A prayer of Thanksgiving at the Millennium:
Thanks be for these:
For silence of moon-washed nights,
For syncopation of rain on roof,
For sound of wind playing in dry leaves,
For rhythms of waves caressing shore......
For softness of summer breeze,
For crispness of autumn air,
For delicate tracery of frost on windowpane,
For bright blooming bursts of spring,
For faithful turning of the seasons......
For the lineaments of things,
Angular, leafless trees,
Gentle hills rolling into distance,
For meandering streams seeking an unseen sea......
For the ends of things,
Dry cornstalks at stiff attention,
Brittle plants bristling past their prime,
For fields of unharvested crops
Returning to enrich the soil......
For slant of sunlight through windows,
For shimmering shadows on snow,
For whisper of wind on face......
For the textures of things,
For smooth skin of apple in hand,
For caress of collar on neck,
For cool melting of snow on tongue,
For prickling of skin when we are deeply touched,
For pounding of heart when we move with exertion,
For peace of soul when day ends......
For sound of bow on string,
Of breath over reed,
Of touch on keyboard,
Of passion in human voice......
For the sight of familiar faces,
The sound of our spoken names,
The welcoming embrace of outstretched arms......
For the ritual of friendship,
Reminding us we matter......
For familiar voices of family rites,
For the faces of friends
In laughter and tears,
For the tender human arms that hold us,
For flashes of memories that linger,
For mysterious moments that beckon,
For the particularity of this instant.
Thanks be for these.
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."
Like Emerson, I am grateful for the rapture of being alive; unlike Emerson, I am thankful that, while I love Boston, I'd rather be in Rochester. What Emerson and I have in common is gratitude for being.
Primitive peoples propitiated the gods - flattered and cajoled them, humored and bribed them to provide another fruitful harvest. Only gradually did our ancestors learn to express thanks for the gift of life, a vital step in humanity's spiritual evolution. We ARE merely GUESTS OF EXISTENCE. As my colleague Forrester Church puts it, "Life is not a given, but a gift."
And so we have the gained the wisdom to set aside one unique day to acknowledge these realities - not only to ask ourselves what we can give back to the earth that has nourished and sustained us - but also to ask what are our obligations to one another. Thanksgiving, however heartfelt, must be more than a bland rationalization for a bountiful status quo.
Religion begins in gratitude and ends in service. Aye, there's the rub! While gratitude sustains us and buoys us up, service tends to tire us and exhausts our spiritual energies. To move from a spirituality of gratitude to a spirituality of service - to move from thanksgiving to thanksliving is a very long and difficult step.
That is especially true in our self-centered age. Despite being recipients of prodigious natural bounty, we are a nation incapable, or unwilling, to share our unequaled prosperity among all people - either here or in the world at large. Despite unparalleled affluence, we seem unable to grasp the opportunity for that beloved community of earth for which humanity has so long yearned.
Why do I say that? Because I am biased toward a hope that things, however good they may seem, can be better. Because I understand my calling as a Unitarian Universalist minister is more to raise the hard questions than to provide the easy answers.
Why do I believe we have failed to grasp the possibilities before us? Let me count the ways. Because I have read the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's evaluation of the new welfare reform law. The report points out that politicians have been so eager to reduce welfare roles and proclaim victory, they have forgotten what happens to people when they leave them. Ending welfare and ending poverty are not the same thing.
Why do I say that we have failed to meet the rich promise of our abundance? Because this week I had lunch with Martha Ojeda, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice in the Maquiladoras. For 10 days in 1997 I was with Martha as part of a delegation from the New York State Labor and Religion Coalition. I encountered at first hand the poverty in the colonias, which house the poverty-stricken workers in Maquiladora factories managed by American and other global corporations. Martha lives in fear for her safety as she organizes workers whose simple demand is a living wage to support their families.
Why do I say we have dropped the ball? Because this week I attended a public forum on poverty sponsored by the Interfaith Alliance and other groups. We listened to Richard Schauseil, Director of the Monroe County Department of Social Service; to Joan Sheremeta of Xerox's Welfare to Work Program; to Bryan Hetherington of the Public Interest Law Office; to advocates for the poor; and perhaps most importantly to some of the poor themselves.
