By grieving healthily, the memory of loss gradually transforms its predominate tone: from pain to gratitude for what was. This work can have no deadlines. You’re ready to move on when you’re ready to move on, and you can’t determine in advance when that will be. It takes as long as it takes. You can bring some intentionality to the process, but you can’t control how long it takes. Eventually, on its own schedule, grief work leads us toward gratitude and peace.
The other connection between gratitude and grief points the opposite direction. Gratitude contains hints back toward grief. All things must pass. That for which we are today grateful will pass. Today, once again, I am grateful for breathing. Some day – maybe today – my breathing will end. I will have no more awareness of chipmunks or blue jays.
Gratitude for health contains the reminder that it is impermanent. Hence the urgency of appreciating it now. The loved ones around the table at your Thanksgiving dinner will be separated from you – if not by fallings out or by growings apart, then by either by their death or yours. So appreciate them now – bask in gratitude for them now. Gratitude is the advance pre-work of grief.
Life is about change, and showing up for it -- showing up for life – means fully immersing yourself in all the gratitude and the grief of it. The gratitude and the grief flow into each other, not even as two sides of the same coin, but as, really, the same side of this thing called your life. And a consciousness of the grief deepens the gratitude, even as a consciousness of the gratitude brings a tinge of grief.
That’s not bad. That is, in fact, the fullest good that we have.
And with that let us return, as I promised we would, to that romanticized story of European Puritans and the Wampanoag people in 1621 -- precisely 400 years ago now – the story with which our Thanksgiving holiday is entangled. White Americans came to think of a largely imaginary 1621 event as “the First Thanksgiving.”
The kernel of truth in that Thanksgiving story we learned in elementary school is that apparently, there actually was a harvest celebration in Plymouth colony that year. It would have been around late September or early October. It seems the celebration included some firing of guns into the air, and some of the Wampanoag did show up to investigate what they imagined was a battle going on.
Everything we know about that 1621 feast came from a description in one letter by colonist Edward Winslow. That letter was lost for 200 years. After it was rediscovered, a Boston publisher, Alexander Young, in 1841 printed up the brief account of the feast. Young dubbed the episode “The First Thanksgiving.” White Americans, craving a romanticized story of their past, latched on to it and heaped on the embellishments like they heaped on the food at Thanksgiving dinner.
The colonists celebrating in 1621 did not call their event "Thanksgiving." For them, “thanksgiving” was a day of fasting – and this was a feast -- the opposite of their thanksgiving observance. More significantly, calling any event involving white settlers in North America "the first Thanksgiving" overlooks the fact that, for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island (North America) celebrated seasons of Thanksgiving. 'Thanksgiving' is a very ancient concept to the first nations of this continent.
Still, there is one good thing to come out of this false mythology about Thanksgiving Day. And that’s that the day has now become an occasion for reflecting on the situation of indigenous people – a day for remembering injustices done to native Americans and for respectfully honoring indigenous people and culture. It is, in fact, a day of mourning, and has been observed as such since 1970. In that year, 51 years ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was arranging celebrations of the 350th anniversary of the 1620 Plymouth Rock landing. Wampanoag Wamsutta (Frank) James was invited to speak -- then disinvited after the event organizers discovered his speech was one of outrage for atrocities and broken promises. So instead of participating in the official proceedings, Native people gathered at Cole’s Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock.
Every year since, Native Americans have been gathering there from around the country at noon on the fourth Thursday of November to observe a National Day of Mourning. You can livestream the 2021 Day of Mourning at noon on Thursday, broadcast from Plymouth, MA. You'll find the link for livestreaming it at uaine.org. I encourage you to do that. Give it a look – maybe on your laptop in the kitchen as you go about the preparations for your Thanksgiving feast. It starts at noon on Thursday.
Why would we watch? Because we have grief work to do – to mourn what was lost, to grieve the centuries of mass cruelty, injustice, broken promises. And through that grieving, to be pointed toward gratitude – that indigenous people were not all wiped out, that they are among us yet, vibrant and alive and living out a rich and wise culture that enriches our world.
As grief and gratitude deepen each other, let us grieve the loss of the romanticized version of American history – the frankly white supremacist version of American history that all of us who grew up in this country grew up with – and be grateful that we now know more of the truth. Grieving that loss of the triumphalist story, we reclaim the energy that had been attached to that story, and become able to reinvest that energy correcting, in joy, the wrongs that continue.
