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November 2002 Sermons
November 10, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. Dean November 10, 2002 Passion in Being Right, Even When It’s Wrong This past week was one of frustration for me at a deep level. As it turned out, I had to be out and about a great deal, and during these times I often want to get a cup of coffee, and at no place that I dropped in to buy coffee did I find a decent cup of decaf. All around me people seemed to be enjoying these various cups of Starbucks, BrewHaHa coffee, and Wawa coffee (which by the way was the cheapest and the best of the lot), but none of them came up to my idea of what constitutes a good cup of coffee. My rational for all these others enjoying their coffee is that most of them doctor their coffee with cream and sugar, but I drink my unadulterated by such fripperies. Black coffee, without the cream and sugar to disguise its real flavor, is a matter for connoisseurs. I know what makes for good coffee, I think; and I certainly know what I want a good cup of coffee to taste like. I finally decided that if I wanted to have the right combination of water and ground coffee beans, I would have to make it at home and carry it around in a thermos. I wish I could say that I am exaggerating my own behavior here for the benefit of the lesson, but this is the way I tend to think about coffee more often than not. So, what’s the problem? What is the big deal if I have this attitude about coffee? Is it such a big deal if I am a coffee snob? Don’t I have the right to enjoy well-made coffee? Should there not be a standard for what constitutes a good cup from a bad cup of coffee? Can it not be possible that I am right and all those other so-called coffee drinkers, those “cream and sugar” coffee drinkers are wrong? After all, we black coffee drinkers were around a long time before people had such luxuries as sugar and cream with which to disguise their coffee. In fact, sugar and cream in coffee came about just like perfume in France, where people smelled so bad from not bathing that they tried to cover up the offensive smells with other better smelling oils called perfumes. So, you can see that putting cream and sugar in coffee is a tacit admission that coffee tastes bad. Indeed the Founders of the International Coffee Alliance states: “Coffee should be drunk without additions in order to appreciate it’s full body and depth.” (I made up that quote, but you might have believed me!) If I had my way, every one would have to pay extra for sugar and cream, then more people would drink coffee black, and then we would finally have good coffee in this country. Aldous Huxley, the English author known for his biting satires of the upper-classes wrote in “A Note on Dogma”: “Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.” Of course, what they achieve may or may not be right. Herein lies the rub with taking such adamant views on any given subject. Be it something as innocuous as coffee, or something far more serious such as political ideologies, or religious belief and practice. If there is one thing that does come through the very broad issue of what it means to be right or wrong, it has to do with the passion that becomes the foundation for our beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. When we believe we are right, people can be disastrously wedded to a set of ideas, notions, practices about how the rest of how we should be and do, and also how the rest of the world should be and do. No one of all the possibilities has been so greatly motivating of such passion than the realm of religion. And today, perhaps even more than ever in the past, religion plays a major role in the patterns of behavior for the various peoples of the world, both for good and for evil. If we take away the religious arguments used to justify the points of view people take on subjects from birth control, use of the world’s resources, ownership of land, rights to water, air, and oil, our disagreements would have to take a different tack. For it would not be enough for one group to simply say, that God has given us this new world, or the Great Spirit gave us this land, or the Prophet wrote that this would be our land to the end of time, and so forth. Yet, we have had a hard time in divorcing our desire for a nation, a place, a way of believing, the way to dress, our sexual orientation, even down to whether it is even acceptable to drink a cup of coffee from all that we call religious. I am reminded of this story: A fifth-grade class was practicing for the school’s annual Thanksgiving pageant. The teacher wanted to make sure that the meaning of it all was clear, so she asked them: ”Now, boys and girls, who can tell us why the Pilgrims came to America?” A boy raised his hand and, when called upon, confidently declare: “So they could worship in their own way and make other people do the same.” All too many of those who talk about our country being founded as a Christian nation, apparently do not know their history, for while it is true that the Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower came to find a place to build their “city on the hill”, a biblical allusion, they were not interested in anything but to have a place to practice their form of puritan Calvinism, and would not have allowed virtually any of the forms of Christianity that are practiced in this country today. Further, they did not found our nation, the later revolutionary thinkers were the founders: Franklin, Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Hale-these were generally deists, Unitarians, or Christians of the sort the Pilgrims would not have approved of as the right kind of Christians. The Founders certainly understood the idea of human rights, but they also understood the very real dangers of intolerant righteousness, of being right at the expense of another person’s beliefs. This attitude of being that is termed righteousness, is in part about being right, but it is also about being just or upright, but the part about being right seems to rise above the other values and being right is without a doubt a place of great high passion. One reason this may be so, is that it can feel very good to know one is right, but the question that anyone who is open-minded (by the way, that is what it means to be a liberal) , to be a person who values liberty (note that liberty, liberate, liberal all derive from the same root word liber-free) must ask is: How can we know that we are right? How can we recognize danger signs of be righteous without worrying about what is right? Now, we Unitarian Universalists are not free of this particular variety of human weakness. We, too, can be so convinced of our way of being or doing that we effectively shut out what anyone else might have to offer on any given subject. Part of the reason I have for encouraging discussion after my sermon comes from the fact that I learned the wisdom from my first mentor in ministry to be wary of leading a congregation to assume that my opinion is the only one that counts. My opinions are just that, my opinions, my beliefs, and it is foundational to our modern UU movement to lift this up as what makes us stand apart from other religions that have dogmas or creeds about which everyone must agree. For many years now, I have been impressed by the work of Dr. Edward de Bono, who holds both a medical and psychology doctorates. He talks about how our patterns of thinking, the biological setup in the brain, likes lateral kinds of patterns, but we need also the creative modes of thinking that do not fit neatly into the more organized lateral patterns. He calls our right-wrong polarized thinking into question, and uses the interesting terms “rock logic” versus “water logic”. He also points out that humor is the most telling of our human way of constructing our ideas. Because we do tend to think lateral, we expect one thing, and the comic turns that on its head. That is how we get humor. Have you ever noticed that people who are very righteous in their thinking, tend to be humorless people? As de Bono puts it: “[H]umour is one of the best indications that the brain works (at least in perception) as a self-organizing system. The pattern-switching of humour is a good model for creativity and insight.” An early mentor in ministry told me that I would want to have a good file of funny stories, for often a joke or silly story can get across a message far better than all the academic research I might use. He was right. Listed in my files under “unknown” comes this story: My car skidded on wet pavement and stuck a light pole. I was stunned and momentarily unable to speak. Several bystanders ran over to help me. A tall, middle-aged woman was he first to reach my car. She started to speak when a burly truck rushed in a pushed her back. “Step aside, lady,” he shouted, “I’ve taken a course in first aid.” The woman watched him for a second, then tapped his shoulder. “Pardon me,” she said, “But when you get to the part about calling a doctor, I’m right here.” Alfred North Whitehead, the noted British philosopher wrote: “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” There are a few, very few, absolutes, but they rarely have much to do with our beliefs. The world is a globe, that is true, but there are people who still believe the world is flat, and the fact that we do live on a globe has only been believed for a fairly short period in human history. What is right and wrong is in large measure based on beliefs more than absolutes, which is why different cultures can have different rules and practices, yet each culture can believe it is/has a good society, even believe their society is better than others. We as UUs believe many different possibilities are acceptable, and have tried to outline those areas of belief we think are right within our Seven Principles. We need to be reminded that there is a difference between being right or wrong or believing we are right or wrong, and the difference between being righteous and being good. The danger for any person or group is to take a position that there is only one way to be a good human being. We also need to ask: What absolutes are required in order to be a good human being? How we answer that for ourselves and for others is the crystal ball of human spirituality. I