by

Davidson Loehr

November 19, 2000

One sentence in the Hebrew scriptures has always seemed to me the essence of religion: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” Deuteronomy 30:19. Yes, it’s from the same book filled with a whole slew of other advice on things for which mean, women and children must be stoned to death. Choosing wisdom from the Bible, as from any religious scripture, is always a matter of selective editing. But that line “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life” — it’s just superb. And, coincidentally, it’s at the heart of the Thanksgiving story.

SERMON: Choose Life

How do you know when it’s Thanksgiving? You might say that it’s Thanksgiving when the fourth Thursday of November rolls around, or when the big turkey is served, with stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But there has to be more to it than that: the fact that turkey is served on a Thursday is hardly a reason to declare a holiday.

You could say that, since Thanksgiving began as a harvest festival, and as such is thousands of years old in one form or another, that Thanksgiving comes when the harvest is in. But harvests don’t have the same importance in our lives that they once did. No matter how the crops are locally, you can drive to Central Market, where the harvest is always in. Most of us wouldn’t even know how to harvest, let alone how to plant.

But Thanksgiving is much more than a harvest festival. It isn’t about picking corn, it’s about choosing life. Consider the first Thanksgiving, in 1621, 379 years ago. In 1620, 102 Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts. They had left England because they were not free to practice their religion. They went to Holland, where there was too much freedom for them. So like the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, they first found it too hot, then too cold, and they came here to try and create a society of their own where it might be just right.

They were a brave group, those Pilgrims. Their character was strong enough and their faith was strong enough that they would not be bent to the will of the others. But even more than this, they knew the cost of this freedom, and they were willing to pay it. They left in two boats, but one was not seaworthy, and so they returned and all came over in just one boat, the Mayflower. They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusetts winter. One hundred and two of them arrived here; by the following summer, only 55 were still alive. Nearly half of these brave Pilgrims died. That was the cost of their freedom.

Imagine this! 102 people leave their homes, say farewell to families and friends, say goodbye to a whole way of life, a whole world. They arrive as strangers in a strange land, and the land knows them not. It is cold, indifferent and deadly, and they spend a lonely and fearful winter freezing, starving, and dying. They bury nearly half of their number: one half of these Pilgrims buries the other half, and in the spring they plant crops and they hunt for food.

The crops are good. There is food here after all, there can be life here, coming from the fields and forest next to the graves of their loved ones who didn’t make it through that first winter. It was like all the tragedies of life, compressed into one year. And by late summer, when they could at last celebrate a good crop, half of those with whom they had hoped to celebrate were dead.

This was the background of the first Thanksgiving. Once it arrived, Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and his people. It was a thoroughly secular affair, a continuation of the British Harvest Home feast; and apparently it was a thoroughly joyous affair as well. The menu for the first Thanksgiving still sounds scrumptuous: they had venison stew cooked over an outdoor fire; spit-roasted wild turkeys stuffed with corn bread; oysters baked in their shells; sweet corn baked in its husks; and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. The food was served on large wooden serving platters, and all ate their fill. After dinner, according to legend, Chief Massasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popped popcorn, which the Pilgrims had never tasted before.1

These are the bare bones of the story of the first Thanksgiving. We don’t know many other details. It was the story of a small group of people who seemed to have both the character and the courage necessary to transform hell into heaven. They had been dealt a mixed hand. They chose their freedom, knowing full well the cost of it. And then they chose life.

I can’t help comparing these pictures of the Pilgrims from nearly four centuries ago with some of the mood in our own society today, and the comparisons are sobering. We don’t seem to bear suffering well today. We sometimes act as if life weren’t supposed to have any suffering in it at all.

One researcher has written that if you add up all the groups that consider themselves to be oppressed minorities their number adds up to 374 percent of the population of the United States.2 And we continue to create new categories of victims. A CBS report of a few years ago breathlessly revealed the existence of what they called “the hidden homeless” – defined as people living with their relatives. As a reporter for The Washington Post pointed out, “Once we called these situations ‘families‘ …”3 Where are all these “victims” coming from?

