There is a Chinese curse that says, "May you live in interesting times." Would that the times were not quite so interesting - the presidential election makes Will Rogers a prophet when he said "I don't make jokes; I just watch the (election) and report the facts."
But that is serious business - as is the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East when what seemed to be the brink of a peaceful era became a plunge into a cycle of violence. Meanwhile, in Rochester, one of our major corporations struggles for its very existence and an interfaith group holds a public hearing on poverty in the midst of the longest economic expansion in our history.
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 forebears 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 takes on a different meaning. We find ourselves in need of working 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."[1]
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 is not often found on our lips - grace.
Here I'm not talking about the grace of a merciful God toward me, a sinner, forgiving my faults. I speak of grace understood as the unmerited abundance which is mine by the luck of the draw. This is the grace of privilege in 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."[2]
An authentic "attitude of gratitude" enables us to acknowledge that we are merely guests of existence, "pensioners of the earth." "Life is not a given, but a gift."[3] And so 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 are our obligations to one another.
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 came upon the 19th century writer 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 snow. 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!"[4]
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.[5] Her thanksgiving song was paralleled by a passion for justice, perhaps grew from it.
Then while surfing the Internet I came upon another intriguing personality who seems to have effectively linked religious appreciation with social justice: Charles Handy, wealthy British businessman-philosopher and 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?'"[6]
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."[7]
That greater hunger lies at the heart of religious thanksgiving: Thanksgiving without works is pure piety. Religion begins in gratitude and ends in service. While gratitude sustains us and makes us feel good, service tends to tire us - exhaust our spiritual energies. To move from thanksGiving to thanksLiving is a very long and difficult step. But, as Albert Schweitzer put it so simply and so powerfully, "Good fortune obligates."[8]
That is especially true in our cynical and greedy age. Lily Tomlin once said, "No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up." 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, it also jeopardizes our consciences. Here in Rochester we use tax money first to build a baseball stadium and now to build a soccer stadium while the waiting list for public housing explodes. We New York Staters subsidize the Buffalo Bills professional football team while its players are showered with ridiculous salaries even as legal aid for the poor is cut. Meanwhile, food cupboards struggle to meet the needs of those still on welfare, and those who leave welfare to become the working poor. 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 from those in need. 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 must 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, to say nothing of the wider world beyond our borders.
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 often fills up the whole page, while in those of Hopi Indian 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."[9]
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 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.
This Thanksgiving day we do well to remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who suggested that people are most conservative after dinner; that is, when our own needs are well-satisfied, we tend to be less worried about others. This moral callousness has been cryptically put by the 20th century theologian Clarence Skinner: "A stuffed prophet sees no visions."
Emerson 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 religious communities, cities 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."[10] 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 investing in those who will follow.
The words of the song say it well: "From you I receive, to you I give, together we share, and from this we live."[11] Agree with me or not, it is something to ponder as we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinner.
"May you live in interesting times." The words are intended as a curse. Might not they also be a blessing? Whether living in these interesting times will be a curse or a blessing will be up to us.
Gratitude Beyond Deserving
In this Thanksgiving season we take pause
To give gratitude for that which is beyond our deserving -
The many graces of life which are ours,
Not because we have earned them
But simply because we are fortunate enough
To be here now - in this time and place and company.
Always we wonder if we get what we deserve
If our labors will bring just recompense,
If our endeavors will be rewarded,
If our life projects will come to fruition.
Often we are saddened because we do not receive
As much as we believe we deserve,
That we have been unfairly treated by others - by life itself.
In this time of gratitude let us remember
All those things we have not earned,
All that blesses us beyond any merit of our own,
All the pleasures that come without effort,
All the joys that come to us when we are unaware,
All the beauty that greets us that we have not fashioned
But are privileged to enjoy.
May we come to understand that life is not a balancing act
That requires easy calculations of reward and merit.
Life is a mystery deeper than all our attempts to understand;
It is a miracle we are privileged to share with one another.
Let us be grateful for that which is beyond our deserving.
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