Poet John Greenleaf Whittier once asked Ralph Waldo Emerson what he prayed for. "When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world," replied Emerson, "I thank God I am alive - and that I live so near Boston."[1] Likewise this Sunday before Thanksgiving I give thanks for being alive - and living so near The First Unitarian Church of Rochester.
Gratitude for being was one of the first religious responses to human existence. Our ancestors lived close to the earth; their existence was marginal, and they were glad just to be alive. Primitive peoples propitiated the gods - flattered them, cajoled them, humored and bribed them to provide another fruitful harvest. Only gradually did our forbears learn to simply express thanks for the gift of life, a vital step in humanity's spiritual evolution.
Now, however, in our technological age most of us are separated from such elemental anxiety. By and large we don't grow the food we eat, create the housing or the clothing we wear, or construct any of the things that are so central in our lives. We work, we earn money, we buy things. It is not the same as creating our accoutrements through the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. Thanksgiving today simply takes on a different meaning. I think we have to work to recapture that pure religious gratitude of yesterday when it was closer to our spiritual core.
Take, for example, these words from the late Ayn Rand: "Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers' holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production."[2]
Now, in a way, she is right. We do celebrate our human capacity to produce, but that is not all; Rand shows little appreciation for the bounty of nature without which we could produce nothing, without which we are nothing. There is little humility here; only a sense of entitlement to what we have produced - what is mine - what I deserve. Missing from Ayn Rand's statement is a word that makes the average Unitarian Universalist squirm - grace.
This is not the grace of a merciful God toward me, a sinner, forgiving my faults. This is grace understood as the unmerited abundance which is mine by the luck of the draw. This is the grace of privilege living amidst the beauty of this world, beauty which I had no part in creating; this is the grace of good fortune to have been born into a loving family in a prosperous nation - again, matters over which I had no control. In the words of the old prayer, "Deliver us from taking for granted what we should take for gratitude."[3]
Authentic thanksgiving enables me to acknowledge that I am merely a guest of existence. "Life is not a given, but a gift."[4] And so I have - we have - gained the wisdom to set aside at least one day to acknowledge these realities - to ask ourselves what we can give back to the earth that has nourished and sustained us - to ask what our obligations to one another are. As we contemplate all this we are in "severe danger of falling into worship."[5]
Yet, there is more to thanksgiving than recognizing our good fortune and giving thanks for it. In looking at the history of the American Thanksgiving, I cam upon one of our 19th century Unitarian writers, Lydia Maria Child. She penned the immortal, and familiar, words: "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through white and drifted now. Over the river and through the woods, now Grandmother's house I spy. Hurrah for the fun. The pudding's done. Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!"[6]
As I read more about Lydia, this rather cliched song took on new meaning in the context of her whole life. Born in 1802 in Medford, Massachusetts, her first book was an acclaimed romantic novel about the love between a Native American man and a white woman. Lydia began writing for children and became part of that grand "flowering of New England"; a friend of William Ellery Channing and Margaret Fuller, among others. She was a popular guest among the rich and famous of Boston.
Then concern for social evils began to disturb her. Lydia turned from romantic novels to books of social criticism - she attacked treatment of Native Americans, protested slavery and advocated women's rights. She was no longer invited to parties; she was excluded from clubs; her so-called friends deserted her.
Her husband had no job, and people stopped reading her books. Their fortunes dwindled. Out of her own need she wrote The Frugal Housewife, instructing people how to survive on little. She responded bitterly to a Southern woman who defended the kindness of Southern women toward their slaves: "The pangs of maternity meet with the requisite assistance; and here in the North, after we have helped the mothers we do not sell the children." She continued to write - including the song so familiar on this American holiday.[7] Her thanksgiving song was paralleled by a passion for justice, perhaps grew from it.
Earlier, while cruising the Internet - actually on Amazon Books - I had come upon another intriguing personality who seems to have effectively linked appreciation with social justice: Charles Handy, wealthy British businessman-philosopher, author of The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World. "It all started with the death of my father," he writes, "whom I had thought a quiet and rather ordinary man, albeit kind and loving. He was rector of a small Protestant parish in rural Ireland for forty years. He was unambitious for promotion, careful about money - careful because there wasn't much - punctilious in his work and sincere in his beliefs, which were conventionally Christian. He did not have much to do with the wealth-creating part of the world, or with its products.
"By the time I was 18 I had resolved never to be poor, never to go to church again, and never to be content with where I stood in life. I went off in search of fame and fortune, first as an oil executive in Southeast Asia, then as an economist in the city of London, ending up, by the time my father died, as a professor at the new London Business School, dashing hither and thither, the published author of papers and books, on the edge of the big time, too busy to attend to my family. 'Until I was ten,' said my daughter years later, 'I thought you were the man who came to lunch on Sundays.'"
