Dina Claussen
November 18, 2007
The winter holiday season is with us again. It starts out on a simple note with the rituals of Thanksgiving. We give thanks in the presence of community and celebrate with stories and food. It involves an incredible amount of taking care of business, on top of the usual tasks that we do. There can be a lot of stress and often unreasonably high expectations. For those who spend time with their extended families, it?s the extra closeness that reminds us of what we love and what we find challenging in those relationships. And this can hold true, whether we are with our family of origin or with non-biological families that we have found to take their place. The whole thing may remind us of painful realities, like recent deaths or divorces, or old hurts not dealt with. There is nothing like close encounters with families of whatever kind to stir things up.
Even for those who celebrate without that larger gathering, it can be a reminder of the difficult realities of how that came to be. I believe that we are compelled by a primal human instinct to reflect and give thanks whether we come from amazing abundance or from the simple fact of having survived terrible times. Despite whatever commercial, political, or religious agendas are served by these rituals, I believe that these rituals would wither away if deeper needs were not being met by them.Even with that primal instinct, reflecting on what we are thankful for and what that means in our lives can be a risky business. Our blessings are often mixed at best. Feelings can run high or we can retreat into numbing routines that will hold a lid on it.
Given all that, what are we to do with Thanksgiving? Do we simply go through the motions to do what is expected and count ourselves lucky to have made it through another intense task-driven experience? Some people do feel that way about any major holiday. In that mode, even sitting with people who you care about can be thought of as a task. It can be a relief to get back to our everyday life.
Now, I don?t believe that rituals are necessarily big affairs invented by ministers and rabbis, for instance, and intensely wrapped up in the Gross National Product Index. They can be private or done with a few others. It can be as simple as taking a breath and being thankful that you can breath, especially if you have memories of having experienced any difficulty in breathing at any time in your life, which is pretty common.
It can be enjoying washing dishes after a meal, with your hands immersed in warm soapy water, as it evokes fond memories, like mine of the times in my family when we sang rounds together as we did the dishes.
It can be glorying in the ritual of taking the dog for a walk, as you enjoy the cool crisp air of fall or winter and the excitement of the dog who revels in getting out. It can be passing on a simple, enjoyable skill to your children, like for instance tying special knots for fishing, and watching as they feel pride in having a new skill.
In a New York Times article, Susan Schnur wrote about a time that she witnessed her boyfriend?s father do an amazing private ritual of thankfulness. In the middle of the night, evidently unaware that she lay quietly awake rather than asleep nearby, this man came to the kitchen and cut a slab of rye bread. He stood looking out the dining room window for a while.
He then began to repeat the word ?bread? in many different languages as he thrust the bread into the air, held it to his heart, shook it, kissed it, and then took a bite. He continued this ritual until his hands was empty of bread and then returned to his bed.
She goes on to say, that even on an ordinary day, he appeared to be ?stunned by his own fierce happiness.? He met that with his extravagant ritual of thanks for the simple gift of bread. We have air to breath, water to drink and simple food like bread for our survival in this extraordinary thing called life. Surely that calls for some reflection and some gestures of gratitude, if not as dramatic as the man with his bread.
As for those who have lived with a great deal of trauma and difficulty in their life, it can stun us when they still manage to approach life in this way. I was working in a hospital where I met a young man who had cerebral palsy. He worked as a messenger before they had email. As he whirled around the hospital in his wheel chair, he made friends wherever he went. If you took the time to listen carefully, you discovered an intelligent, witty and warm person who lived with what he had with ease and laughter. He told me that it was good to be alive. He had the audacity to give thanks in the middle of what would look like woe to most of us.
What are the things that we live with that can make it difficult for us to feel gratitude? Is it our weight in this culture that is so obsessed with thinness? Is it that we are outside of the narrow models for what a male or female should look like and act like? Are we not interested in the kind of work that would bring us more money and respect?
Do we have mental or physical conditions that allow others treat us as less than fully human? Do our sexual realities, our race, or our gender make us targets for discrimination and violence?
As the world changes, do we feel we have lost the world that we came from? Or are we coming from a new sensibility, still not accepted widely in the world? Are we too young or too old?
Do we have to share our life with half-truths because of experiences that would make others fear or pity us? Do we have more passion than is accepted in our culture? There are so many to name. I?m sure that you can fill in those others.
What are some rituals that you do now to help move you out of being caught in all the negatives? Do you do them fully present or are some of them done now as routine, forgetting the original feeling that they arose from? I have a ritual from my childhood that involves peanut butter. I take bread (the vehicle is unimportant actually) and lay down slabs of butter (no thin layers here), gobs of peanut butter, and gobs of jam. This is definitely comfort food for me. I now understand that this ritual reminds me of those rare times when my mother would feed me in between meals and I would feel especially cared for. Now that I understand this, perhaps I can move into thinner layers for my health?s sake. Are you naming and reclaiming old rituals? Or are you and your loved ones finding new ones to take their places?
As a community, we also have rituals. We gather here every week as a congregation, looking to renew our sense of who we are, what we are grateful for, and what we feel our work is in this world. May our rituals here live up to the task of doing that for us. If they no longer do that well, I trust that there will be a process in which the congregation will be moved to come up with new ones that will. Since I have found my spiritual home in Unitarian Universalism, I have felt gratitude every day that I can be a part of communal rituals that help to sustain me. Thank you for being one of those sustaining congregations. Gracias! [thrust] Danke! [to the heart] Wah Do! [shake] Merci [kiss] Thank you![hands open wide]
Susan Schnur, Hers; Susan Schnur, New York Times (www.nytimes.com search), July25, 1985.