lived in Texas a several years, indeed my son Adam was born there, and I learned that Texans are a grand people, and believe they have a grand state. Well they do, but being grand does not necessarily mean the best as some Texans would have it. Here is a story from a Texan friend of mine: A Texas businessman was showing an English politician around the great Lone Star state. At one point he commented, “Do you realize that your whole country could be fitted into one small corner of our state?” “Oh, really?” said the Englishman, “ I say, it certainly would do wonders for the state, wouldn’t it?” If we find we must always be right, we are undoubtedly on the wrong road. What we must be if we would have the greatest mental/spiritual development, is to be open, to be broad-minded. To look out at the world and appreciate that we can either be like rocks, with defined unmovable, even sharp edges, or be like water, flowing together. One rock next to another rock makes two rocks, but water that comes together is not two waters but flows into one. There are different ways of looking at the world, different kinds of logic, as de Bono states. What we are prepared to examine of our selves and others; the way we view right and wrong, our understanding of innocence, humor, the arts, flow of attention, the ways we manipulate perception and understanding, how we understand provocation, change, insight, all of these and more (as de Bono states)-all this will come into play as we develop our own views of rightness and wrongness. And, whether we can differentiate between belief and opinion. Stanford philosopher Dallas Willard writes; All this puts us in position to see that, while belief is relative--a fact or statement is believed only if someone believes it--truth is not relative. One believes something, one does not truth it or fact it. Again, we can and should experiment with this. Try getting your car to run by believing gas is in your tank. Or by also enlisting others to believe it, or by generating a social movement in favor of it. One million Frenchmen (or Americans, etc.) can be wrong, and adding a million or two more will make no difference--although they may be helpful in getting the government to pay for the consequences of being wrong. My greatest desire for us as a liberal religious community, is to be able to accept, even appreciate that we are limited human beings, and that our growth comes from the diversity of ideas and understandings we develop. My opinions are just that, my opinions, my beliefs, and it is foundational to our modern UU movement to lift this up as what makes us stand apart from other religions that have dogmas or creeds about which everyone must agree. Here in our UU home, we find a safe place to live with a variety of different spiritual belief and practices, but it is not so in all the world, which is all the more reason that we want to safeguard this liberal faith. So be it. November 17, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanNovember 17, 2002The Intellect: The Light of the MindSometimes I think rather deliberately about what separates, or sets us Unitarian Universalists apart from most other religions. This is both an intellectual exercise as well as an emotional exercise. Note that I say intellectual and emotional as if my brain is divided into various file folders or cubby holes from which I can pull one set of thoughts, then open yet another to extract a different set of thoughts. While the physical recesses of the brain are not that way in fact, they are that way in practice. You and I have experienced this difference many times. Perhaps the one dramatic way this has always been made clear to me has had to do with my role as a mother. As a good mother I knew that it was best to treat my children with respect, to encourage their better selves, to lift up any difference of opinion to an adult or compassionate plane. That was the mother in the intellectual file. But far too often, I became the mother from the emotional (or sometimes irrational) file folder, who lost patience with trying to lift up any difference of opinion to an adult or compassionate plane, and would say, “Enough of this! I’m the Mom and you will do what I tell whether you like it or not! Got it!” And the language was often even less intellectual, depending on how tired, frustrated, angry I happened to be. I was sometimes very ashamed of myself upon reflection. Does this dual behavior mean I have a split personality or worse? Well, I have it on good authority, that by all indications, both psychologically and spiritually, this behavior shows quite clearly that I am just human. (Sorry if you thought your minister was nearer to God than thee.) All this new church year, I have been focusing my sermons on the fact of paradox in our lives. Paradox, that condition when two seemingly disconnected or disassociated things can be in existence at the same time. Like the paradox that to know great love also means to know great sorrow. So, too, is the quality of our brains, the processes of the brain we call the mind. The mind can and does operate on different levels under different situations, and we have