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November 7, 1999 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 7, 1999

Enlightened Aging: Grow Old with Grace

Some years ago I did a sermon on Diwali which this year celebrated between November 4-8, and is the Hindu Festival of Lights. Diwali (Divali) is a festival for the Goddess Lakshimi the source of health, fertility and prosperity, and her consort, Vishnu, the preserver. The focus is on peacemaking and new beginnings of this the Hindu lunar New Year. It was the theme of honoring the light within ourselves, and in others that I wanted to emphasize in my message today on growing older. Remember the greeting I told the children about, namasté? Palms together, gently bowing, Hindus greet one another saying, "namasté," translated "I honor the light in you." Today I want us to consider how we might also honor the light within ourselves.

Someone in this congregation asked me back last spring to do a sermon on aging well. After some preliminary research, I sent out feelers to my UU internet groups hoping to get some help, and I did receive some wonderful stories. I heard about a man in Lexington, MA, who started a family in his 60s, who still going strong in his 80s; and woman in her late sixties who became an actress and still acting in her late 70s; my husband told me about a man who shares duties with him in a glider club flying the tow plane, this man is 80 year old tow pilot who must keep his medical certificate current and keeps meeting the rigors of this test with, shall we say, flying colors. I also thought about my own Grandma Dean who loved politics and kept going to every voting opportunity into her middle 90s. And Wes, a man at my former church, who was still spry in his 90s, often took me out to lunch--he had a cadre of waitresses in four restaurants who loved spoiling him, but his most notable achievement was that he was continuing a tradition he began when he retired of picking blueberries which he put in his freezer and gave to people through out the winter; the last year I visited with him he was given front page attention in the local paper for picking 500 pounds of blueberries.

Then I look at the elders in this congregation and see a large group of people who are not just growing older. All of these folk have the gift I think of as enlightened aging and they are growing older with grace.

However, just hearing about the people who do age well does not really address the issue of how to do it, for often these senior members of our society are just as mystified as everyone else about how they have reached a ripe old age with all, or most of, their faculties and are still looking forward to each day. Some years ago I used to listen to Willard Scott on the morning news, when he would mention the things that the 100+ group said had led to their long lives, and heard everything from no smoking and no alcohol to a daily cigar and martini. Which indicates that perhaps attitude has a lot to do with it.

On a fundamental biological level, genes play a dominant factor in how long we will live, but who knows which genes they have. The Dean side of my family lives into their nineties, doing about everything they are not supposed to, most of them too skinny even while eating an old fashioned high fat, meat and potatoes daily diet, while the maternal, Martin side of my family, are very religious, and tend to be abstainers from everything but food, yet seem to die off by their sixties. I keep my fingers crossed that the fact that I look like the Deans means I got most of my genetic material from that side, but I cannot know for sure. As a middle-aged woman, I certainly care about aging issues and hope I have an experience like those I have mentioned.

Which reminds me that at our Women’s Retreat someone asked what is middle-age, what is elderly? I don’t remember where I read this, but somewhere it is defined that you are young until age 45, middle-aged from 45 to 65, and from 65 on, you are a senior, and generally elderly refers to those who are past 70--although, my guess is we would think twice about calling a lot of people we know in their 70s elderly.

In a way it is surprising that old people don’t spend a lot of their time thinking about the subject of old age and the inevitable: In a Harris poll, only 24 percent of oldsters say they fear death; whereas, 75 percent of those polled in junior high school list death as one of their top five worries or fears. Though teens prove the confusion of that time of life because they behave as if they think they will live forever--which must say more about their level of life experience than their deeper fears.

In the Barbara Stanford reading, she wonders: "At sixty-seven how long do I have? One day or thirty years? Will it end fast? Or will I go slowly, lingeringly, declining, fading away?"

Generally, we do not like to think about how much time we have left, assuming on some level we have more; perhaps afraid to consider that we might have less, especially if we had to acknowledge that we are not leading very healthy lives. I am in the fifth decade of life, and when I think about Stanford’s questions, I find I assume I have lived at least half my potential life time--based on the Dean genes, and expect another half; yet, the truth is, I might not have more than this day. And perhaps a characteristic of being middle-aged and elderly is that we feel more acutely the speeding up of time. I often feel that time is like water running through my fingers, and long for those childhood days and my country summers that seemed would never end. Which also makes me aware of how much of my life I have wished away waiting for, expecting things that were not all that important.

