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Vicki Rao
Davidson Loehr
Cuileann McKenzie
21 November 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH: “A Step Back”
(Cuileann McKenzie)
By celebrating Thanksgiving, our culture has chosen to reserve a day to reflect and to be grateful. Most of the time, for many of us, finding thankfulness may seem effortless. However, each of us will experience losses and disappointments at various times in our lives; some will be visible to others, and some will be seen by only ourselves. How can we be grateful at times when the difficulties seem to block the blessings from view? We can choose to take a step back, to look at the big picture with a fresh perspective.
For me, the process of stepping back has included remembering the grading policy of one of my high school teachers. He told the class that if anyone wanted to complain about the mark he gave for a particular test answer, he might also re-evaluate his marking on the rest of the test. There was less grumbling in that course as students who felt entitled to more marks for one answer were also amazed by the teacher’s generosity in other sections. He ensured that we all paused to look at the big picture before complaining. Though he may have been just trying to reduce the number of disgruntled students he’d have to face, he offered me a life lesson that would guide me when, many years later, I’d have to accept the diagnosis and effects of multiple sclerosis.
Perhaps the key to feeling thankful instead of grumbling is to move beyond our sense of entitlement, or at least to re-examine it. Fine, I didn’t deserve to get M.S. Illness is never fair. But was I anymore entitled to be born into my fabulous family, or to complete university while still being able to scurry frantically between my classes? And how could I complain much when I recognized the gift of being trained as a writer (a profession that actually requires a lot of sitting down)? And what about the blessing of being married to my wonderful husband? Overall, my M.S. could be seen as just one bad card in the otherwise stellar hand that I’ve been dealt. Getting M.S. was disappointing, but I would never want to submit my whole life for re-evaluation. I’ve received my share of grace. I’m thankful.
Michael J. Fox described Parkinson’s Disease as “the gift that keeps on taking,” and I feel the same could be said of M.S.. For through all it takes, it offers back opportunities for personal growth, and lessons on recognizing and appreciating the blessings that you do have, finding joy in what is often taken for granted. For instance, about twelve years ago, when a doctor first suggested that I might have some very early signs of M.S., I was offered an intense appreciation of walking, dancing, moving, if I chose to recognize those gifts – I did. When I wanted a real treat, I’d get a coffee and go for a long walk. The feeling of my legs moving easily and rhythmically was no different than all the times that I had taken my ability for granted, but suddenly I could see the gift of it. I chose to see the wonder.
Now my walking involves a lot more effort for a lot less speed. But I am thankful for continuing to do it. I’m also excited by the rapid advancements in research, leading to constant improvements in medications and steady advancements towards a cure. I follow the progress carefully and am confident that I will walk with ease again. When that time comes, I may not want to do anything but walk, or better yet, run! I might have to take occasional breaks to eat or sleep, but I’ll make Forrest Gump look like a couch potato!
The joy I found in walking years ago is only one example of finding miracles in the seemingly mundane. When you drink your next cup of coffee, really taste it (okay, only do this if it’s good coffee). Enjoy tonight’s bedtime story even more than the kids do. At the start of your next flight, find the thrill of speed. Let the runway release you, and at take-off, let your spirit soar at least as high as the plane.
There is also much joy to be found right here, right now. We’ve all chosen to come together, in celebration, in this sacred place. Recognize this experience as the gift that it is and stay a little longer to chat with others, or linger a while in the sanctuary for some peaceful reflection. Later, on Thanksgiving Day, whether celebrating with family and friends, or on your own, do something special. Perhaps go for a walk, if you’re able, or a spin in your wheelchair, to enjoy the cooler, fall air. Listen to your favorite songs or read from a beloved book. And tell someone special about the impact they’ve had on your life, just as I’ll be sending this text along to my high school teacher with a note of sincere thanks. Whatever you choose to do, take a step back, find your joy, and be grateful. Happy Thanksgiving!
PRAYER: “Let Us Give Thanks,”
by Max Coots
Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.
For children who are our second planting, and, though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are.
Let us give thanks:
For generous friends, with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;
For feisty friends as tart as apples;
For continuous friends who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we’ve had them.
For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;
For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as potatoes and as good for you;
For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;
For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you throughout the winter;
For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;
For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts, and witherings;
And, finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter.
For all these, we give thanks.
