It is hard not to feel overwhelmed some days, too many days, by the pain and sorrow we see in the world about us. Sometimes I wonder if the evening news, or the morning paper, are so toxic to our souls that we'd be better off blocking them out. (Maybe we need another kind of V-chip.) But no, to isolate oneself from the world will not do. We must find a way of being whole in spite of the agony -- the pain and conflict -- of the world.
And besides, it is not just the world out there we're talking about. It is the world we are in. More of us are in pain and sorrow in our personal lives and in our families' lives than any one of us knows. We may say we want to bear each others’ burdens, but even only to hear about all these burdens would be literally unbearable. And each of us has our own pains and sorrows to bear.
People often say that Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday -- it's so uncomplicated. No potlatch of gifts, no mind-boggling myths, no noisy firecrackers. All it takes is a joyful song of gratitude -- easy for the joyful and the grateful! The rest of us must reach deeper inside (maybe a lot deeper) to find what it takes to get our hearts, in one piece, from where we are to Thanksgiving Day.
Two weeks ago I went to my first Ramapo -- the annual Metro District UU ministers’ retreat, held near Ramapo State Park, amid those marvelous rock-bound mountains an hour north of here. We gather to share stories, to hear papers, and to talk talk talk. This is an immensely supportive group, with almost none of the “bitch and brag” pattern that one tends to hear at professional gatherings. But INTJ that I am (that’s Myers-Briggs talk, for the uninitiated), by day two I had to get away from all the talk. So I walked, out into the surrounding hills and woods.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teaches the practice of “walking meditation”: You walk mindfully, emptying yourself of everything that is not here and now. He calls it “going somewhere with nowhere to go.” On such a meditative walk, he says, you are never someplace else, seeking to arrive; rather, “at each moment, you arrive.” Well, I walked and walked, but I found it very hard to arrive, for in my head I was rehearsing events of the past and events of the future. Somewhere else ruled my heart and mind.
Then it happened. Three deer stood before me. I stopped. They turned their heads toward me, their antenna-like ears erect. I stared at them as they stared at me for minutes on end, transfixed. I had arrived -- arrived in the present moment without even knowing I had arrived, with neither memories nor anxieties to pull me away. It was a liberating moment, which finally broke when I stepped forward and -- so quick it seemed simultaneous -- three white tails flashed like flags, as the deer bounded into the forest.
“The Peace of Wild Things” is a poem by Wendell Berry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
For a time I too did not tax my life with forethought, but rested in the grace of the world.
Church is for recalling us to the primacy of spiritual values. Spiritual values are qualities -- of spirit, of feeling, of meaning. They are qualities of our very being. They name basic inclinations of the heart. Church is for upholding the primacy of spiritual values. I will name three: gratitude, humility and kindness. These are not rules to follow but virtues to embody.
I want to lift up these three qualities for our reflection. Together they form a vision of human life in its completeness, its wholeness. We are turned off by the supernatural way “salvation” is described in so much traditional religion. Rather, we speak of spiritual health or wholeness, a quality of the person-in-community. We have sometimes been tempted to think of “wholeness” as an individual matter, but in wiser moments we recall the interdependence of person and community: for the fulfillment, the wholeness of each depends upon the fulfillment, the wholeness of the other. Church is for the wholeness of our humanity in a world pain and sorrow. Church is for wholeness in spite of our brokenness, and upholds a way of mending -- through gratitude, humility, kindness and perseverance.
This is my byword: “Begin with thanksgiving.” In other words, gratitude comes first in any prayer. e.e. cummings’ beautiful prayer puts this first thing first: “i thank you god for most this amazing / day.” We heard the poem set to music by Beth Bachmann, and familiar to our children. e.e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) was the son of a Unitarian minister, in Boston and in Cambridge, Mass. The son held his father in deep affection and high esteem. He memorialized him in prose, and in poetry:
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height ...