So who does tend to age well? How do they do it? How old is old or old enough? I will look forward to your views on the subject during our period of congregational sharing.

Most people say they only want to live as long as they can live a good quality of life. Yet, my experience tells me we may not always believe that, nor do we always believe that for our loved ones.

The great American lawyer and politician, Daniel Webster was visiting one of our great presidents (the sixth), and a Unitarian, John Quincy Adams who was aged 80 at the time. Webster asked Adams how he was feeling, and the old man replied, "I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement, battered by the winds, and broken in upon by the storms. From all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair."

You know my favorite saying is, "Every front has a back." If the front side of aging is experience and greater contentment, then the back is that our bodies are racking up the story of our years. While we do live longer on average now than in Adams’ day, we have just as many physical ailments that go along with a long life.

How we keep our focus, or become enlightened in our aging, and grow older gracefully comes in part by making the soul--however you understand that word--the center of aging well.

I have spent a lot of time in retirement homes, and nursing centers, places that are filled with the aged, and I find that most of the time this is not a disheartening experience. I have always enjoyed the company of elderly people. The most important thing I have learned from this is that elderly people do not get more grumpy or crotchety, though they often do get more forthright about speaking their minds. I was once told by a psychologist who specialized in working with elders that people usually become more of what they already were as they age. So a generally happy younger person grows into a generally positive, but realistic and happy elder, while a cranky, hard-to-please younger person is apt to just get more cranky. It is to this wisdom I have turned when facing difficult people of all ages.

My personal belief is that people tend to age well who are outwardly focused, yet inwardly centered. So in spite of the ups and downs of life and of the physical problems that do mount with age, we are more likely to have a good life to the end if we live our lives with goodness as our goal. Goodness, as an outcome. That is if we strive to make our actions ones that benefit ourselves and others, which is the essence of our human connections that I see as holiness incarnate. We reach out to touch others and are conscious of the impact of our actions, all of our actions, both the deliberate and the incidental.

The enlightenment process is the same regardless of age, for it is in the knowing of ourselves that we find what matters most to us. And then we will live more authentically. Often, it is in the retirement years that we really get to do the things we always wanted to, so growing older is an opportunity, not a sentence. It is only a sentence if we find our worth in the wrong places.

Aging well has clear physical and mental components, but I would include also the spiritual component, that even rationalists have to admit operates at a different level. We know that we need to take good care of the working machinery, the body. A sensible diet, exercise, do in fact play a great part in aging well. And one of the reasons we are seeing more people living longer, and living healthier into their old age comes from the sensible precept that your body gives you what you give it.

Most of us intuit also that we need to keep active mentally. There has been an very interesting study going on for about twenty years now, of a group of nuns in a convent in Kentucky, where gerontologists, those doctors who specialize in the aging body, have been looking at the rate of Alzheimer’s disease. Compared to most convents, this convent has a very low rate of this disease that is synonymous with senility, though there are other forms of senile dementia that are not Alzheimer’s. The most outstanding feature of this convent is the mental activity, the constantly learning new things these nuns are required to do. Other studies support this evidence. As we continue to learn new things, as we struggle with new thoughts and ideas and processes, we have a greater likelihood of keeping sharp mentally. When you look around at the family and friends you would lift up as elderly go-getters, I would bet that most of them are doing this very thing. Even if physically impaired, they keep their minds open. I consider that a Unitarian Universalist way of living!

Seniors are often given short shrift because they are assumed to be losing their mental acuity, but two of my elderly friends showed that one aspect of a good old age is humor, and they offered me these two stories (I didn’t ask Jane Frelick or I would still be on the phone--we all know her vast repertoire of jokes!):

A son wanted talk to his aged and somewhat forgetful mother about what inevitably lay ahead, her death, but he was stumbling about a good deal. Finally he said, "Mother, you’re getting along in age, and who knows what may happen? I mean, shouldn’t we make a few decisions about arrangements?"

The old lady kept silent, but was smiling calmly, so the son pressed on. "I mean, Mom, do you want to be buried or cremated?"

The mother patted his cheek, then replied, "Well, son, I don’t know. Why don’t you just surprise me?"