HOMILY: Thanksgiving
Victoria Shepherd Rao
Sometimes it can be difficult to feel thankful when we are filled with other feelings. Maybe you are coming here and feeling discouraged at the politics of the day and disheartened at the social horizon. Maybe you are feeling afraid for your civil rights and maybe you are feeling sad or numb at the killing which is going on in the name of America’s well-being. Maybe you are angry at the lies and half truths that wisp over the television screens and radio waves.
One way to overcome moods and to build up an attitude of gratitude is to do a little mental exercise I am sure most of you are familiar with if not habituated to: it’s called “counting your blessings”. You just ignore your current funk and start to review all the things about your life you appreciate, you remember everything that is going right, progressing smoothly, thriving silently like a potted geranium brought in from the summer porch, and living out its perennial life, giving you a shot of bright coral red just for looking that way.
When you place in your mind all these considerations, and just keep counting your blessings, you experience some level of transformation and a crack of light appears in your dark mood. If this is not a practice for you already, I suggest picking it up soon. Ask around here this morning, I am sure you’ll find many friends here who can coach you along, and give witness to this practice.
The times we are living in are bleak and the time of year suitably gloomy. Darkness is setting in. The days are noticeably shorter. Makes you feel like you’ve just got to get home and get into your pajamas. The rainstorms we have been having here in central Texas have added to the dreariness, so even though the temperature has been mild, the pull towards seeking shelter inside has still been strong. And it feels like there is much to shelter from in the political climate as well. Newspaper headlines appear as writing on the wall as the renewed administration seizes and scopes out the next four years. And then theres the whole array of feelings I was talking about earlier. Fear, anger, confusion, depression.
It is very hard to celebrate the abundance of life when we know of the utter devastation and poverty which is being created on the fields of war. Not fields, but city streets of Fallujah, of Mosel. How can we separate our keen sorrow and despair at the brutal killing, at the material and spiritual destruction? How can we when we come around the heavy-laden feast table with family and friends all around? Do we try to forget? Do we have a few drinks to help? Do we try to talk about our feelings, take the risk to talk about divisive issues? Do we just try to get through the holiday and hope everyone can act normal and decent with each other? Well, what approach do we take? It’s not so much a question about coping with the Thanksgiving holiday as it is about how we connect with revitalizing truths.
Here are a couple of suggestions. First, try to connect with the reality of the abundance of the earth, the bounty of life. Not in the bogglingly overladen shelves of HEB but outside. The sky and the air are great gifts to us horizon-seeking air-breathers. Breathe the fresh air in deliberately. Realize that it is shared by all living creatures of all time. Let go of the illusion that you are separate from the earth. Keep letting that idea go and see how that feels. How do you feel in that state of reckoning? Can you sense a thankfulness there in that moment.
Second, try to connect with someone. How can we bring a sense of the real into the Thanksgiving celebration? Try to widen the circle of inclusion around your table and more importantly around your heart and in your thinking. Whatever makes us more inclusive and widens our notion of the boundaries of the human community serves God or serves the Good. It is practicing liberal religion.
Now, I am sure you know all about hospitality and do your mightiest to be with family and to make an inviting feast for your family and friends. Try to imagine an expanded circle of kinship which includes all people, all living beings, the earth and the unknown. Imagine an expanded feeling of kinship with people who believe very different things about life and death than you do and imagine what that would do to your point of view. For instance, if you felt such a kinship, you would never feel alone, and separate from others because of ideas. You might allow your curiousity to mix with your acceptance of others and begin to give voice to questions which are earnest and satisfying. It is hard to imagine but we can start together, here, with each other. We can do this together here in this community, accept each other and encourage each other towards spiritual growth.
If that is to happen we need to take the time to be with one another and to build a trust of one another strong enough to bear both self-revelation and the risky process of seeking understanding of one another. The Listening Ministers can vouch for that I bet. Cultivating this practice give us practice in experiencing a truly accepting and inclusive attitude as individuals and as a religious community. The covenant groups which are small groups of the members and friends of this congregation are a great chance to grow in these ways, and there are new groups starting now if you have not yet become involved in this ministry.
It is hard to love someone when you are confronted with all the complexities of their religious beliefs and all the confusions of their unarticulated certainties. But it is amazing how we all can help others to come to clarity for themselves just by listening to them and trying to understand them using their own terms. It is a learned skill and it can be difficult at times but it is real and it is life-giving and it creates powerfully real relationships. Sacred connections.
And such are the gifts which are “blessings to be counted”. May there be such bounty among us. May it spread out from each of us and touch all we know.