And wrongs do continue. The poverty rate among families with children on reservations is 36 percent, compared with 9.2 percent of families nationally being below the poverty line. Because of poverty and lack of access to medical care, the covid pandemic hit indigenous communities much harder. During the early months of the pandemic American Indians and Alaska Natives were 3·5 times more likely to be diagnosed with the disease than non-Hispanic whites and their mortality rate was almost twice as high. It’s a continuation of past reality for American Indian and Alaska Natives whose mortality rate from the 2009 H1n1 influenza was four times higher than the general population. Alaska Natives represented 80% of the state's death toll from the 1918 Spanish flu.
Because we are able to be grateful, we are able to be grateful that we are capable of seeing wrongs, that we are capable of addressing them, that we are capable of moral progress, that we are capable of bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice. Gratitude for gratitude itself embraces all of life, embraces the necessary grieving, and imbues life with the joy of facing toward compassion and fairness. May it be so – and happy Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving Day is coming. The occasion is entangled with a romanticized story of European Puritans and the Wampanoag people in 1621 -- precisely 400 years ago now. I’m going to come back to that, but first let’s talk about this thanksgiving -- the practice of giving thanks.
Thanksgiving Day is coming up -- Thu Nov 25. So that’s great: getting together with family or friends or both – and overeating! OK, I know that it can be fraught. Even before covid, many of us found the occasion fraught with risk of getting into unpleasant political arguments -- or dealing with that cousin who would drink too much. Under Covid conditions, a lot people aren’t gathering – and deciding not to might make sparks fly. So, as I said: fraught. I don’t know your family, so I’m not going to give any advice about how to handle them. I’ll just say, it IS difficult, and whatever you’re doing, it’s great, given how difficult things are.
What I do want to say is Thanksgiving is not a special time to be grateful – as if you didn’t need to be any other time. Thanksgiving is a time for a reminder – if we needed a reminder – to be grateful all the time. Every day. Three hundred sixty-five and one-quarter days a year.
Studies confirm how helpful it is to jot down, every day, 3-5 things that you’re grateful for. Gratitude is associated with greater well-being, better coping, and better sleep.
It’s OK if your gratitude list is repetitive, day after day. On my daily lists, “air” comes up a lot. I’m grateful for air. Or I’ll say “breathing” because I’m grateful to be taking in air, and giving it back, with a slightly higher concentration of carbon dioxide and some of my body’s moisture. It is so great to breathe – the feeling of the inhale and the exhale. There’s no need to be original – feel free to steal that one for your list for as many days as you feel like it.
During certain seasons of the year, chipmunks will be on my daily list almost every day. Such delightful and interesting little critters, they are! That’s OK if I’m repeating myself a lot. It’s also OK if I feel like pushing myself just a little bit to think of something different. My mind might go: “OK, ‘blue jays’ instead of ‘chipmunks.’”
But do mean it. That’s why actually writing the list works better than speaking it, or just thinking it. Writing is a little slower, and in the extra time it takes to write “blue jays,” I can feel my way into an appreciation and gladness that blue jays are in the world, and in my world.
Gratitude is how we notice and appreciate grace. Grace is the goodness that you did not earn – that you do not deserve: like air, and chipmunks.
Or friends or lovers, right? They’re a grace, aren’t they? If they’re only hanging around because you earned them, then aren’t really true friends, are they?
To practice gratitude, do not wait for something special to be grateful for to fall into your lap. Be grateful for all the ordinary, pedestrian wonders that are continually falling into your lap. The sun came up. Thank you. If it’s sunny, be grateful it’s sunny. If it’s rainy, be grateful it’s raining. As David Stendl-Rast says,
"It's not being happy that makes us grateful. It's being grateful that makes us happy."
Gratitude does not mean ignoring difficulties, losses, or injustice. It just means also paying attention to the grace that’s all around you, that you are submerged in – the grace within which you live and move and have your being.
When you do this, you are resting your mind on the fullness of life -- on the sense of having an open heart that moves toward an open hand. Gratitude is receptive. Grace does the giving; you only need to do the receiving. Open and receiving, taking in, appreciating what grace provides.
"When we are receptive we are open, aware, awake and actively receiving what life has to offer us. We are in flow, we are in balance. We are both open and focused, surrendered and engaged." (standinbalance.com/receptivity)
When we are grounded in openly receiving, we naturally feel we have more of value inside ourselves and more to offer to others.