And this one which will remain one of my favorite stories about growing old:

Two supposedly senile men were committed to an institutional home near the sea on the southern shore of England. They were taken out one morning for a walk, accompanied by an attendant, Albert. As they strolled along the beach, a seagull flying over dropped a "little gift" right on top of the bald head of one of the old dears. Albert saw what happened and said in great concern, "Wait right here while I go get some toilet paper." As Albert ran toward the building, the offended old man turned to the other one and said, "Now there goes a darned fool! And they say we are mentally weak! That seagull will be a mile away by the time he gets back with the toilet paper."

Enlightenment is knowing oneself, the fact and the fantasy, and the all important spiritual aspect of reaching out to others. My belief is that the heart of lived spirituality is the act of giving--giving love, which is giving of self to and for others. The best lived life is one where we give and not just receive, the more giving the better. Giving is not primarily about things, but more about looking for the light of life, that holiness that makes us humans reach out to one another. That does not mean we are not supposed to give to ourselves, for I think that we are always going to get more love and kindness as we give it. And it is good to take time for the self, for nurturing the soul, for learning what it is that makes us feel sorrow and feel joy. The spiritual component is learning about ourselves, being more accepting of others knowing that we will grow in the process, too. Honoring the light that is in us and honoring the light that is in others. At the end of our lives, if we are lucky enough to be aware of the moment, we will not be adding up the sum of our possessions or the years of our toil; rather, we will be most aware of the love we have--or missed. What we want is to grow so much in love that we find we never have missed anything that really counts.

Growing old gracefully is about growing, period. We will age well if we are unencumbered by false ideas, false goals, all the false gods of ego and self-centeredness. These are weeds in our Eden of life. It is the work of a life well-lived to keep planting and keep weeding.

So, that our lives will be full and we will age with grace and joy, in the words that the French philosopher/writer Voltaire ends his masterpiece Candide with, the line spoken by the elderly Candide: "Let us cultivate our garden."

Namasté

 

November 14, 1999 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 14, 1999

What’s Wrong with the World: A UU Prayer for Social Justice

Some days I pick up the newspaper and read a lot of negative articles. Unfortunately, this follows my 5:45, morning wake-up to National Public Radio, which I often continue to listen to as I take my exercise. What happens is that I reach a kind of saturation point of sad and difficult stories of lives shattered around the world by war, famine, natural disasters. When I reach this saturation point I find myself saying out loud sometimes, "What’s wrong with the world?" I am sure you have also experienced this satiation of bad news, too. The overwhelming feeling is helplessness. Would that I could have a magic wand or be God for a day.

When I was doing my chaplaincy training for ministry, I was in a class with five evangelical students, all male, from the local seminary. We were all completing our CPE class, Clinical Pastoral Education, at the Beverly, MA, general hospital on Boston’s north shore. I was often given a hard time by these fiery young ministry students, but it taught me better than anything else how to defend my Unitarian Universalist faith. This CPE training consisted in part of a morning class where we all had to give verbatim reports about interactions we had had during the week with patients. The rest of the time was devoted to working on the wards--I was assigned the emergency room and the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). While I had two tough units, I saw a lot of dying and death during that summer, on the whole, it was the classroom sessions that caused me the greatest difficulty.

All this set up is merely to tell you that one morning while we were in our discussion period, one of the young men said in essence, that he found a great deal of hope in knowing that Jesus had suffered and died on the cross. After waxing a bit on this, he concluded rhapsodically, saying, " You just can’t imagine a better way for God to make himself known to the world." Almost before he had closed his mouth, I piped up to say, "I could think of dozen better ways!" Needless to say, this only proved to them that I was on the express train to hell.

In that moment, though, I was speaking what I still believe. Why would anyone make a world that has so much senseless suffering? Why, for instance, couldn’t the world be safe for children, and then the adults could suffer the repercussions of their actions? Right down to the main question: Why would a God make a world with any suffering in it at all? Would you? The old, "we can’t know God’s will," has never held any meaning for me. Except on one narrow level, which I will talk about later.

If I throw out the question, What’s wrong with the world?, most people have some opinion about what’s wrong with the world. The media certainly give us a large dose of it daily. One of the chief complaints of many positively oriented people, like myself, is how little we seem to hear of anything but what is wrong.