The National Council on Compulsive Gamblers claims that 20 million Americans are addicted to gambling. Estimates for addicted shoppers and addicted debtors are not clear, though both groups have formed support networks, claiming to be the innocent victims of a disease beyond their control. Dysfunction is a growth industry, but what are we growing?

During the past decade, for instance, young people were ten times as likely to be depressed as their parents and grandparents were at their age.4 Just a couple years ago, one-eighth of the children in New York City public schools – about 119,000 children – were classified as “handicapped” at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the struggling school district: one quarter of New York’s school budget was devoted to special education. Something here is being “defined down.”

Codependency is another growth industry, and sometimes it’s pronouncements are just funny. The cofounder of Minnesota’s Children Are People organization said that you do not “have to be the son or daughter of an alcoholic to be a co-dependent. Any critical parent will do.”5 So the “adult child of alcoholics” has become, simply, the “adult child,” a sweeping classification that includes everyone who was in any way traumatized by their parents’ inevitable shortcomings. One leader of the codependency movement puts the number of “adult children” at more than 230 million – higher than the nation’s actual total adult population.6

Pop psychology author and television personality John Bradshaw made this endlessly injured “inner child” a household word. He insisted, for example, that as many as 96 percent of American families were dysfunctional in one way or another.7 Ninety-six percent! At some point, you have to ask: Compared to what? When 96% of the families can be described as flawed in this way, don’t you need to stop calling it “dysfunctional” and begin calling it “normal”?

Sometimes, it seems like “the National Anthem has become The Whine.”8

This past summer at our annual General Assembly there was an instance of this that is still memorable. Several Unitarian Universalist ministers were sitting in a restaurant complaining about — well, nearly everything. A waiter kept walking past their table, and each time he noticed the whining was getting worse. Finally he stopped and said “Say, folks: is anything all right?”

It’s easy to find things in life to complain about. But when we let it become a habit, it cripples our spirit. Every time I catch myself whining about how something in life doesn’t please me, I try to remember that life isn’t supposed to please me. That isn’t the deal. The deal is, we have been given this gift of life, and our fundamental spiritual challenge is to learn how to see that it is a gift, and to respond appropriately. And the appropriate response to a great gift is gratitude. A medieval theologian named Meister Eckhart once said that if the only prayer we ever said was “Thank You,” it would be enough. I think he was right.

Thanksgiving isn’t as much a holiday as it is an achievement — an achievement of character and of spirit.

This isn’t to say there aren’t some real victims in the world, or that they don’t need our compassion and help. There are, and they do. But ironically, they are likely to become the real victims of this “victim culture” mentality. For when the society gets burned out or angered over all the bogus “victims” vying for attention and funding, the backlash will cut off both compassion and funding for the real victims. I think that’s already happening, and it is tragic.

But it’s tragic at another level, too. It’s a failure of spirit, and of character. If life were always fair, if bad things never happened to good people, life would be no more nuanced than a cartoon and we wouldn’t need churches for much more than ice cream socials.

Sometimes, life is hard. Suffering is an inevitable part of it, as the great religious figures have been saying for thousands of years. Your stepdaughter and your daughter-in-law are both battling cancer. It isn’t fair, and it hurts. A friend and colleague, a chaplain who has given so much to so many, is killed at the age of 53 when an oncoming driver crosses over the line and hits him. It isn’t fair. It hurts.9

We can’t control that. What we can control, however, are our reactions to life’s suffering, and the quality of the causes for which we suffer. We are often being taught to whine for the slightest reason, to whimper and look for someone to blame at life’s tiniest inconvenience, as though the only life we would accept would be a perfect one, in which we were healthy, beautiful, popular, powerful and rich. In that scene, “thanksgiving” would be little more than an untextured narcissism. There’s more to us. And the depth of our religion, and our spirit, is often measured not by putting on a happy face, but by looking at life in its depth and complexity, its eternal mixture of the good and bad, luck and misfortune, and still finding compelling reason to give thanks.