HOMILY: Thanksgiving
Davidson Loehr
Holidays are like second chances that keep coming back to us. They are anniversaries of certain themes worth revisiting every year, maybe even every week. And this year, two normally unrelated anniversaries need to be combined. The first one is the American Thanksgiving tradition, which evolved four centuries ago out of the English Harvest Home festival.
Thanksgiving is a holiday for people who have suffered painful losses and need to know how to get past them. If everything in your life is just swell, and it has been just swell for as far back as you want to remember, Thanksgiving will just be another swell day, with turkey.
But if you have lost something this year, you need to lay claim to this holiday, because it is for you. I mean hard, painful losses: a parent, a partner, a child, a beloved relative, even a pet you loved. Or a more abstract pain: a loss of innocence, a loss of faith. Or the loss of a job, or the loss of confidence, optimism and hope.
It was so long ago, that first Thanksgiving, it’s hard to imagine it could still be such a big thing. It took place 383 years ago. Bach wouldn’t be born for 64 more years. The founders of the United States – Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Washington – wouldn’t be born for another century or more. The United States itself wouldn’t exist for another 155 years. Charles Darwin was 200 years in the future, and the new world he would help establish wasn’t even imaginable back in 1621 at the first Thanksgiving.
But one of the most enduring and life-affirming stories in our history was being lived out back then, in real time.
The year before, 102 Pilgrims had left to make their way to the New World. They started out in two ships, but one wasn’t seaworthy, so they came over in just the one ship, the Mayflower. The trip took 66 days, they arrived on November 11, 1620.
They were greeted, after a harrowing trip across the Atlantic, by a brutal and deadly Massachusettes winter. Of the one hundred and two who left to come here; by the following summer, only 55 were left alive. Nearly half of them died.
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 hunt for food.
They had the amazing good luck to land near a village where the famous Indian named Squanto lived. Squanto probably spoke more English than any Indian on the continent, and he helped them survive and plant crops. Without him, they might all have died.
The crop is good. There is food here after all, there can be life here. I cannot imagine how they might have felt: the combinations of life and death, tragedy and joy, famine and feast. It was like all 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.
The first Thanksgiving lasted for three days. There was much eating, drinking, and merriment between the surviving Pilgrims and Chief Massasoit and ninety of his people. The menu for the feast was 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 everyone ate their fill.
After dinner, legend has it that Chief Massasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popped popcorn, which the Pilgrims had never tasted before.
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.
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 to 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 almost four dozen graves, graves of wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters-in the midst of this field, they threw a party of thanksgiving. They invited over some new friends, they put on a sumptuous feast, 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, a simple thing so powerful that it may do the same for us: they gave thanks.
The scene reminds me of something the historian Will Durant said. Durant, you may know, wrote about a huge fourteen-volume, small-print “History of Civilization” which only seven people – and no one knows who they are – have ever read. Then he wrote a one-hundred page summary of the whole thing called The Lessons of History which many more of us have read. After that, he was once asked to sum up civilization in a half hour. He did it in less than a minute. Civilization, he said, is a river with banks. The river “is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, dying, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
“The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”
The American Thanksgiving is like that. In the river, in the background of the first Thanksgiving, were the graves of 47 friends and family, nearly half their number. On the banks, the 55 who survived invited some new friends over and threw a three-day party to give thanks.
They gave thanks because they knew that this life, even as it is punctuated with occasional pain, suffering, loss of life and loss of love, is still pure miracle, the greatest gift we will ever receive.
Now this year, the Thanksgiving anniversary is more complex. Because yesterday was another anniversary, too. It’s one I have never thought of in conjunction with Thanksgiving before. It gives a bolder and more stark picture of that river than even the first Thanksgiving story does. Yesterday was the anniversary of November 20, 1945, the day the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials began. Twenty Germans were put on trial, as they were told, not for losing the war, but for starting it. Among the twenty were two editors of German newspapers, who published the government’s propaganda so unflinchingly that they were seen as co-conspirators in the murderous war crimes that propaganda enabled. I read the original story as it appeared on that date in the New York Times, and want to read you just the opening paragraph:
Nuremberg, Germany, Nov. 20–Four of the world’s great powers sit in judgment today on twenty top Germans whom the democratic nations charge with major responsibility for plunging the world into World War II. The twenty-first defendant, tacitly although not specifically named in the indictment, is the German nation that raised them to power and gloried in their might. (By Kathleen McLaughlin)
That last sentence is the one that stopped me cold: The twenty-first defendant, tacitly although not specifically named in the indictment, is the German nation that raised them to power and gloried in their might.