I learned of their struggle to be self-sufficient, to liberate themselves from addiction, to juggle child care, transportation, poor education and an often unsympathetic bureaucracy to make ends meet. I heard from people who are working hard - some just barely making it; some not. It was poverty with a human face.
I left that meeting frustrated as ever. It was a good meeting and there will be follow-up. But like all good meetings the people who should have been there were not - the County Manager - though he was represented; the Mayor was there for a time; there were no business people beyond a representative from Xerox, as far as I could tell. There were familiar faces of activists who have been working with the poor for decades.
Yet, I should not have felt so frustrated because there is plenty to do. At an entry level I know I can financially support the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which is working to replace poverty with self-sufficiency around the world. That is one of my efforts to link spirituality with service. I can support Martha Ojeda's work in Mexico by supporting the Committee for Justice in the Maquiladoras. But that is only money; it is relatively easy to write a check.
But, locally, there is more I can do. From the beginning I have supported the Rochester Living Wage Campaign which seeks a city ordinance requiring companies doing business with the city to pay what is called a "living wage." The local campaign has determined that is $8.52 an hour with health benefits or $9.52 without. That would lift a family of four out of poverty but not much more. Ultimately the living wage campaign will address the county, the state, the nation and in some far distant day - the world.
Of course, there is opposition. There are those who say this will drive businesses from the city because they cannot afford it. I wondered about this until I heard Robert Pollin speak at St. Mary's Downtown Community Forum last spring. Author with Stephanie Luce of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy, Pollin is an economist who was asked to research the impact of living wage laws on communities. He began with skepticism but concluded that, not only did this not harm communities, it made them healthier - happy, long term, tax-paying workers are good for a community. Baltimore in 1994 was the first city to adopt the living wage; Los Angeles followed suit, along with dozens of others.
Others say it will cost too much. Companies will only pass the increased costs on to cities which will pass them on to the taxpayers. But surely if we, the taxpayers of New York State can afford nearly half a billion dollars to subsidize a new IBM plant in Dutchess County, we can afford to pay people a living wage. Surely, if we in Monroe County can afford to subsidize a baseball stadium and now a soccer stadium, we can afford a living wage. Surely, if we subsidize a prosperous company like Wegmans with tax breaks for new stores, we can afford to insist on a living wage for low-income workers.
There are those who simply oppose any interference with the market - let the market set wages - government interference is not only wrong, it won't work. Unfortunately, the market is not paying a living wage to the 3 million working poor in America - people who work year-round, full-time and yet live in poverty - and an additional 6 million poor who work part time and untold millions more who work several jobs to make ends meet. The remuneration for work in America is badly skewed and basically unfair to millions.
It all boils down to this moral question: should a person who works full time year round have to live in poverty? Is there not an unspoken covenant in America that if you play by the rules and work, you will be OK economically? Isn't the work ethic something we cherish - and if people are willing and able to work and do - isn't the least we can do is assure them of a living wage that will support a family? If we can't do this, if people who report punctually to work, perform conscientiously, can't move out of poverty, then the flaw is perhaps not in our remedy, but in the system itself.
Our moral problem, I think, is that we tend to think all the good things that happen to us are of our own doing. If we prosper, we deserve it. If others don't, it is their fault. For example, in March of 1995, Washington Post columnist David Broder found Senator Phil Gramm's opposition to entitlements for the poor disingenuous. Some time before, Gramm had told "Meet the Press" that "we have gone too far in creating an entitlement society." Broder noted that if government checks had stopped, the Senator would have been out of luck. He was born in a base hospital in Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father was living on a veterans' disability pension - an early entitlement program. He went to the University of Georgia, where his tuition and expenses were paid by the War Orphans Act, another entitlement sponsored by the very senator Gramm replaced. His graduate work in economics was paid for by the National Defense Education Act. Gramm then taught at Texas A&M, a state supported school, until he became a member of Congress. Broder concluded, "Maybe he'll go all the way to the White House. A presidential pension would certainly round out his life of warning against government handouts."