Remember that gratitude is not guilt or indebtedness -- both of which actually make it harder to feel grateful. You may feel moved to be generous in turn -- including in new directions, such as giving to some out of appreciation for what you have been given by others -- but it will come from large-heartedness, not because you think you owe something.
Gratitude lifts us up out of market mind. Yes, there’s a big part of life where we need market thinking. We need to think about ensuring we’re not paying too much for what we’re getting, and that we are paid enough for what we’re giving. Market mind keeps score – using dollars as points – and monitors the fairness of exchanges. It is helpful and necessary – but we wouldn’t want to live in market mind all the time.
Gratitude takes us out of market mind. Where market mind is focused on scarcity, gratitude brings awareness of abundance. You are fed beyond measure – perhaps literally so at Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, when you are in gratitude, rather than market mind, you appreciate how your needs are supplied in great abundance. And this allows you to, in turn, give with all your heart without keeping score.
Gratitude is such a powerful orientation toward well-being and joy that perhaps the thing to most be grateful for is that we are beings capable of gratitude. We are capable of appreciating every moment. Even if don’t appreciate everything IN every moment, we can appreciate every moment.
"You can’t be grateful for war in a given situation, or violence, or sickness, things like that. So the key, when people ask, 'Can you be grateful for everything?' — no, not for everything, but in every moment." (David Stendl-Rast)
So gratitude FOR gratitude itself is indeed appropriate.
Gratitude doesn’t mean putting a smiley face on everything. In fact, I want to talk some about the particular inter-relationship between gratitude and grief. This relationship goes in both directions. The work of grieving leads us, finally, out of the pain of loss and into a gratitude for what was. Going the other direction, gratitude for the beauty, health, and security that we have is also tinged with grief as we remember that all these things shall pass.
To see how grief points to gratitude, we need to review how grief works and how grief work works. We need to grieve. Grieving is a need. Grief is not just this unfortunate thing that happens to you, willy nilly (will-ye or nil-ye). Lots of unfortunate things do happen to you, will-ye or nil-ye, but you might or might not grieve them as much and as intentionally as would be good for you.
There’s grieving to be done whenever there’s a big change in your life – because big change means a big loss of what was before the change. We grieve when a family member, or friend, dies, when a relationship ends, when we move to another town, when a pet dies, when a loved one faces significant injury or illness, when a major possibility you were really hoping to realize becomes closed to us.
Through the grieving process we come to reclaim the energy that has been bound to the person, object, or experience now lost. We are then able to re-invest that energy elsewhere. Without effectively grieving, a part of us remains tied to the past. As long as part of us remains tied that way, reinvesting in the new world in which we find ourselves can’t happen.
Grieving, of course, is not forgetting. It’s the working of our way to remembering with peace rather than with pain. The memory of loss will always be tinged with blue, but the memory can come, through the grieving process, to be infused with gratitude for the wonderful gift of what was – rather than with anger, recriminations, or regret for the loss.
That’s the first connection between grief and gratitude: that the grief process is a process of arriving at gratitude for what was as the predominate tone of the memory. Much of the process of healthy grieving is built into us, and will unfold without our direction. But there is a level of intentionality to bring to the process. There’s intentional work to be done. There are tasks to do, and doing them more or less consciously facilitates the re-emergence of wholeness from the broken-ness of loss.
The tasks include, in any order:
To accept the finality of the loss;
To acknowledge and express the full range of feelings we experience as a result of the loss;
To adjust to a life in which the lost person, object, or experience is absent;
To say good-bye, to ritualize our movement to a new peace with the loss.
And to do all the above with balance: balancing time spent on grief work with coping with day-to-day life; balancing time spent with others with time spent alone.
There’s a lot more to be said about how to healthily grieve, how best to negotiate grieving. Today, I just want to say enough to convey that being intentional about proper grieving brings us through the pain and into gratitude. Grief points to gratitude.
In part 2, we'll look at how gratitude points to grief.
Religion is stories, and music, enacted in ritual.
Our ancestors gathered around campfires.
There would be drumming and dancing, chanting or singing.
And there would be story-telling.
The stories helped them make sense of themselves.
The stories told the people’s history.
They would tell of how the world came to be, and how the plants and animals came to be, and how they themselves, the people, came to be.
They didn’t know how the world, and life, came to be so they guessed, using imagination to fashion a tale that seemed to them credible.
We do the same thing today.
