Rev. Edmund Robinson

Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield

November 21, 1999 – Thanksgiving Sunday

I think we all experience what amounts to a powerful animal instinct this time of year. It is as if we suddenly lift our heads out of the school-rut and the work-rut and the busy-ness rut and sniff the Fall air and something in it tells us that our days are getting shorter and there isn’t an infinite amount of time left and we’d better touch base with the environment from which we sprung. So we call around and make the necessary arrangements, as does everyone else in the country, and soon we will be clogging the airports and the trains and the highways in pilgrimages to be with our loved ones.

And we do it even though we know that in many cases the pilgrimage will engender as much strife, sadness, awkwardness as it will love, affirmation and a sense of belonging. So many of our family units, including mine, are broken by death, divorce, alienation, generational conflicts; some people simply can’t get away from job or school to come home.

This seems to be a time of the year when things have come together for me with particular poignancy. I recently found on my computer the sermon I preached at Thanksgiving 1996, and it brought back to me the circumstances of that time in my life. I had arranged early in the fall to spend my Thanksgiving with my family in South Carolina, and had agreed with my home church in Charleston to preach there on the Sunday following Thanksgiving. They had unanimously voted to sponsor me for the ministry, and after a little over a year of seminary, I was going to give them a report card. I entitled the sermon "The Education of a Minister."

What I had not foreseen when I set that up was that things would deteriorate in my marriage to the point that my wife would announce her intention in early November to end it. Because our daughter was then in her senior year applying to colleges, we decided to spare the children the stress of announcing this news until Christmas, when Sally would have heard on her early acceptance. This meant that we had to get through Thanksgiving as a family with two of us knowing that it would be our last Thanksgiving together. We spent the holiday at the beach with my sister and brother, mother and aunt, nieces and nephews. All the adults knew what was going on, and none of the children.

That was trying enough, but not as trying as giving that sermon the following Sunday. For the Charleston church was like an extension of my family. It is a beautiful structure, built in 1789, and a style like no other UU church in the country, known as perpendicular gothic. Each pillar comes up from the sanctuary floor and blooms at the top into an effusion of fan tracery which merges with that from the other pillars to form a delicate reticulum on the vaulting ceiling. I stood in the ancient, familiar pulpit of that place where both of us had been pillars – vestry chair, canvass director, choir members, search committees – and I knew that life would never be the same again. I looked down at my family and somehow got through the sermon without a hint of what I was carrying in my heart.

I think of that time as I mull over the words from Susan Hull in this morning's reading: the injury of the river is also its gift. It is easy to be thankful for the good and happy things that life has brought us. Can we also be thankful for the hurts?

I think we go through life with a basic sense of responsibility for ourselves and our actions. We are brought up this way, and in fact, it is good that we are. A society has to be built on people taking responsibility for themselves. This idea is certainly a strong theme of the Unitarian side of our religious heritage. In Nineteenth Century Unitarianism there was a belief in "salvation by character," the idea that we would bring about our own destiny by emulating the character of Jesus.

The notion that we are authors of our fate and captain of our souls is great in the sunny times. We can take credit for the good things that happen to us. As a lawyer, for example, I tend to feel that if we win our case, it must be due to my brilliance and hard work, and if we lose, it must be because the client somehow muffed it before I got my hands on it.

The downside of the notion that we are responsible for our lives is, of course, when things don't go the way we want them to. I spoke on Halloween about the ghosts of the way things might have been, of the roads not taken. If we rely on a sense of personal authorship of our lives, it is hard to avoid a sense that all bad endings are our fault. I realized about a year into my divorce that the lawyer in me regarded it not as something that just happened to me but as the biggest case of my life, which I had lost. There was some part of me that said, if I had just made the right argument, I could have kept the marriage together.

What's needed when we get trapped in these vortices – or is it vortexes? – of despondency is a paradigm shift. Instead of looking at ourselves as the authors of our lives, let's look at our lives as given from someone else. Our lives are a gift, not a purchase. And we can break it down, each day, each hour is also a gift.

I feel that this view of lfe as a gift is vaguely Universalist, as opposed to Unitarian, though I can't point to any specific text from Universalist writers to support this view. Certainly Ballou denied that humans had free will, since everything that happened was in the hands of an omnipotent God. To this extent, our existences are not of our own doing but gifts.

Now I can hear the nontheists in the room sniffing suspiciously, "Uh oh, if life is a gift, there has to be a giver? He's going on God again." I don't think we have to answer the question of who the giver is to realize the benefits of treating life as a gift. I think Mary Oliver said it better than I can in her deservedly well-known poem, "The Summer Day:"

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I do not know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Clearly we don't have to get off the secular or scientific plane at all to realize that many if not most of the things that make our lives what they are are not of our own doing. Your genetic set is the result of a chance combination of the genes of your parents. Your psychology and outlook on life is the result of your upbringing, your education, your life experiences.

To some extent our sense of authorship of our lives is a function of age: when I was in my twenties, I was the captain of my fate, the master of my soul. Now in my fifties, I see how much of who I am was given to me by others.

