Thanksgiving 2005

20 November 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Let us learn to be grateful for the blessing of life, even though it be a terribly mixed blessing, with enough of sorrow and loss to make us bitter if we let it.

When our vision becomes narrowed and our expectations become inflated, we wonder how we could ever be thankful for something as flawed and often unsatisfying as life can seem to be. Our job is not as we had imagined it would be. Our relationships are not as fulfilling as our fantasies of them had been; our friends are neither as numerous nor as true as we feel we deserve. Our families have problems.

We think, perhaps, that if only life would get better, we would be glad to be thankful for it, but that surely no one would be thankful for this kind of life. Yet it is precisely this life for which we must learn to be thankful. For it is the ability to see life as a blessing rather than as a burden which can lift its burden from our backs and let us sing and dance with the sheer joy of being alive.

This is the season when we are given the opportunity to renew our attitude of gratitude toward life: to recapture the sense of joy and of gratitude for the simple fact that we are here, that today life is ours, and today there is the chance to relish it.

And so let us give thanks: for imperfect lives in an imperfect world, let us give thanks. Amen.

SERMON: Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday like Christmas or the 4th of July, in that the original story always needs to be retold as the background for each year’s remembrances and reflections. Also like Christmas or the 4th of July, Thanksgiving is about a spirit, an attitude that we want to stay with us on all days, not just the holidays.

As the 4th of July celebrates the spirit of Independence, and reminds us of the struggles necessary to earn that independence, and as Christmas reminds us that the birth of the sacred can occur any time, any place, and in the humblest of surroundings, so Thanksgiving reminds us of the attitude, the vision, needed to let life’s sorrows be trumped by life’s joys and blessings.

Thanksgiving isn’t a religious holiday in the sectarian sense; it is a religious holiday in the deepest sense, arising from the hopeful and trusting depths of the human spirit, that place from which all the gods have also been born. It is a holiday especially for people who have lost something and need to know how to go on. If everything in your life is just swell, and it has been just swell for as far back as you want to remember ‘ well, that’s really swell. And then 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 friend or relative, even a pet you loved. Or the loss of a relationship, a community, even a lost chance. Or a more abstract pain: a loss of innocence, outgrowing a faith too small to cherish you without yet knowing how to replace it. Or the loss of a job, or the loss of confidence, optimism and hope.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the original Thanksgiving story. It was so long ago; it’s hard to imagine it could still be such a big thing. It took place 384 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 poignant, 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. They left on September 6th; 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 Massachusetts 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 they 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 combination 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.

Maybe that’s why 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.

If the Pilgrims had all given up and died of despair, we’d have no First Thanksgiving, and no good story worth telling. It was their victory over the tragedy of life that transformed it into a feast of thanksgiving.

We think of miracles as supernatural things that some foreign power just does or doesn’t do, and we sit as passive recipients, holding a remote control that won’t work. But that’s not true of Thanksgiving. It’s our miracle. We must turn tragedy back toward the attitude of thanksgiving, or it’s not likely to happen. Oh, time helps. Time heals all wounds, we say, and there’s much truth in it. But finally, we must decide to throw the party, to sit at life’s feast, which is always there, though it gets so easily hidden by the tragedies and monotonies of life.

It’s a special kind of vision being celebrated in Thanksgiving. It’s a vision we’ve all had, and most of us lose as we grow older. Thanksgiving is an invitation from life itself to take back that vision and restore both life and ourselves to wholeness.

It’s as though when we are children, still na’ve and prone to seeing magic and miracle everywhere, it is as though we see life as being made of gold. Then as we grow older, as we come upon our share of losses, sorrows and tragedies, we gain that cynicism so often associated with maturity, and we think ‘Well, it was only a very thin gold leaf, that’s all ‘ and very thin gold leaf, at that!’ Then sometimes, if we can come full circle, we return to the childlike awe at the wonder of it all. Life becomes a gift again, and we realize that under the gold leaf are rich deposits of gold. Not pure gold, but enough of it to help us regain a proper sense of awe and gratitude.

Yet the gold is always there. There’s a syrupy poem most of you know that’s sold a billion posters and greeting cards, by the name ‘Footprints in the Sand.’ Published for years as anonymous, it was apparently written by a woman named Mary Stevenson in 1936 when she was a girl. She was finally awarded the copyright for the poem in 1984. I suspect you’ll all remember seeing it somewhere:

Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord.

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,

other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed

that during the low periods of my life,

when I was suffering from

anguish, sorrow or defeat,

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,

‘You promised me Lord,

that if I followed you,

you would walk with me always.

But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life

there have only been one set of footprints in the sand.