Our story today says that there was a singularity 14 billion years ago that expanded into the universe as we know it.
Our story today is continually revised by the results of experiments that we designed for the purpose of learning to revise in our story.
Our story today has a lot more math in it.
But our story, like the ones our first story-telling ancestors told, has, at its heart, mystery.
We don’t know what made the singularity happen, and our early ancestors didn’t know what force had brought forth the soil, mountains, rivers, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals – and themselves.
It all began in mystery.
And then it unfolded.
When the unfolding involved something that didn’t seem to fit what people could do, what animals or plants could do, what earth or sky or wind or fire or water could do, the story-teller brought another character into the story – with an agency that could do what otherwise couldn’t be done.
We might translate the name of that character as spirit, or Great Spirit.
It was something mysterious, and there were a lot of very different stories about it, but what the stories had in common was: it knew things and wanted things.
It had intentions.
How else could mountains, or people, come to be, except through the intention of some creative force?
(There is an answer to that question. But there’s a lot of math in it.)
The stories and the music and the dance were done in a ritualized way – or were done together with ritual.
These were ways, maybe, our ancestors sought to influence the mystery that had powers, knowledge, and desires.
They were ways to help them feel connected to this mystery with powers and intentions.
It helped them be at peace with the mystery they could not control or influence.
We continue today to gather – have music, a little ritual, and tell stories about where we come from, to help us know who we are.
Different religions have different stories, different rituals, different moral codes, and play different music.
They aren’t so much different paths all headed up the same mountain as different paths headed up different mountains.
But they are all religions – which means they have stories, music, and ritual to convey a sense of who we are, what is our place in the family of things, what is ours to do, what we are here to try to be.
Who are we? Where do we come from? And why do we share in practices of Thanksgiving?
Therefore, let the ritual story of Thanksgiving be told.
And because Unitarians are a story-revising people, continually updating our story in light of new evidence, new understandings, and new sensibilities, the floor will be open to amendments as we go.
ACT II: IN SESSION
STORYTELLER: Our story. The Pilgrims were not the first people to land on the shores of New England. The area was first discovered in 1524 by Giovanni de Verrazzano, who explored the Atlantic Coast from Florida to New Brunswick.
[Delegate 1 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from _______
DELEGATE 1: Mister Chair, I move to amend. Giovanni de Verrazzano did not discover New England. There were people already here. Say instead, “Verrazzano was the first European to explore the Atantic Coast.”
CHAIR: Those in favor of incorporating the amendment, raise your Order of Service. . . . The amendment is incorporated.
STORYTELLER: Let’s back up further, then, and say who did discover this region. This region between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware River, was discovered by peoples who came over the Bering land bridge about 16 thousand years ago. As they split into branches and spread across the continent, one of the branches of these people discovered our region about 14 or 15 thousand years ago.
[Delegate 2 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from _____.
DELEGATE 2: Mister Chair, move to amend.
These people did not discover this region either. There were animals already here. I might mention in particular the Carolina Parakeet, extinct since 1918. I’d nominate them for discoverers of our region.
CHAIR: Perhaps we should remove the word “discover” altogether?
DELEGATE 2: Yes, that’s the amendment I propose.
CHAIR: All in favor of striking the word discover, raise your Order of Service. . . . The amendment is incorporated.
STORYTELLER: As they split into branches and spread across the continent, one of the branches, about 14 or 15 thousand years ago, became the first humans to inhabit our region.
Then in 1524, Giovanni de Verrazzano explored this area.
John Cabot and Jacques Cartier also charted in the vicinity.
In 1609, Henry Hudson made his way up what we call the Hudson River.
These explorers sometimes captured and enslaved natives – and they brought diseases.
Europeans had developed immunity to these diseases, but the natives had not.
The Wampanoag, for instance, in 1600 numbered 50,000 to 100,000, occupying 69 villages scattered throughout the region that is now southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island.
The plague from Europe killed up to two-thirds of them.
Many also were captured and sold as slaves.
In 1614, a Wampanoag boy named Tisquantum was abducted from his village, Patuxet.
Tisquantum was sold as a slave in Spain, then escaped to England.
After several years, Tisquantum was able to get back to Turtle Island (what we call North America).
When he returned to his village, he discovered there were no other surviving Patuxet -- the rest were either killed in battle or died of disease brought from Europe.
In 1620, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth rock bringing 102 Pilgrims.