So life is a gift, but of course one of the eternally irritating things about getting gifts is that you don't always get what you want. There was an office manager at the law firm I worked for who would give me tie every Christmas. Each year's tie was more hideous than the last. I would have to find a day when I didn't have any court or public appearances and force myself to wear that year's tie for Lois so that I could show her my appreciation before I put it in the Goodwill bag.

But as I look back on it now, the gift was not in the tie. Our office manager was a childless widow who lived for her cats, our senior partner for whom she had worked for fifty years, and what companionship she could get from the rest of us in the small office. Her gift to me was her way of making a connection, and viewed in that light it was beautiful.

The injury of the river is also its gift. Can we really believe this? Can I really preach it? Do I really believe it? I look back at the worst things that have happened to me, which are probably trifles compared to some of the things that have happened to some of you, and I ask myself, can I really see these things as gifts for which I should be grateful?

I might have said this was Pollyanna thinking if I hadn't heard a particular story last weekend. I attended a conference on restorative Justice. Restorative Justice is a concept gaining a lot of attention as an alternative way to think of and deal with crime, conflict and harm. We had presentations by the leading theoretician of the movement as well as by a judge from the Yukon Territory in Canada, who has instituted what he calls "circle sentencing," a process borrowing Native American ideas in which the offender and the victim and everyone else affected by the act gets together in a circle and decides by consensus what to do to redress the harm done. I participated in a mock circle exercise and it was a powerful experience.

More powerful, however, was a story told by one of the conferees and her husband. She had been driving along a street in Asheville, North Carolina where she lived, when two teenage boys with guns attempted to rob her at a stoplight. The one on the driver's side became flustered and shot her just behind the ear. She managed to drive herself to a hospital and her life was saved.

The boys were arrested, and they turned out to be two kids from the neighborhood. She had a dream, she said it was unlike any other dream she had ever had, and it featured the teenage boy who shot her and in the dream she was his savior. She determined that the dream was telling her something, and she set out to find out all she could about this kid. She soon came to know that in the context of his life, he was probably more of a victim than she was, and realized that if she could get him to take some responsibility for what he had done, he might have a chance in life. Working through the system, she has gotten him back in school and he has some chances in life. He now reports to her periodically on what's going on with him.

In other words, through this tragedy that life gave her, this woman was able to break through to a connection which has given meaning to her life and to the life of this child. After this story was told, the room full of lawyers and judges and ministers and social workers just sat in stunned silence.

Life is not one gift, but many. If we can be grateful for the injuries, it should be easy to be grateful for the joys. The losses and pains and harms are opportunities for us to grow in fullness. In my own case, I would not be as open to the world and to my fellow humans today if I had not gone through the losses of the last few years.

As Mary Oliver says, "doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?" This Thanksgiving, let us feel the givenness of life, the invaluable present of joys and blessings and sorrows and losses and triumphs and defeats and loves and hurts and interesting characters and blue skies and grasshoppers and grizzly bears. And tell me, just out of curiosity, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Amen.

Run, River, Run

Susan V. Hull

from Skirt, November 1996

We are what is given/and what is taken away – Wendell Berry

Norman Maclean wades into the swift silver of Big Blackfoot River, casting for memories with the same reverence that he reserves for trout. Planting his feet in the slowly deepening riverbed, Norman begins to hear the long story of his life cascading by – from his birth in Missoula, Montana where the river banks were the breasts on which he fed as a child, through a restive adolescent initiation in the roaring rapids, the still reflections of his first love, to the dark eddies of gambling and debt that pulled his brother under. Now all are gone home before him in that great race to the sea. "Eventually," Norman concludes from the timeless sibilant prayer of water on rock, "eventually all things merge into One, and a River runs through it."

There is a river that runs through us. It is Mystery, it is Life, some say God. It descends through my granite soul with the force of gravity and love, plunges through empty canyons, chisels out corridors with its wet hands and slowly, ever so, widens the cracks and crevices of my failures into pools where grace collects. The injury of the river is also its gift. Where I have been cut most deeply, so there life most deeply, most surely, flows.

I don't believe that the gifts of God come in the form of goodness, but in the face of Life itself. In danger's shadow as in dazzling light, in a disquieted heart as often as a still mind, in labor as in love. If we would receive the sacred, we must receive the river's flow, even as it injures, even as it takes away.

I thank God for my handicaps, said Helen Keller, unable to hear a babbling stream or see its glistening green or put it into praise. Yet she praises, I thank God for my handicps, for through them I have found myself, my work, my God.

That, to me, is thanksgiving. It's not about being glad for the good things that have happened to us – they are simply moments in the sun. Thanksgiving is standing still, with an injured and opened heart, and letting the River run freely through us. Each year at this time, I stop and cast into the water. I recount the story of the year past, of life given and taken away: our planet's staggering losses, our moments of forgiveness, our wonderment, our fulgent gains. I think of a friend's child swimming into the world on amniotic rivers, and I remember my grandmother's final crossing over to the other shore. I remember the intense hope of eyes brimming with the vows of marriage, and the loosening tears of those whose hope was broken. I think of my own love found, of friends lost.

We are what we are given and what is taken away, blessed by the name of the giver and taker... The confluence of all things returns to the Sea, the Source. The Gift unites with the Giver. Let the river run. The banks of my heart are wide with thanks.