Having said that, I want to make clear that I believe there is a lot more right with the world, than wrong with it. If every household, every country were functioning at a chaotic level, there would be complete anarchy, the end of civilization as we know it. The truth is that the vast majority of people living around the world, live in relative harmony, trying to be cooperative, and get along. We all know, however, especially those of us who have taught, that it only takes one difficult person to create disharmony in a small group like a classroom, a family, a church, etc. The old adage that one rotten apple will spoil the barrel is often true.

The fact that there is a lot right with the world only makes it more important that we try to find ways to help where things do not work well. Further, we might have to see that we are part of the problem, and naturally, none of us wants to believe we have anything to do with what is wrong with the world--or the part of the world that we call ours, be that the office, the congregation, the home. But, as the Brits say, there it is. That is our responsibility as citizens of the world. And it is especially our responsibility as people of faith, for we come here saying we want to be better people, we want to help our community, our world, to be a better place. Our Seventh Principle reminds us that this world is an interdependent web of existence, of which we are a part, not just the plants and animals.

So we cannot expect that things that impact one part of the human community do not ultimately impact the rest, so it matters what we do, even if we cannot see the wider view. One good example is neglected or troubled youth who will become neglected, troubled adults--we cannot just ignore them and expect their problems won’t be our problems. The fact that injustice is a condition for any group of people, means that injustice is a part of our human family. We must see it as central to our ethical values as UUs to want to help our world family.

My reaction to so much that is wrong with the world is to do what people down through the ages have done when nothing else could be done--pray. My UU prayer for social justice is to pay attention to it; that we need to pay attention to it; that we in this congregation need to pay attention to it

Looking at the most obvious system meant to address social justice in this country, we can consider the welfare system. I have heard people say, sincerely, that the welfare system should be abolished; that it is the worst system the government ever devised. But that is simply not true. The welfare system is a wonderful system. Be reminded also, that it is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the defense system in government funding. (Frankly, if it is going to be wasted, I would rather money be wasted on people than machines.) The system was designed to help those aged, infirm, and children, those who cannot help themselves. There are some people who have no family, a concept that is alien to most of us. They have no one to turn to in times of trouble. I have met these people. Even the most cynical of us wants to help those who in fact can do little to help themselves. That the system was/is sometimes abused does not make it a bad system.

My chief complaint with "The Government," and therefore the highest on my list of things to pray about, is this: The government, at the behest of us the people, is good at coming up with all sorts of wonderful programs meant to address a multitude of problems, as well as advance a multitude of good ideas. Like social security, the highway system, public education, rural electrification, Medicaid/Medicare, many wonderful programs that make this a very special nation--and welfare. Most of us would not want to live anywhere else in the world. But that same government, our chosen leaders, is--as far as I can see--pretty poor, often incompetent, at monitoring these programs and solutions. Oversight or auditing does not seem to get much attention. That’s like turning a group of six-year-olds loose in a candy store with a piece of paper that says, "Eat only one piece."

Condemning good ideas, condemning good programs that benefit thousands of people is not the right approach. The better approach goes on the lines of condemning the sin, not the sinner. A social justice prayer asks that we help the helpless, not the make a help-yourself program that has little responsibility built into it.

My social justice theme in a nutshell, my prayer in other words, is that everyone would exercise personal responsibility: at home, at work, in the houses of business and government--everywhere.

What’s wrong with the world is that too many people are concerned with personal gain, and too few are exercising personal responsibility. This is about ethics; our moral monitoring of the self.

We hear about it every day. In The News Journal, with city government credit card abuse; pork barrel spending policies as the national government plays its never ending one-upsmanship game of politics; in countless ways that all come down to the same core issue that in most cases boils down to not taking an ethical stand, not exercising personal responsibility. This is what I pray for in our elected officials as well as for all of us, that we exercise personal responsibility.

If the world were to function at its highest, if we are to function at our highest, then we all have to work under the honor system. Everyone doing what s/he can in a given moment. The most perfect system is communism; Jesus, Buddha, many enlightened religious leaders have lived this way. Everyone sharing a common pool of goods. But what we also know is that communism does not work for more that a few devoted small groups because not everyone accepts the level of personal responsibility that it requires. Communism becomes subject to greed, ego, power plays like any other system. The communism of the Soviet Union, was communism in name only. Communism did not work for them, and won’t work because not everyone works at a responsible level. Some give too much, and many give too little. The founding parents of this country, particularly Jefferson and Franklin, understood the need for checks and balances in order that one branch of government, one state, one person would not overstep the boundaries of relative fairness.