[Delegate 3 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from ________
DELEGATE 3: Mister Chair, point of factual clarification.
Did these people call themselves “Pilgrims”?
CHAIR: Fact checker?
FACT CHECKER: They did not. Not until the 20th-century did Pilgrim come to refer to the people who came over on the Mayflower. They called themselves “Saints”.
DELEGATE 3: It’s disrespectful to them to call them something they didn’t call themselves. I move we call them Saints.
[Delegate 4 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from ________.
DELEGATE 4: Mister Chair, I oppose this amendment.
It may be disrespectful to them to call them Pilgrims, but it’s disrespectful to us to call them “saints” – because we’re pretty sure they weren’t.
CHAIR: Fact checker, was there some other name?
FACT CHECKER: They were Puritans.
CHAIR: Will the delegate accept an amendment to the amendment, to call them Puritans.
DELEGATE 3: I will.
CHAIR: The amendment is to call the people on the Mayflower “Puritans.” All in favor, raise your Order of Service . . . the amendment is incorporated.
STORYTELLER: These . . . Puritans settled in an area that was once Patuxet, the Wampanoag village abandoned because of the plague.
The English did not see any Wampanoag that first winter at all.
They only caught a rare glimpse of a fleeting shadow of the land's inhabitants until March 1621 when Samoset, a Monhegan from Maine, came to the village.
The next day, Samoset returned with Tisquantum.
Tisquantum had learned English during his abduction, so he could talk to the settlers and serve as a translator.
Tisquantum showed them how to plant corn, fish and gather berries and nuts.
The crop seeds the colonists had brought with them failed, so without Tisquantum – also called Squanto -- help, there probably wouldn’t have been a harvest to celebrate that fall.
[Delegate 5 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from _____
DELEGATE 5: Mister Chair, I move to include what the Puritans wore.
CHAIR: Which was?
DELEGATE 5: Beats me. I was wanting to find out!
CHAIR: Fact man?
FACT CHECKER: The Puritan colonists did not wear black, large hats with buckles on them, nor buckled shoes.
The 19th-century artists who painted them that way did so because they associated black clothing and buckles with being old-fashioned.
Actually, their attire was bright and cheerful.
DELEGATE 5: I move to include that information in the record.
CHAIR: All in favor raise your Order of Service . . . The information is incorporated. Pick up from there.
STORYTELLER: The harvest celebration on 1621 was not a solemn religious observance.
It was a three-day festival that included drinking, gambling, athletic games, and even target shooting with English muskets -- a not-so-subtle way to warn the indigenous peoples that these colonists could shoot them.
The Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, and 90 warriors made their way to the settlement in response to the sounds of the gunfire.
They thought the colonists were under attack, so they came prepared for battle to help defend the colonists.
The Wampanoag were probably not invited, and the settlers were probably rather nervous having them around.
[Delegate 6 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from _____.
DELEGATE 6: Mister Chair, I have a number of questions, and I move to go into Q&A format.
CHAIR: That’s quite and extraordinary parliamentary procedure.
DELEGATE 6: This is quite an extraordinary story.
CHAIR: Very well, there’s a move to suspend the rules for a round of Q&A. All in favor, raise your Order of Service. . . . The motion carries. The delegate may begin questioning.
DELEGATE 6: We’ve heard what the Puritans wore. What did the Wampanoag wear.
STORYTELLER: They were not wearing what is often pictured: woven blankets on their shoulders and large, feathered headdresses.
They wore breechcloth with leggings -- and perhaps one or two feathers in their hair in the back.
DELEGATE 6: How long did the Wampanoag stay?
STORYTELLER: The Wampanoag stayed for three days, during the course of which they contributed a large portion – perhaps most – of the food.
DELEGATE 6: Was the 1621 harvest celebration in November?
STORYTELLER: November would have been much too late.
It was some time between late September and the middle of October.
DELEGATE 6: So the first Thanksgiving, then, was in September or October?
STORYTELLER: The colonists celebrating in 1621 did not call their event "Thanksgiving."
For them, “thanksgiving” was a day of fasting – and this was a feast -- the opposite of their thanksgiving observance.
Calling any event involving white settlers in North America "the first Thanksgiving" overlooks the fact that, for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island (North America) celebrated seasons of Thanksgiving.
'Thanksgiving' is a very ancient concept to the first nations of this continent.
The 1621 celebration was a one-off that was not repeated -- and, in any case, wasn't thought of as a "Thanksgiving."