seen over the course of human history that some of those ways we handle the ups and downs of life can be better and some worse; we can act in ways contrary to our own well-being or the well-being of others. This is indeed a paradox. Why is it, I ask myself often, that I know I should not eat cake when I am working so hard to lose twenty pounds, but not only do I eat one piece of cake at the Capital Fund Drive dinner last night, but go back for another? (Well-that may not be real paradox, it might just be plain ordinary greediness.) But, I am pretty sure you all know what I mean; as it says in the 1928, Anglican, Book of Common Prayer: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. One of the most determined, necessary behaviors of the human animal, the greatest impulse we have had since our rise up onto two legs, seems to be our overwhelming desire to make sense of what we are doing in this world. What are we doing here? Is it all just a great cosmic fluke, or did some creator mould and fashion this world and each one of us who live here? Regardless of which road we travel down in this dual line of enquiry, we only produce more questions. It is a frustrating behavioral process; yet, this first source creation question had driven virtually all of the intellectual behavior of humankind. We want to know why we are alive. What our purpose is in being alive. Why I, Nancy Diane Dean, am here standing before you? And why each one of you is here? And why all the billions of people who have ever lived have lived were here? And how long will this making of people keep going on? This great need to have answers has come, I believe, from our innate spirituality, that is of our spirits, and has given us the hundreds of different religions that have existed since the dawn of humankind. These questions come from the file folder in our minds, that is the thinking part of our brains, that we call the intellect. The intellect is truly the light of the mind, if we think of the mind as a closet full of stuff we have been learning and storing since our birth, but it is sometimes a dark closet. Of course, part of the mind is always a dark closet, for there is so much we have stored away, so much that we do not even realize is there. For, instance, all the stuff, the workings of the brain that make us go; our involuntary, autonomic and automatic systems that allow us to get up each morning and take a shower without having to think through each step. With little children, you have to teach them that a bath or shower is more than just getting wet: Wash your face, scrub behind your ears and between your toes, and rinse the soap from your hair, etc. Eventually, we store all that information and don’t have to, actively at least, think about it anymore. But the intellect, that is the thinking part of the mind/the brain lights up that closet full of stuff, and helps us come to various conclusions about the nature of ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. It is indeed marvelous, this power to discover, to evaluate, to wonder, to weigh one thing against another, to figure out that one way is right or wrong, good or bad, virtuous or evil. We know from the archeological record they left behind that early humans worked through these processes, too, and the answers they came up with we mostly now consider primitive or superstitious. For instance, let’s say in some tribe or clan a bear was seen just as a baby is stillborn, so from that point forward a pregnant woman learns never look upon a bear or it is believed that her child will be stillborn. That particular kind of superstition was still around, and may still be in some places, but it was still prevalent when I was a child in the 1950s. I can remember-I must have been about seven-years-old-hearing one of my elderly aunts talking about a baby that would be marked because of something the mother-to-be had done. Hence the term birthmark. Superstition as we think about it nowadays, means having a belief that is inconsistent with known facts or rational thought, or even belief in the supernatural. I think we all have some levels of superstition, though. I can remember a few years ago when it seemed like every major project or decision I made on a Tuesday had disastrous results. I avoided Tuesdays like the plague for months; and even now, once in a great while, have a little twinge when something really important is going to happen on a Tuesday. My Grandma Dean, despite the fact that she had a wonderful native intelligence, was uneducated and grew up on fundamental religious beliefs and homespun wisdom, and she was very superstitious: one of those people who didn’t do anything important on Friday the 13th, avoided walking under ladders, didn’t want a black cat to cross her path, and so forth. Believe me, superstition is still with us, as this story illustrates: Mark and Tessa, a couple of teenage sweethearts, were on the sofa in one another's arms when there came the sound of a key in the front door of the luxurious apartment where Tessa lived. Tessa bolted upright. Her eyes were wide with alarm. She cried. "It's my father! Quick, jump out the window." Mark, equally