Of course, the living wage is not a government handout. It is reasonable compensation for work performed. Of course, it is outside the normal workings of the market - but then, Phil Gramm had a limited relationship with the marketplace to get where he is today.
The living wage is not new. St. Thomas Aquinas even back in the squalor of the 12th century advocated a "just wage" which was not to be determined by the "higgling of the market," but by what served both the good of the worker and of society as a whole. In the Middle Ages it was assumed a worker's wages would be enough to support a family, an early forerunner of the Living Wage.
The Living Wage Campaign raises both theological and ethical issues that revolve around ThanksGiving and ThanksLiving. How much is enough? Usually we ask that question to about the limits of an affluent lifestyle. We may worry about the corrupting influence of prosperity on people - the corrosion of empathy and sympathy - the erosion of any sense of the common good.
Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee reflected a prevalent American attitude when he wrote, "The concept of the 'common good' hardly means anything any more to many of our people." He quoted a letter he received from critics of the Roman Catholic bishops' statement on the American economy: "I have worked hard for what I got and I am going to keep it. God has been good to me. The lazy slob next door has no rights to what I have earned."
This idea that every material thing we have is ours by divine right, that we have earned every bit of it; that we are prosperous solely by dint of our brain and brawn; that we have done it all ourselves -- is the height, not only of hypocrisy, but of arrogance. All of us got where we are - assuming we like where we are - not only because of our virtues, but with a little help from our friends and family and the national community to which we are so fortunate to belong.
Thanksgiving - yes! We need to be grateful and to express our gratitude. We are lucky to be here. Some complex combination of hard work and good luck has placed us here at the millennium in a most enviable place. But we have not done it alone. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. We are where we are, in large part, because of them.
However, the "how much is enough?" question has new meaning in the Living Wage Campaign. How much is enough to lift a family out of poverty? The suggested wage will barely do it. A study of what it would take to sustain a family above the edge of poverty and independent of government assistance would require a self-sufficiency wage that is half again as large as that required by the living wage ordinance - something well beyond the $17,050 which is the poverty line for a family of four. Think of supporting your family at that level.
ThanksGiving and ThanksLiving - one for gratitude; the other for service - one a happy holiday; the other a time of reflection. Why have I been so blessed? What obligations flow from that blessing? How much is enough? Those questions have deep implications not only for our social values, but also for our spiritual lives.
On this Sunday before Thanksgiving, Americans have to be grateful. We are the most fortunate people in world history. We also have to ask about the obligations of our bounty. Good fortune obligates is a foundation stone for ethical living. One of those obligations is to share that bounty - not only in charity, but also in justice. We need a nation in which no one is confined to poverty, especially if they work. We need a nation in which there are not "dinners without appetites at one end of the table and appetites without dinners at the other," as Unitarian Senator Charles Sumner put it in the late 19th century.
This Thanksgiving our thoughts ought to dwell not in guilt, but in gratitude - not guilt in our relative prosperity, but in thanksgiving for it; not guilt in all that has not been done, but gratitude because of all that can be done - and gladness we are so richly blessed that we are called to serve those without abundance, to advocate for those without a voice of their own. Our Thanksgiving should overflow in thanksliving.
In the words of a Latin American prayer: "To those who hunger give bread, and to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice."
And so, to my Thanksgiving prayer, I offer a prayer of thanksliving:
Thanks be for these:
Wisdom to know life is not a given, but a gift,
To receive blessings so bounteously bestowed upon us,
That we might be of use.
To be of use - the greatest blessing.Thanks be for these:
The poor and the dispossessed,
For they, like us, have their stories.
Thanks be for these:
For those who serve the downtrodden,
And advocate for and with them in the corridors of power,
For they shall both be blessed.Thanks be for these:
Blessings that remind us of duties,
Abundance that cries out to be shared,
Thanks be for the needy ones who maintain dignity,
And the prosperous ones who know how to be of use.
Thanks be for these.
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