DELEGATE 6: Last question: What is the source of the misinformation we about the 1621 harvest celebration?
FACT CHECKER: Everything we know about that 1621 feast came from a description in one letter by colonist Edward Winslow. That letter was lost for 200 years.
After it was rediscovered, a Boston publisher, Alexander Young, in 1841 printed up the brief account of the feast.
Young dubbed the episode “The First Thanksgiving.”
White Americans, craving a romanticized story of their past, latched on to it.
CHAIR: Thank you. We conclude our Q&A section, and resume the regular story.
STORYTELLER: The first European-recognized Thanksgiving came in 1637, when Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed a Day of Thanksgiving.
The proclamation focused on giving thanks for the return of the colony's men who had traveled to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they had gone to join in battle.
The thanks that was foremost in Winthrop’s proclamation was thanks for their “great victory”.
The roots of the American Thanksgiving holiday are a celebration of a massacre of hundreds of Native people.
It grew into a general celebration of genocide.
For example, a Proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1676 thanks god that the "heathen natives" had been almost entirely wiped out in Massachusetts and nearby.
Thanksgiving proclamations a century later continue to be connected with war.
In the midst of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress issued Thanksgiving Proclamations each year from 1777 to 1784.
Thus was the way paved for Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, to make Thanksgiving a US National Holiday.
Lincoln set the US National Holiday of Thanksgiving as the last Thursday of November.
[Delegate 7 raises hand]
CHAIR: The chair recognizes the delegate from _____.
DELEGATE 7: Mister Chair, I move to include how the holiday moved from the last Thursday of November to the fourth Thursday of November.
CHAIR: Would the Assembly like to hear how the holiday moved from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday? All in favor, raise your Order of Service. . . . Opposed?
The motion carries, so tell us.
STORYTELLER: Five times out of seven, the fourth Thursday in November is the same thing as the last Thursday.
The other two times – like this year – November has five Thursdays, and then the fourth one is not the last one.
The holiday moved from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday in 1941.
Franklin Roosevelt made the change because November 1941 had five Thursdays, and by moving the holiday up a week he gave merchants a longer Christmas shopping season every year with five Thursdays in November.
[Delegate 8 raises hand]
CHAIR: The Chair recognizes the delegate from _____.
DELEGATE 8: Mister Chair, I move the following resolution.
Resolved: That those present at this worship service of Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation give thanks for all the good in our lives and all the blessings we enjoy,
That we remember also the pain and loss of the Indigenous people.
And that our list of gratitudes include thanks that we have the capacity to face the truths of the past, to learn from them to love others better, and love the rich diversity of humanity and of life.
CHAIR: The motion is [repeats motion]. Motions of this type require a second. Is there a second?
All in favor of the motion raise your Order of Service.
Opposed?
The motion carries. Next on our agenda is the reading of the gratitudes.
ACT III: AFTERWORD
Sometimes you feel happy.
Sometimes you feel sad.
Those are opposite feelings, and life brings them both, though usually not at the same time.
It can happen.
It is possible to be both happy and sad at the same time.
Have you ever felt happy and sad at the same time?
It can happen, but it’s unusual.
Usually being happy means not beings sad, and being sad means not being happy.
How about these two: being grateful and remembering suffering?
These are not even opposites at all.
They are the natural extensions of each other.
There is much to be grateful for.
Air!
Take a breath, and be thankful for air!
Thank you air.
And we have trees and sunshine to be grateful for – the beauty of this world.
We have cardinals and nuthatches and chipmunks.
Thank you, trees!
Thank you, sunshine!
Thank you, cardinals and nuthatches and chipmunks!
Gratitude chases out loneliness.
You can’t be lonely when you’re feeling thankful – because as soon as you say, “thank you,” you have company, companions, friends.
The air, trees, sunshine, birdies and wee beasties: your company.
Compassion also chases out loneliness.
Caring about other people, caring about whether they suffer are treated unfairly, also chases out loneliness.
Compassion brings other people into our lives, even if only in our imagination.
We have company.
Thankfulness recognizes the companionship that is all around us.
Compassion reaches out to extend our companionship outward.
For as the world is our good company, it makes us want to be good company for the world.
So gratitude and compassion – thankfulness and remembering suffering and unfairness – are not opposites.
They naturally go together, for they are both about: having company in our life.
We are not alone.