alarmed, raced toward the window, then stopped. "Are you crazy? I can't jump," he said; "we're on the thirteenth floor." For heaven's sake!" cried Tessa in exasperation, "This is no time to be superstitious!" The ways in which humanity has continued to exercise the intellect have been wonderfully varied, but in all the desire that tends to rest beneath it, is the desire to have some absolute truths (like that we all need air to breathe), and we know that there are still no absolute truths about the why of human existence. Theories abide in great quantity, but few absolute truths. We know that we will bleed if we are slashed by a sword, but we do not know what the source is of our belief. Is it purely of the mind/brain, or is it God? Clearly, the religions that offer absolute answers have enjoyed great success, at least for some period of time. We forget from this point in human history, that a great many people believed that gods and goddesses and other supernatural beings lived upon Mount Olympus, indeed the religion of ancient Greece, the very source of modern intellectual thought, that religion reigned longer than Christianity has been in existence. It reigned so long precisely because it gave such satisfying answers, and in the form of great stories. Want to know why you are here? You are here because Zeus and Hera created human beings from the stuff of the gods. Since the time when the ancient Greek religion thrived some three-thousand years ago, many other religions have liberally borrowed from the Greeks, and come to other different expressions that really are about the same. That is, humans come from gods. In Genesis1:26, "Let us make human kind in our image, according to our like . . . .” As you might suspect, this passage has given biblical scholars much meat for the scholarly appetite. For by all the exegesis, or systematic translating from the early Hebrew, the choice of words implies that God is not just one god, but there must be at least two. Of course, that comes up again when they have to marry off Cain and Abel. Around the world we see a rainbow of religious belief that, in and of itself, is quite miraculous; that humans could/do come up with so many fascinatingly different ways of explaining our origin or purpose. The comedienne, Carol Siskind says about her religious beliefs: I believe in reincarnation. I've had other lives. And, I have clues. First of all, I'm exhausted. So, we continue to wonder, worry, and consider: Am I here because God sent me, and if so, what am I supposed to do while I am here? It is the exercise of our intellect that brings us to the answers we come to believe for ourselves. William James, the great Harvard scholar of philosophy and psychology, quotes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (the lecturers given 1901-02) : “As M. P. Sabatier says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity [most in view], another [branch of religion] keeps man most in view.” This, is part of what sets Unitarian Universalists apart, that we think it is likely, and even good, that we can come up with different answers to the first part, and still see a common answer for the second. For, no matter how we each come to understand why we are here, we can see quite clearly that our larger or over-arching purpose is to care about, indeed to love, one another. That put us in the category of branch of religion that keeps humanity most in view. Still, we must be wary of how we treat this wonderful aspect of the mind we call the intellect. While we value and respect the ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding that is part of our human consciousness; the very spirit of consciousness that is regarded as an aspect of reality that originates in the brain. We must take care that we not value the intellect in such a way that it devalues our human experience. Or, as Albert Einstein said: We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. We want our lives to have personality. What makes you you and me me. For all the world that I admire and respect and value highly the wonderful person that is Elizabeth Dole, or the person that is Nancy Pelosi, I “wanna be me,” to borrow a line from musical theater. Furthermore, I want you to be who you are; the authentic you who is a work in progress. Otherwise, in our drive for some grandiose human conformity we lose the very powers of intellect that brought us out of the cold caves, out of the tribal warring, out of the medieval crusades, out of the Nazi reign, out of one attempt after another to force individual men, women, and children into a rigid code of being that broached no difference. Without difference, without the capacity for each of us to contribute our drops of intellectual understanding into the great sea of human thought, we might as well be rocks. And for those who would say, with all the evil in the world we would be better off as rocks, I offer the paradox that love and hate both exist within us. There is no paradox in rocks, and there is no love in rocks. And for all the evil that comes from human existence, this one beautiful thing, love, is available nowhere else that we know of. And it is this one beautiful thing, love, that we need and want more than all the gold, all the power, all the praise in the world. We love. We love. Say it: We love. Now say: I love. Now say, I love and add on the name or names of the people you love. Say it! And keep on saying it until you finally get it, especially when you are wondering in those dark moments of the soul, Why am I here? What’s the use?, and you need some light from the intellect. Say: I love (all the names you can say) . . . That is your answer. That is our answer. So be it. November 24, 2002 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanNovember 24, 2002Get Ready to Be GratefulPeople get ready in lots of ways and I especially like this one a friend shared with me:
