed. And if you know your early American history, you know that is exactly how our colonies began.
Our colonies were on the verge of perpetuating the religious warfare that tore Europe apart and the only thing that prevented it was finally the founders setting up a Constitution with a Bill of Rights including a first amendment. The pilgrims would have absolutely detested the United States of America and its Bill of Rights and they would not have permitted it. So we need to know that about them. Don’t just wrap them in an American flag, they would have hated it.
Nevertheless, they showed a courage and a perseverance that are absolutely astonishing. And we have a lot to learn from them. I don’t know how many worlds they lost. They lost a whole world in England. They lost their families, they lost their grandparents, great grandparents, they lost uncounted generations of history that they would never see again. Imagine how this feels, to leave England to go to Holland willing to lose an entire world, to redefine life and start again in Holland and then they lose it again because the world is much bigger than their beliefs can allow. And they lose a second world. And they came here to start a third one.
Originally, they started out in two ships, but one of them wasn’t seaworthy. So they returned and all of them came in just the one ship, the Mayflower. There were 102 pilgrims who came here in 1620. They arrived in Massachusetts to face an absolutely record breaking, brutal, deadly winter. They come to the New World and the world knows them not and loves them not. During that winter – these are numbers I think we should all know – out of the 102 pilgrims that came, during their first winter, 47 died. Almost half. If you think of winter as four months in Massachusetts, that means that they lost about three people a week, all winter long. How long could you do this? Without losing your own will to live? Without losing your own spirit? The courage and the perseverance of these tough pilgrims is something that we need to make a part of us.
In spring, they planted crops, the crops had to be near the graves of 47 of their people, graves they dug in frozen earth during the winter when they weren’t hunting for food to stay alive themselves. They planted crops, they hunted for food and according to all the stories I’ve read, they made friends with the Indians that were here. The Indians were apparently very friendly towards the pilgrims at first.
Maybe if the Indians could see 300 years into the future, they wouldn’t have been so friendly, but they were friendly in 1621. And in the fall of 1621, as was their custom from England, they had a Harvest Home Festival. It was a very old English festival, when the harvest comes in, you have a big Harvest Home Festival. And the pilgrims re-instituted that here, it’s what we now call the first Thanksgiving. It was quite an event.
The records seem to say that this thing went on three days. Three days of eating and merriment. And the menu was pretty spectacular for the first Thanksgiving, it still sounds good. They had venison stew cooked over an open fire. They had spit roasted wild turkeys stuffed with cornbread, sweet corn baked in its husks, and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. After dinner, according to legend, Chief Masasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popcorn, which the pilgrims had never before tasted.
Perhaps, in life, all’s well that ends well. But this didn’t end well without great loss, great pain, and great resolve. Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday for people who have never lost anything. Without the loss, you can still have the turkey but it doesn’t have the meaning, or the victory, that it had for these first pilgrims.
t first, they must have tried denial. When the first one of them died the previous fall, and then the second and third, they must still have thought that might be all, that the rest of them would make it. We have no records of their anger, and in their style of religion it doesn’t seem likely they would have expressed it – at least not towards God. But inside, how could they avoid anger at the loss of so much and so many? I wonder what were the bargains they offered God in their private prayers? “Just spare our family God, and we will work even harder for your glory.” Then, “at least spare our children,” and “spare something, spare someone, anyone.” In return, they would convert – whom, the Indians?
At some time during that cruel winter, though, despair had to settle in. My God, almost half of them were dead, there was no reason to think the other half wouldn’t follow them the next winter. If this was the land God had chosen for them, he certainly had a perverted way of showing them its bounty! We don’t know the depth or style of despair these pilgrims went through. What would you feel, losing half your people, uncertain whether the rest of you might soon join them? I’ve never had as many good reasons to feel despair as they did. They had at least 47 good reasons for giving up, another 55 reasons to keep holding on, but it had to feel like a close call, don’t you think?
What they were being offered, finally, wasn’t what they had wanted or hoped for at all. Little glory, limited joy, many grave markers, many searing memories, a long long way from their homeland, their relatives – everything and everyone. What did they get? Life, and even then only for half of them. Life, food, the chance to survive another year, and the chance to do something else. Something that still stuns us by its audacity, its unlikeliness, its irony. Right there, right in the middle of the fields of suffering and death, in the heart of this new land which had still not decided whether it would let them live, right there with some new friends, they stopped, they celebrated, they threw a party, and they gave thanks.
I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks offered them freedom and courage to go on, and began the healing of wounds they would wear like battle scars forever. Just their ability to accept the gift of life – however it was to be offered to them – and to accept it with praise and gratitude, just that. I like to think that offered the most and the best healing and blessing they were going to find. I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks blessed them, and blessed those who followed them.
I know it works for us.