These were the obedient citizens known since then as the “Good Germans”: those who their country applauded for being good citizens because they did not question the actions of their government.
They stayed on the banks and ignored the bloody river which they, through their leaders, were creating, and history will never forgive them for it. They celebrated, had their parties, gave thanks, and their lives went on. But in that place, at that time, that was not sufficient. History believes, as I also do, that they had a moral duty to do what was within their power to stop the blood pouring into the river beside them. With the anniversary of Thanksgiving and the start of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials coming at the same time, it raises the challenge of Thanksgiving, and of living life on the banks, to a whole new level. It doesn’t change the fundamental challenge; it just complexifies it.
But it does say, as both the Nuremburg trials and the verdict of history have said, that living well on the banks of that bloody river does not mean we may ignore what’s going down the river. In fact, we may be held accountable for it. The German leaders were held accountable legally. The German people were convicted by the opinion of nearly everyone in the world after Hitler claimed the right to a pre-emptive invasion of Poland in 1939. That was the crime which began WWII.
And we may not ignore the fact – we are morally compelled to acknowledge the fact – that the next significant pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation happened last year, when President Bush claimed the right to invade Iraq, a country which had nothing at all to do with 9-11 and posed no threat of any kind to us. Nor did we “liberate” anything in Iraq except its oil and its money. Fifty-nine years ago, we made it clear to Germany that these were war crimes punishable by death.
Every Thanksgiving has its version of those graves in the background, in the bloody river next to the banks on which we build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. When the deaths are visited upon us, we are challenged to grieve them without letting them poison our lives, or take away our gratitude and hope. That’s why it’s so important to remember that life is always the ultimate gift, and learn the art of giving thanks.
But when we visit the deaths on others, if history is a guide, we must not only grieve them, but do our best to stop them. For if life is the ultimate gift, then the willful and unprovoked destruction of others’ lives is among the greatest of all crimes against humanity. We cannot afford the moral cost of being Good Americans if it means failing to question the kinds of actions that we once prosecuted another nation for as war crimes. If we do, the phrase “Good Americans” may take on the same ironic meaning we gave to the phrase “Good Germans” six decades ago.
So our challenge this Thanksgiving is twofold. First, we must see what is in that bloody river, ask how it got there, and decide whether we have the moral obligation to try and stop all the killing, all the deaths.
And second, we must not let rage, vengeance or angry determination poison our souls and rob our own lives of their nuance and their balance.
It is a spiritual balancing act worth the best that is in us. We must give heed to the moral actions of our nation, for which history will hold us accountable. And we must not let it blind us to the fact that, as bloody as the river is, the lives we enjoy on our banks are still precious, and still worth giving thanks for.
Holidays are like second chances that keep coming back to us. At this most complex Thanksgiving, may we seek that delicate and necessary balance between the moral awareness of our contributions to that bloody river, and our spiritual appreciation for the great gift of life, both here and abroad. May we give a rest to our habits of complaining that the gift is not perfect, long enough to recognize that the gift is miraculous, precious, terribly fragile, and fleeting. Let’s not let it pass us by without stopping to give thanks. And may our actions also make it more likely that others whose lives our armies and corporations touch may also be able to give thanks for their own lives.
A Thanksgiving Prayer
This is one of thirty-four ancient poems, all addresses to and praising to the individual gods or goddesses of the Greek pantheon. They were ascribed to Homer in antiquity but are of unknown authorship.
To Earth the Mother of All
I will sing of the well-founded Earth,
mother of all, eldest of all beings.
She feeds all creatures that are in the world,
all that go upon the goodly land,
all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly;
all these are fed of her store.
Through you, O Queen, we are blessed
In our children, and in our harvest
and to you we owe our lives.
Happy are we who you delight to honor!
We have all things abundantly:
our houses are filled with good things,
our cities are orderly,
our sons exult with feverish delight.
(May they take no delight in war)
Our daughters with flower-laden hands
play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field.
(May they seek peace for all peoples)
Thus it is for those whom you honor,
O holy Goddess, Bountiful spirit!
Hail Earth, mother of the gods,
freely bestow upon us for this our song
that cheers and soothes the heart!
(May we seek peace for all peoples
of the well-founded earth)
Homeric Hymn XXX, adapted by Elizabeth Roberts, and by Vicki for FUUCA