We are a people who get ready. Ever noticed that? We get ready to go to school or work. We get ready for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. We get ready for a meeting. We get ready for the Super Bowl. We get ready for the opera, theater, or symphony. We get ready for the wedding or funeral. Certainly, we get ready for Thanksgiving Day, or more likely, Thanksgiving Dinner. We get ready to go out on the town, or get ready for a special occasions such as on Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, or Christmas, or get ready to decorate, or get ready for just about anything of importance in our lives. But-- How do we get ready to be grateful? It often seems we are in a progressive state of preparing for something or another. We rarely just are. To get ready, that is, to do as the verb ready implies is to “prepare oneself for action.” To be ready, as the adjective indicates, is to be “in a state of readiness, or preparedness.” Last year, when I first heard the story of Homeless Joe from Tom Hartline, I knew this was a story about something deeper than just our inability to always live by the Golden Rule, our for us here, the first principle of our UU faith. It appears that this is a common cultural inability to value another human being who seems to be someone so different from ourselves. I knew that the story touched at that, yes, but it was also a reminder to me that there are so many people, and so many things, in the world that we do not value, do not appreciate unless somehow they are brought to our attention as with the story of Joe Czarenko, Homeless Joe. The 17th Century writer, creator of the first standardized dictionary, Samuel Johnson said: Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people. Of course, I do not want to suggest that we can always be appreciative of all the people, places, things that benefit the world, or our own lives. We are not saints, not even capable of such a heightened level of awareness at all times. I do agree with Johnson that gratitude is something we can cultivate, or grow, within ourselves. Indeed, gratitude, an appreciation for all that is good in our lives has been one of the chief aims of western religions. It would appear that to grow in any significant spiritual way, one must have an understanding of gratitude, an awareness, deep feeling for, an appreciate of and for our all that is our lives. As Rabbi Harold Kushner has written: "If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul." Homeless Joe Czarenko chose a life that must have given him something that we do not know about, or perhaps cannot appreciate. Living out in all weathers, barely making it from day to day, and probably giving many people in the neighbor heartburn for being there at all. No doubt, he was regularly reported for vagrancy, yet over the two decades of his occupancy of the woodlands around Pottstown, he became a familiar sight to many people. In the newspaper story was about his death, at age 72, but noted his life in the process, pointed out that he was no beggar, though he would accept handouts. Occasionally, he would take shelter, as he did from one woman who also offered him dinner with her family, staying in her basement one freezing winter’s night, but only with the stipulation that the door remain unlocked. (Perhaps a clue here to his personality.) It was noted that Joe was an educated man, had worked in the Army Corp of Civil Engineers, but no one seemed to know what had led this man to a life on the streets, jobless, homeless, alone. There is no indication that he had a substance abuse problem, though he might have at one time. While he was a vagrant by just about any definition, he was not a burden upon the community, as that term usually implies. In fact, it became obvious shortly after his death that he had been of great service to the community, in a quiet, unquestioning way. Suddenly the strip of town near his shelter, became cluttered and littered with trash, as Tom said. It was too bad no one really paid much attention before he died to what he did to keep the place clean. Still, appreciation, gratitude can come in wide array of possibilities. Like the child who was picking through his food, mounding green peas and mashed potatoes into an admirable tower, occasionally taking a bite from his construction, when his grandma asked the four-year-old how he liked his Thanksgiving dinner. "I didn't like the turkey