The son said of his father, the Rev. Edward Cummings, that he saw the church as a place of safety -- a sanctuary carved out of the wilderness world. Nevertheless, he wrote, “One beautiful Sunday in Spring [he] remarked from the pulpit that he couldn't understand why anyone had come to hear him on such a day.”
e.e. cummings began with thanksgiving.
When people in the hospital invite me to pray with them, I always begin with words of thanksgiving. I guess it’s because I feel I have to be upbeat; if we don't start there, we may never make it back again. We do not want to end life, to end anything important, with a curse. Therefore, I say: Celebrate the gifts of this day, of life, of something as simple and obvious as our being here together.
A second spiritual value in our journey toward wholeness is humility. If we reject the word, the reason may be that we confuse humility with humiliation -- we confuse not puffing yourself up with being put down. Humiliation is always demeaning. But humility has a positive spiritual value. It’s not just a matter of not being “puffed up,” not being vain; it's a matter of embracing one’s limitations. It's a matter of noticing that I can be wrong, and often have been wrong. It’s important to be able to say: “I may be mistaken.” It means being willing and able to recognize that I too am frail and fallible, I too have known failure.
Casey Stengel said, “There are two kinds of baseball managers: Managers who have been fired, and managers that will be fired.” Recent events remind me of what Abraham Lincoln said after being politically rebuked by the congressional elections of 1862: “[I feel] somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.”
I carry about with me what I call “the scar tissue of mortality.” It's from a gash I got on the side of my thumb -- from a shard of broken glass ... that cut the flesh almost to the bone when I fell down on ice in a grocery store parking lot ... from (I admit it) a half-gallon jug of wine I was carrying. How solicitous they were at the grocery store when I went back inside for help! It happened many years ago, but when I pick up something a certain way, even now, I feel a small, sharp pain. I remember that event and say to myself: This is my “scar tissue of morality.” I am frail, fallible, faulty, and mortal.
The other day I came across these words from Gene Knudson Hoffman: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
What is the path that leads beyond pain and sorrow, that renews our sense of being more nearly whole persons in a more nearly whole community? I speak of a pathway leading from gratitude to humility ... to kindness. This is the third spiritual value I want to lift up today.
A couple of years ago I met Michael Carey, native New Yorker, real-life western Iowa farmer (in the Nishnobotna Valley) and (what else?) serious poet. Not to jump over Thanksgiving to Christmas, here’s Michael Carey’s fine poem, “Winter Chores: December 25, 1986.” It’s about work, even on Christmas Day, and being blessed nevertheless. Woven into these lines I hear a “covenant of kindness.” One kindness (feeding the animals, with their “small souls” made visible in the cold winter air) brings another kindness in return (recognition, felt as a blessing):
Fog falls over the hills
like a dark snow, nudging
the barns and the houses
further into their dreamless
slumber. The goats blink
their eyes and bleat as if
they see meaning in all this.
The horses shift uneasily
in their stalls. What was once
water is now ice. A bulb
burns over the soft bedding.
Footsteps crackle on the straw.
We have come bearing gifts:
fresh water and oats, cracked
corn for the chickens. Healthy
mouths and nostrils pant smoke,
the small souls of the
animals. This is what we
have come to see, the soft
rustle of recognition. These
are our blessings.
Think of kindness simply as “the soft rustle of recognition” of another living being. To be recognized -- in gratitude and in humility -- is a blessing. It evokes our kindness.
This Thanksgiving, friends, affirm the primacy of spiritual values in your lives, and in the life of your community -- each of your communities. Stop and rest, be mindful of the present moment: It’s all you've got. Affirm those qualities of heart and mind that mark the way through the dark woods, beyond pain and sorrow, beyond anger and despair. I have named gratitude, and humility, and kindness. Let their light lead the way toward a renewed wholeness and strength of spirit.
I bid you: Give thanks in the very teeth of pain and sorrow; in all humility embrace your own frailty and faults, and be kind to others, who like you are frail and faulty, and in need of a helping hand and an encouraging word.
I invite you to join me now in e.e. cummings’ sonnet and prayer:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any -- lifted from the no
of all nothing -- human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened
Amen!
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