"Then my father died, in the fullness of his years…. I was staggered by the numbers who came to say farewell to this quiet man, and the emotion which they showed. He had clearly affected the lives of hundreds of people in ways I had never imagined. He had obviously got something right which I had been too obtuse to see. And, in the end, too late for him to know, he affected my life, too.
"I realized that what one believes about life, and the point of life, does matter. I had put my faith, until that moment, in success, money, and family, probably in that order. I still think these things are important, although I would now reverse the order, but I hanker after a bigger frame in which to set them. At other times, I think 'why bother?'"[8]
Handy went on to point out that, "In Africa, they say that there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need. The greater hunger is for an answer to the question 'why?', for some understanding of what life is all about."[9]
That greater hunger lies at the heart of religious thanksgiving: Thanksgiving without works is pure piety. Religion begins in gratitude and ends in service. Aye, there's the rub! While gratitude sustains us, buoys us up, makes us feel good, service sometimes tends to tire us - exhaust our spiritual energies - often it frustrates us. To move from thanksGiving to thanksLiving is a very long step. But, as Albert Schweitzer put it so simply and so powerfully, "Good fortune obligates."[10]
That is especially true in our cynical and greedy age. Despite our prodigious natural bounty, we tolerate poverty in the midst of plenty with scarcely a word of protest. Despite our growing prosperity, we inflict harsher penalties on those who cannot compete in the struggle for prize. Despite the inadequacy of private charity to cope with poverty, we eviscerate public support for the needy. It is almost as if our very prosperity were corrupting our moral sensibility.
Greed, not generosity, seems to permeate the very air we breathe. Our bounty seems more to be hoarded than to be shared. We never seem to have quite enough. As poet Bertolt Brecht put it, "What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough."
Our very prosperity threatens not only our capacity to give genuine thanks for our bounty, but it also jeopardizes our consciences. Here in Rochester we consider use of tax money to build another soccer stadium when the waiting list for public housing explodes. We New York Staters are now being asked to subsidize the Buffalo Bills professional football team while its players are showered with redundant and ridiculous salaries even as legal aid for the poor is cut. Meanwhile, the Southeast Ecumenical Food Cupboard is digging deeper into its "empty pockets to cover the cost of services."[11] The list of such moral outrages is long - too long for a single sermon. Our affluence, then, has a potentially corrupting impact on our minds and on our hearts.
In our affluence we tend to distance ourselves both morally and spiritually. We find it difficulty to understand why others could not have worked as hard as we for what we have. I find this in myself even as I prosper in worldly goods and find I have to be on guard lest I be seduced into indifference to the plight of the unfortunate fifth of the population which lives at or near poverty.
Even more dangerous is the possible impact on our children. Robert Coles, who has studied children of wealth and poverty, observed "that since wealthy children are treated as if they were the center of the universe they tend ultimately to believe it. In the self-portraits of rich American children, for example, the figure of the child fills up the whole page, while in those of Hopi children the figure is merely a dot in a rich landscape. Children of wealth addicts tend to grow up with a sense of what Coles calls "entitlement" - a feeling that the world and its bounties belong to them by right."[12]
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that people are most conservative after dinner; that is, when their own needs are well-satisfied, they tend to be less worried about others. This moral callousness has been cryptically put in a remark attributed to the 20th American Universalist theologian Clarence Skinner: "A stuffed prophet sees no visions."
The juxtaposition of Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Guest at Your Table Sunday and Thanksgiving is no mere coincidence. If, as I believe, the sincerity of our thanksgiving is measured not only by the depth of our gratitude, but also by the extent of our service, then it seems not only appropriate, but absolutely necessary they be celebrated together.
From 1939 when it rescued refugees from Nazi Germany to its current human rights work in contemporary Burma; from its economic development among India's wretchedly poor and oppressed women to its critique of U.S. federal welfare reform; from its work in helping the people of Chiapas, Mexico, win self-determination to its Promise the Children program with America's poor youth; from its Just Works volunteer project at Rosebud Reservation of the Lakota Sioux nation in South Dakota to helping rebuild burned black churches of the American south; from battling environmental racism in Oakland, California, to celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UUSC is one way we can transform our thanksgiving into thanksliving.
In the end we are drawn again to Ralph Waldo Emerson who also said, "We are not born free, we are born with a mortgage. That mortgage is a debt - a debt that we owe to the past and to the future. While we live we pay interest and then pass it on to the next generation. That's how churches, communities and nations survive; by accepting what has been bequeathed and passing it on to those that come after them. This ritual of receiving and giving is an act of Thanksgiving."[13]
Emerson, I think, has it right. Thanksgiving is not simply about receiving the bounty of earth and the blessings of being; it is also about paying our mortgage to those who have gone before and to those who will follow. The words of our song of reflection say it well: "From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live."[14] Agree with me or not, it is something to ponder as you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner.
return to main page