very much," he, replied, “but I sure loved the bread it ate." Why was it getting so trashy when the vagrant was no longer there, who for all intents and purposes was perceived to be part of the rubbish problem? Some had been aware of Joe Czarenko, felt pity for this old man walking around in his multiple layers of clothing, but even those who showed compassion for him, were not inclined to see him as an important, or at least a meaningful part of the community. The neighborhood became littered because Joe was no longer there picking it up and disposing of the very trash that his so-called superiors were tossing out the windows as they left the fast-food establishments that dominated the area. Perhaps more than many of those selfsame good citizens, Homeless Joe had found a way to be of use; he had a purpose, even if it was a purpose we might find troubling to contemplate. And, perhaps Joe had as great a sense of self-worth and meaning for his life as those who judged him. No one, or at least, only a very few were ready to be grateful for the fullness of Homeless Joe’s life. To believe in real the worth and dignity of his life. Perhaps this is the key to real gratitude, that we believe in those around us, believe in the greater dignity that a life lived in freedom might posit, even when such people violate some other part of us, something in us that says this is not right, not healthy, not the way anyone should go through life. I can only contrast Joe’s life with that of a man like Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron. Enron, which used to be a company and is now a scandal. Perhaps this is also part of the key, that we look at those who occupy the highest places of wealth and acclaim, and believe that they too may have greater potential to live in a decent way, a right and healthy way, than we see or know. Even as Joe, the full worth of Homeless Joe, was disguised by his layers of tattered clothing, a person of great beauty, wealth, or power can also be disguised by the trappings that are mostly superficial. We get confused sometimes by what it is for which we are supposed to be grateful. But, we can all get ready to be grateful when we make an effort to broaden our understanding of those things in our world, those ways of being, all the real, and the artificial and superficial that disguise a life well-lived. Writer Melody Beattie states: Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. In Buddhism , it is not an uncommon practice to give up all but the robe on one’s back, and a begging bowl, and to trust in the goodness of the day to supply one’s food and drink. This is not done to achieve merit in the eyes of God, but rather to be free in mind, body, and spirit of the perceived dangerous trappings of the world. When I was a child, I developed a Norman Rockwell view of life. My mother took along with Good Housekeeping, the magazines Life and Look and my favorite, the Saturday Evening Post -those double-sized, photo-filled periodicals with dramatic art on the cover. Norman Rockwell painted the life of a prosperous small town in western Massachusetts for many of these covers. His Thanksgiving Day issue that anyone forty years of age or older has seen, was Rockwell's idyllic portrait of Thanksgiving, and was one of four paintings he made in 1943 to illustrate America's Four Freedoms, to spur his countrymen on in the second world war to help the war effort. The painting toured the country earning something in the range off $130million; a noble effort of a man whose art was roundly criticized by the art world of the time. Worthy as Rockwell may have been as a human being, and as an artist, his art set a standard for Thanksgiving Dinners in America, but one that many families could never live up to. While my own home had a wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner, with a huge turkey, browned to perfection, all the requisite root vegetables that symbolize the harvest plenty, and an array of pies and cakes I have rarely found equaled in my adult years away from my Idaho orchard home. My family were a simple people, and we did not sit down to a table filled with fine china, crystal, and sterling silver flatware. And, with the exception of my grandfather, few men in the family came in a suit for the big meal, most of the boys while hands and faces had to be scrubbed to get a place at the table, had grass-stained jeans and sweaters from their pre-prandial touch football games. And, most disheartening to me was that the children were segregated from the adults, with children at a makeshift table off to the side, while the adults all sat around the big table. This rankled the most, since I was often the lone girl amid a sea of male cousins whose manners had a way of disappearing when their mothers where not in arm’s reach. I was very disappointed that our Thanksgiving Dinner portrait lacked the panache, the coherence of the Norman Rockwell portrayal. Here I was, dressed in my Sunday best, surrounded by the heathen males who stirred their food into one big mess, talked so much that chewing with their mouths closed was pretty much impossible. Who took great pride in emitting