The honor system then is truly a function of the individual in most cases. There was a flap in the news this week about a survey done by, I believe it was Penn State, about cheating on campus. According to the survey, over half of the students said they had cheated on tests and homework. So the school was going to institute an honor code. Honor codes have been around for a long time, but honor codes are only as good as the people are honorable. Further, honor codes can be abused. If the system requires that Nancy tells on Sue, or Sue tells or Ted, then there is a potential for an abuse of power. No matter how many systems we devise, there is always some way around them; unless we put the emphasis on personal responsibility.

Social justice speaks to the need for all the peoples of the world to be treated fairly. Last week, Theresa Medoff and Hope Russell of our Social Concern committee presented a program in the Forum about the problem of child labor, especially in the so-called third world countries. One of the major reasons for opposition some people have to the NAFTA, free trade agreement, is that big companies ship the work to places like Mexico where there are no child labor or minimum wage laws. Nike, Kmart, only to mention two that have been accused of this practice, have done this, but many companies are part of the problem. And, it happens right here in this country. Supply and demand is at the heart of it the economists argue.

What’s wrong with the world always boils down to humans, to human greed, not human need. If I could find one instance where this were not true, and it would change my philosophy! How can we claim to be a civilized society, or a collection of civilized societies, if we can turn a blind eye to social justice abuses in the name of supply and demand. Doesn’t sound very civilized to me.

As long as there are people who will operate out of self-interest, greed, the need for power, then there will be abuse--from the home to the nation.

When we look out at the world, we see that there are institutions not working well, but these institutions are run by people, by you and me. Taking responsibility for our part in the larger system, though, does not happen by accident.

An esteemed judge, Robert Gawthrop, once said that it was important for him to remember that he was nominated to dispense justice. "Just because people stand up when you walk into court, and you wear a [black robe] and sit on an elevated chair . . . , you have to remind yourself you're just another person who happens to be a lawyer elected to serve as judge." To keep this in mind, for himself and those who interview him, Gawthrop keeps a small framed statement near his private courtroom door--a gift from relatives. It reads: "To us you’ll always be the same old jackass."

I do not have much time for television, but if I do get a few minutes, I like to watch the Food Network, the cooking channel. It is very relaxing, plus, I enjoy cooking for my family who enjoy eating. I was listening to this channel as I was preparing a meal, and heard about a California woman who owns a restaurant that uses only organically grown products. But that was not the part that caught my attention; rather, it was hearing her say that she had been on welfare for several years, while her children were small, and then got a job in a restaurant when they were school-age. Eventually, she worked and saved and got some help in starting this small enterprise, which has become very well-known in that area of California. She was very candid in speaking about being on welfare, saying that at the time she could see no way out, no other way to take care of her children, and now she feels a great personal responsibility to others for helping her family when they needed it. She got, now she gives. That is what is right with the world. Especially that she talked about the very bumpy road to her success.

When you hear those inevitable stories about welfare queens, remember the vast majority of people on welfare are paupers, and some of them have the potential be become productive citizens. Whose fault is it if the welfare system works poorly, anyway? Not the recipients. Mostly, it’s the dispenser’s fault.

There are so many social justice issues, you know about most of them, and there is only so much any one person can do; but, there is something we can do. Always, there is something we can do. It just takes practice, diligence.

A strong man at the circus sideshow demonstrated his power before a large audience bending iron bars, lifting heavy barbells, etc. As a finale, he picked up a lemon and squeezed it mightily, then said, "I’ll give $200 to anyone who can get another drop from this lemon."

A slight, studious-looking man came forward, picked up the lemon, strained hard, used both hands, but managed to get a drop. The strong man was amazed, and as he paid the man asked, " What is the secret of your tremendous strength?"

"Practice," he replied. " Just practice. I was treasurer of the church for thirty-two years."