We have the companionship of everything that we are grateful for and everything we have compassion for.
I remember when I was a kid, the extended family and always a few unrelated guests gatherered around the table for Thanksgiving dinner each year.
My Mom found a recipe for oyster stew one year early on, and liked it so much she made it every year thereafter, so, I know it’s weird, but in my mind, Thanksgiving is associated with oyster stew.
Thank you, Oysters.
Thank you, Mom.
And we’d go around the table and talk about what we were thankful for.
I don’t remember if it ever came up at the Thanksgiving tables where I was, but it seemed a common thing around Thanksgiving to talk about being grateful for how well we’re doing when others are doing so much worse.
That seems weird to me.
I suppose the point is to remind us not to take our blessings for granted, and that’s a good point, but the even better point is to be reminded that our blessings are limited.
As long as anybody isn’t free, none of us are free.
As long as any being isn’t treated fairly, none of us has the blessing of living in a world where everyone is treated fairly.
We have company – we aren’t alone.
We have the great good fortune to be able to care, to have compassion.
Gratitude and compassion are dishes best served together.
Perhaps the year 2020 has been on your mind of late -- because we SO enjoyed the presidential campaign and can't wait to spend another 18 months going through that! The year 2020 is on my mind today for a different reason. 2020 will mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the ship “Mayflower” in the region now known as New England.
Native American tribal leaders, human rights advocates, environmental justice advocates, and others have expressed concern about the way colonization may be celebrated.
As Unitarian Universalists, our heritage is particularly enmeshed with this issue. Several New England churches established during the 1600s continue today as Unitarian Universalist congregations, and Unitarian Universalists have had a role in developing this holiday known as “the American Thanksgiving Day.” And we are committed to peace and justice for all the world’s people.
Taking note of all this, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly last June in Columbus, OH, adopted a resolution encouraging “all Unitarian Universalists to enter a time of education, careful reflection, and healing, during the years 2016-2021.” (see the full resolution: CLICK HERE; for more on the UU role in the Thanksgiving holiday: CLICK HERE.) The run-up to the quadricentennial of the Plymouth Rock landing is a particularly apt time to give special attention to the suffering, indignity, and loss that native peoples have suffered in the last 400 years.
As we seek to build a more just future, a more beloved and beloving community, we must be mindful of the past we share with others. To prepare for the future, we must make peace with our past – and better understand the people and the environment of the 1600s. The story of the Radical Reformation and the religious Dissenters and Separatists of the 1600s is part of our Unitarian Universalist story, and their influence is still with us. The story of indigenous peoples, including the Wampanoag Tribal Nation of Mashpee, Massachusetts, who first met the Pilgrims, and the story of their spiritual wisdom also needs our honor and respect. (Here's a start: CLICK HERE.)
The resolution asked for “all UU congregations across the United States of America to enter into dialogue with the local Native People in their areas about the Thanksgiving holiday and its history.” Here at Community UU in White Plains, NY, we have begun steps to connect with Lenape in our area, to learn from them their perspective and experience and how that can better inform our understanding of this Thanksgiving holiday.
Truth and reconciliation for all Americans, including those who were here before it was called America, requires this dialog, grounded for us in our Unitarian Universalist recognition that we are part of an interdependent web of all existence.
And so we celebrate harvest – the bounty of the earth that sustains us. Most of us grew up with a romanticized picture of the first Thanksgiving, and that’s not an altogether bad thing. We can correct for the inaccuracies of how we have recounted the past while holding on to the vision of cooperation and good will across cultural difference. The past wasn't really like the picture we learned as children of intercultural harmony between the Pilgrims and Native Americans at the First Thanksgiving. That picture of the past is a fantasy. Perhaps the future can make it a reality.
The creation of Thanksgiving involved influences from Native American people, influences from colonist Pilgrims, influences from the Jewish Sukkot festival -- and others. The meaning of Thanksgiving continues to be shaped by the encounter of people of different cultures. It takes all of us -- those who can trace their ancestry to the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims of 1620, those whose ancestors lived in this part of the world for many centuries before 1620, and those who arrived here, with or without documentation, from foreign shores just in the last few years, and everybody in-between. It takes first-generation Americans, 2nd-generation Americans, 16th-generation, and 160th-generation Americans to embody what it means to be American and to be thankful together.
In our harvest celebration of cornbread and cider, let us be reminded of the vision of radical hospitality, where we all have a seat at the welcome table.