disgusting eructations that would draw the verbal wrath of those just-far-enough-away mothers. Furthermore, why did my mother not see what a contribution I would be to the big table, with my good manners, cleanliness, even godliness. I always kept my head bowed throughout the entirety of my Grandpa Martin’s lengthy graces. My Grandpa Martin was devout, as they used to be termed, he was a muscular Christian in his evangelical fervor, who served frequently as a lay preacher. I think that he learned somewhere along the way that while he was not well educated, he could make up to the Lord for his simplicity and lack of eloquence with length. My father learned to be like him, and we never ate a morsel of anything at any meal without a treatise on the sins humankind, our unworthiness, and thanksgiving for it all. The question gratitude comes in this story, too: Thanksgiving day was approaching, and the family had received a card picturing a Pilgrim family on their way to church. Grandma showed the card to her young grandchildren and remarked, "The Pilgrim children liked going to church with their parents." Oh, yeah?" her grandson replied. "Then why is the dad carrying that rifle?" My disappointment in Thanksgiving Day dinner, as a portrait, faded in my adult years when I could set a table worthy of a Rockwell painting, with my family dressed to show appreciation for my efforts, but by then I could look back and see how the shared family gatherings offered something my small family did not offer. Not the least of which was labor to help in the preparations-all that cooking and cleaning. But, also the learning about family that took place on these occasions. My children did not have that connection with the big farm family of my youth, with all the grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. That was the part to really cherish, but at the time, I was too immature to see that gratitude was about more than the superficial, the artificial. This Thanksgiving, I hope we come away with something more than overly full stomachs, and afternoon football glories or defeats. I hope we have gotten ready to be grateful for something more that the event which might be captured on an artist’s canvass. I hope that you and I have gotten ready to be grateful so that we see gratitude is an act of the heart, and not just of the mind. If we are ready to be grateful, ready, today, tomorrow, any day, including Thanksgiving Day, we will come to feel appreciation to the marrow of our being. Such a feeling of gratitude as Sarah Breathnach extols when she says that to be filled with gratitude is to open "’the eyes of your eyes’" and give your life another glance.’” This is the paradox of real gratitude, that we see that we can, even should, be grateful for things, people, even circumstances outside those that seem most obvious. This is the real story of Homeless Joe Czarenko, for me, that this man knew something that we do not, found something that we might, that just in choosing to live outside the hard lines of cultural acceptability, he was giving people something for which to be grateful. Would you, would I, would any one of us, if we lost all that we have of the material gifts of the world still find purpose and meaning for our lives as he did? If we think not, then perhaps it is time to get ready to be grateful for all we have that we think we cannot live without. Time to get ready to grateful for the life lesson that was Homeless Joe; which is, that all of life can be worthy--even the sparest and barest of lives. Here is my most practical advice for getting ready to be grateful. Listen to what you are complaining, grumbling, gritching about, then turn it on its head and find what these same problems give you. Look around us here, for example, at this former elementary school cafeteria/gymnasium in which we have gathered for nearly every Sunday over ten years. While we have all looked forward with excitement to the day when we could have our own building, our own religious home, and felt confined, constrained, confounded because this meeting space was only ours for a short time during the week, and when it was ours it was often dirty, too hot or too cold, has given us regular headaches in one way or another. That while we (your minister chief among us) have griped and groused about the problems that this space continually tossed our way, we had something beautiful happening all along the way, something I hope we take with us of this place. We in this Mill Creek congregation know how to make a worshipful place, indeed a sacred space right where we are. That we can find a knowing of the Holy, the Spirit of Life, of God, of the greatest good, right here in this space. This place has taught us that in whatever space we are ready to be grateful, in whatever place, for whatever occasion, during whatever trial and struggle, we know that when we are ready, we can see and feel all it holds that is worthy of our gratitude. May we go forth into this week of Thanksgiving, with the intention to get ready for gratitude every day of our lives. It will make all the difference. So be it.
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