So as a background and preparation for Thanksgiving this week, I want to suggest that you make a list of your losses this year, the shadows in your life. What have you lost? What has hurt that you haven’t known how to deal with?

  • Perhaps you lost a parent, a partner, a child, a friend, or even a beloved pet.
  • Or maybe love turned sour. You fell in love with the wrong person, or fell out of love with someone you thought you’d be with forever.
  • Your job isn’t satisfying, you think it may not be where you belong after all.
  • Or maybe an illusion died this year. Some comfortable old hope or faith faltered, and you felt disillusioned. The Buddhists may be right when they say it’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned — but it seldom feels that way when it happens.

Make your list of the shadows in your life. They aren’t evil, the shadows give your life much of its texture, like shadows show the texture in a photograph, a landscape, or a face.

Then, against this list, look at what still remains. There is still this amazing gift of life, unearned and there for the living. The sun comes up, a new day begins, and with it new possibilities. There is the bad, and there’s the good, and there is us, needing to choose.

An ancient writer who believed he was speaking for God once wrote lines that have been quoted a million times since: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19, RSV)

“Choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” That’s how Thanksgiving started: with some Pilgrims who were thrown into the midst of life and death, blessing and curse, and who chose life.

The first Thanksgiving in this country was for people who had suffered horrible losses thousands of miles away from homes they would never see again. Then after just one year in their new home, 47 of them had died, and 55 had lived. The first Thanksgiving was for the faithful remnant of a faithful few. They were the American patron saints, in a way, of all who have suffered deep and tragic losses but refused to be beaten by them; of all who have been crippled by life but who still found a way to hold their heads high.

By all rights, all 102 of them should have been dead by spring. But they were not dead, and they proved it in a way that still beckons us by its courage, its audacity, and its sheer magnificence of spirit. After the harvest, in the midst of a field dotted with the markers of forty-seven graves, graves of forty-seven wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters — in the midst of this field, they invited over some new friends, they put on a feast, they shared their food, they said some prayers to honor the still-warm memory of those they had lost, and then they did a simple thing so powerful that it freed them from despair. They gave thanks. They gave thanks.

And so how do you know when it’s Thanksgiving time? Perhaps you know it’s time for Thanksgiving when you are finally able to give thanks for a terribly imperfect life in a terribly imperfect world because it is, after all, life, and life is still the greatest miracle we know. Maybe Thanksgiving is a holiday most appreciated by those who have been through a hell of a year, who have lost something of great value during the past year, and have somehow survived, and are at last able to rise above their losses and go on — and go on in a spirit of hope, of some tempered optimism, and of gratitude.

Thanksgiving, then, would be a kind of spiritual victory over life; a decision that, as the Pilgrims might have counted it, even though there may be 47 good reasons to give up on life, there are at least 55 equally good reasons not to give up on it, and to count our blessings as greater than our woes. And it would be a spiritual victory because the only way really to feel the fullness of life is to greet it as a wondrous gift, and to greet it with joy.

The ability to give thanks for this mixed bag of blessings and woes that we call life is the mark of people who have risen to a considerable spiritual height.

May we all, this Thanksgiving, strive to find again that more adequate and more honest attitude toward life: that attitude that overwhelms us with the sheer miracle of it all. May we lay aside our habits of complaining that the gift is not perfect long enough to recognize that the gift is miraculous, and short, and passing. And may we not let this gift pass us by this year without stopping to give thanks.

 

Endnotes

 

  1. The People’s Almanac #2 (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1978, p. 947)
  2. Christopher Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of American Character, pp. 12-13.
  3. Sykes, 13.
  4. Sykes, 13.
  5. Sykes, 140.
  6. Sykes, 141.
  7. Sykes, 142.
  8. Sykes, 15.
  9. During the segment of the worship service called “We Remember in Prayer” this morning, I mentioned a church member whose stepdaughter had just had mastectomy surgery and would soon be starting chemotherapy, and whose daughter-in-law had been receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer for several months. I also mentioned a local Episcopal priest and chaplain who had been killed in a head-on car accident this week.