Why, when I needed you most, you have not been there for me?’

The Lord replied,

‘The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand,

is when I carried you.’

– Mary Stevenson, 1936

This is such a favorite poem of so many people, I don’t want to debunk it, but I do want to clarify what it’s really about. Everyone in the world can identify with this experience of somehow being ‘carried’ even when we felt hopeless and abandoned. Buddhists, Taoists, theists, atheists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, everyone. So calling it ‘God’ is just giving this human experience the familiar name of our local deity. But what carries us, all of us, is the momentum of life itself, and life almost always tilts toward the positive, the healthy, and the good. What carries us is that capacity is the trustworthiness of life and of most of our fellow humans and other animals on the planet. That’s the manger into which we were born, and it’s a trustworthy home. And resting in life, even when we think we don’t know how to go on, can carry us across that chasm of despair, to return to awe, gratitude and thankfulness, in spite of the sorrows and tragedies life brings our way. That’s the kind of victory that Thanksgiving is celebrating.

It reminds me in some ways of a very different kind of story from one of my favorite contemporary storytellers: a physician in San Francisco named Rachel Naomi Remen. She tells a story about how as a girl growing up in Long Island, New York, she would spend many summers on a deserted beach there, gathering shells, digging for little clams, doing child stuff. It was a magical place. Every morning, the sea would wash up new treasures’pieces of wood from sunken boats, bits of glass worn smooth as silk, the occasional jellyfish. Once she even found a pair of glasses with only one lens left in them. Some of her most vivid memories were of beautiful white birds that flew constantly overhead, and when they flew between her and the sun, their wings became transparent like angel wings. Her heart soared with the magical white birds, and she too wanted wings to fly.

Then she wrote these words: ‘Many years later I had the opportunity to walk this same beach. It was a great disappointment. Bits of seaweed and garbage littered the shoreline, and there were seagulls everywhere, screaming raucously, fighting over the garbage and the occasional dead creature the sea had given up.’

‘Disheartened,’ she says, ‘I drove home and was halfway there before I realized that the gulls were the magical white birds of my childhood. The beach had not changed.’ But through the passing years, she had lost the vision, lost the ability to see the ordinary as extraordinary, and the everyday happenings of life as the magic of life itself, unfolding all around her. Yet that grander and more life-giving vision was always there ‘ sometimes like footprints walking beside her, sometimes carrying her. (from Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, pp. 70-71)

We need this ability to return to an attitude of gratitude, an attitude of Thanksgiving amidst the graveyards of lost people, lost hopes and dreams, lost chances, lost magic. This isn’t just about sitting in church on Sunday grooving on a happy-face feeling, like a weekly dose of hallucinogenic drugs. It’s one of the greatest secrets of life.

The historian Will Durant (1885-1981) wrote about this in another way. He was a prolific reader and writer, who over the course of a 96-year life wrote 15,000 or more pages on the whole history of civilization. Then, testing the boundaries of arrogance, he wrote a 100-page book called The Lessons of History, to summarize his life’s work. Following that, he was once pushed even farther into the wilds of arrogance, when an interviewer challenged him to sum up the history of civilization in half an hour. He said he did it in less than a minute. Listen to these few lines; you’ll hear the whole story of Thanksgiving running through it, the message of restoring us to balance and life:

‘Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, 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.’

Choosing to identify with the banks rather than the river is the act of choosing life, because only from the banks can we regain an honest and appropriate attitude of gratitude. Every great loss demands that we choose life again.

Sometimes we focus so intently on fixing life we lose sight of the fact that it is not broken. It is developing, it is unfolding, it is always incomplete, becoming more complete, but it isn’t broken. Something in us is capable of turning tragedy and suffering back into hope and trust, and joy, because we are being carried by the momentum and the magic of life even when we can’t see it, like the image of those footprints in the sand. It happens through grieving the loss, attending to the hole it has left in the fabric of our lives, and then being handmaidens to the healing passage of time that weaves us once again back into the fabric of this miracle of life. And it happens up on the banks, not in that river rushing by, but up on the banks where life, love, gratitude and hope dwell.

This is what the Thanksgiving story is reminding us of. That river that carries all of life’s awful happenings ran right through the community of the original Pilgrims. The first year in their new land, 47 of them died. 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 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, had a wonderful feast, probably 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 can still do the same for us. They gave 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 hope – is still pure miracle, mostly gold, the greatest gift we will ever receive.

May we all, this Thanksgiving, find again that more adequate and more honest attitude toward life: that attitude that overwhelms us with the sheer wonder of it all. 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, and fleeting. And may we not let it pass us by without stopping to give thanks. Happy Thanksgiving, good people.