The fact that you are sitting here is evidence that everyone in this room understands the importance of personal responsibility. We come here to address the needs of the world as we contend with our own concerns. We understand the need, as ministers are fond of saying, for comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. The gift of this community is this process of sharing of our concerns, and finding ways to address them. Next Sunday we will ask for a small donation to the Agape fund, that helps people in our own faith community, and a portion of that will go to helping those in the wider community. The existence of this Unitarian Universalist Society of Mill Creek is a testament to your acceptance of the larger needs of our families and the community. We are always helping each other and those you never see, in ways that you usually do not see. And I know that you are reaching out to help in dozens of ways, which all do not see. It is the ethic of personal responsibility that motivates you.

Earlier I said that the old, "we can’t know God’s will," has never held any meaning for me--except on one narrow level. That is only if God’s will is that we feel the agony of feeling helpless as we ask, What’s wrong with the world?, so that we will respond to those wrongs.

My UU Prayer for social justice is that we will continue to support as many good causes as we can, those dearest to our hearts, and certainly the work of this congregation, the work of Unitarian Universalism. This is our work, for while we cannot do everything, we can do something, as Edward Everett Hale reminds us:

I am only one
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the
something that I can do.

 

November 21, 1999 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

November 21, 1999 Thanksgiving Service

Hungering and Feasting: The Thanksgiving Themes

"Thanksgiving is often a holiday focused on a turkey stuffed with sage, and I want each of us to focus on being a sage stuffed with turkey." I borrowed that, supposed to be amusing line, from a Toastmaster friend, and I do like the idea of being a sage, even if I do not like the idea of being stuffed.

Most of us sit down to a Thanksgiving meal with some understanding of being thankful for our food. Nowadays we are so far removed from the source of our food that I often wonder if it is not much harder for us to be truly thankful. Also, very few of us have ever experienced any hunger. Few of us have ever experienced real thirst, either. We live in bountiful times.

Hunger and its counterpart, feast used to be much more real to folk who lived at the behest of the wind and weather. They never knew from one year to the next if there would be enough, much less if there would be bounty as we know it.

Envision being a prairie farm family who has barely made crops for four or five years, then suddenly, all the necessary elements work in your favor: the spring starts and stays warm, the seed sprouts readily, few insect or plant diseases trouble you which is a rare occurrence, your animals are all healthy as there is more than enough pasture grasses, and looks like there will be a good hay store, as well. Then the early fall brings in the best harvest of your time on this homestead. Years of hard work, wanting this kind of harvest, are finally paying off. The fruit ripens and is picked and stored; some is put in root cellars, some of it dried, etc. The grain crops come in and there is enough seed for the next crop, enough to grind for flour for home use; plus, there is enough to sell for that very rare commodity for farm families of a hundred years ago, cash. Thanksgiving Day was truly filled with thankfulness. Every bite of sweet potato, turkey, bread, was something that came by the toil of your own two hands.

This is not quite so easy for us to understand anymore. The supermarkets have an abundance at very reasonable prices all year long. Even the need to wait for strawberries or bananas to come into season is no longer an issue, thanks to refrigerated transport. We have everything all year long. No society has ever lived before that had such abundance.

We do indeed have much for which to be thankful.

Since the beginning of our earth, there have been a driving set of forces we call instincts. We all know that we have to have food and water. Every creature on this planet goes forth to find its nourishment, in that we are all alike, and as our 7th Principle reminds us, we are an interdependent web. There is no creature, particularly no human creature, that does not understand at some primitive level the need to survive requires satisfying the hunger and the thirst.

This is one of the very first absolute truths. I have often felt that the nature of God must be such, if we are all to accept it, that we would not be able to deny it. Like the need for food and water. So telling me that I must bend sideways and recite forty verses of ancient writings to know God, and this is truth which I must believe or I will spend eternity in torture--maybe listening to rap music which would be hell for me--all this is nonsensical to me, for I can easily live out my life without these rituals. Truth is I cannot live without food and water. And the way I know that is this driving force in me to satisfy the hunger and the thirst.

Further, with a long tradition of human beings, from every corner of this round planet, I move naturally to the time of feasting. It is ingrained in our cultural behaviors. All over the world people understand the concept of feasting to celebrate survival, to celebrate life.

Few of us, in fact, know how to celebrate without feasting. In my family and in this congregational family, we honor being together, our birthdays and anniversaries, all our special events, with feasting. The idea of not having coffee and snacks after Sunday service is UU sacrilege. We know, intuitively, that food draws us together. That this is a good way to be together and celebrate. Notwithstanding that we all celebrate a little more than perhaps is good for us. But, never undervalue this need for feasting. Even if we are very far removed from our source of food on farms, we are still aware of the need for thankfulness that we have this super-abundance.

Hungering and feasting are the essential themes Thanksgiving Day, but, my friends, they are also the essential themes of the spiritual life.

Hiking with the Coming of Age group this past weekend I also saw this play out, for the group very naturally chose to have us eat our lunch at the Pinnacle, literally a point of rock, a cliff looking over the valley below. Our feast of accomplishment for climbing a steep section of the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. We could have eaten earlier or later, but they just knew that the Pinnacle was the right place and food the right celebration.

The goal of the Coming of Age program is for each of our nine youth to begin to learn who they are, what makes them tick, what is significant for them, what is important. I talked to them as I talk to you, that life is lived in the small things more than in the large ones. Somebody in the group said, "You mean like, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff. And, it’s all small stuff.’"

In point of fact, most of life is the small stuff, the details. Every day we must deal with a multitude of details, and very few large, crisis-type issues, or large finally-made-it issues. We have all heard that it is the path toward the goal that is most rewarding, which is why we tend to just set one goal after another. Or, it can sometimes be the reason we unconsciously sabotage reaching our stated goal. We live in the reaching more than the grasp.

Perhaps this is the nature of God. God is our constant reaching; our hungering for more. More things, or more knowledge, hopefully, also more understanding, and more of a sense of our own motivations. Herein lies the stuff of the soul, the spiritual path we walk.

We long to know what life is all about. What counts. What doesn’t. We are not always given reliable information, so we must keep searching for what rings true in our own hearts. You know that hunger. We are hungering for fulfillment.

Sometimes we get the feast, but we know that the feast is not meant to be a constant state of being, anymore than happiness is. These are the brief orgasmic moments of our living. I will always remember what the comedienne Rita Rudner in her stand up routine once said in relation to this idea of "muchness." She was complaining how all her friends were having children, she has decided she does not want to have any herself, but still is part of the childbearing-rearing conversations. Rudner said the worst part was listening to her friends talk about labor, the birth process, and how they each seemed to try to top the others with how long they had been in labor. (You need get the picture that Rudner always dresses formal, and talks very nonchalantly.)

"One friend," she said, "was telling me how she had been in labor for thirty-six hours." Looking calmly over the audience, she went on. "I don’t even want to do something that feels good for thirty-six hours."

Feasting is not meant to be a regular event. Nor are the glorious moments of life. Accomplishments that are easy, rarely mean much. It is the struggle. The climbing up hill over rocky paths to get to the Pinnacle. The years of school before the diploma or degree. The long hours building up a business.

My deeply held belief is that nothing much worth having comes easily. We are meant to hunger, meant to seek after that for which we hunger, then meant to feast, or celebrate to mark accomplishments.

The seed of spirituality is the hunger for finding our place in this world, and the growth of the seed is the process of learning who we are, what makes us tick, where our values, ethics, morals reside. The feasting of the soul is recognizing when we have the stuff of life we need most: food and water--and love.

Love is the theme of every sermon--or should be. How to love our neighbors as ourselves; how to love ourselves so we can love our neighbors as ourselves. This story about how we should love others is reputedly true:

During WWII, a society maven who lived on the exclusive Philadelphia Main line decided to be charitable and support the war effort by inviting soldiers to Thanksgiving dinner. She called the nearby army base and was connected with a sergeant. He heard the grande dame’s invitation and said he would be glad to send three soldiers. Then the woman added, "Sergeant, I don’t want any of them to be Jews."

"I understand, Madame," said the sergeant. So on Thanksgiving Day, there stood on the doorstop of the magnificent Main Line house, three immaculately uniformed soldiers, all of them black. "We’re here for Thanksgiving, Ma’am," said one politely.

The woman was astonished. "But, but . . . ,"she sputtered, "the sergeant must have made a mistake."

"Oh, no, Madame," said the soldier, "Sergeant Cohen never makes a mistake."

This Thanksgiving Day, I wish for you a wonderful celebration with all your favorite foods, your favorite people, but mostly that you feel the sense of wonder for the hungering and feasting that drives humanity.

 
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