“Blessings… Remembered and Forgotten” – Thanksgiving Sunday

“Blessings… Remembered and Forgotten”

Thanksgiving Sunday, November 20, 2016 Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist

Reading – Garrison Keillor

…. Gratitude is where spiritual life begins. Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black t-shirt. Thanks for black and for other colors. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the wherewithal not to fix a half-pound cheeseburger right now and to eat a stalk of celery instead. Thank you for the wonderful son and the amazing little daughter and the smart sexy wife and the grandkids. Thank you that I haven't had alcohol in lo! these many months and thank you that it isn't a big struggle to do without, as I had so feared it might be. Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

I could go on and on and on. One should enumerate one's blessings and.… Begin every day with this exercise.

List your blessings and you will walk through those gates of thanksgiving and into the fields of joy. It is to break through the thin membrane of sourness and sullenness though we should be thankful for that too, it being the source of so much wit and humor – and to come into the light and enjoy our essential robustness and good health.

“Blessings… Remembered and Forgotten” Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister

This morning I begin with words of the poet Carroll Arnett of Cherokee descent:

As the sun rises high enough to warm the frost off the pine needles,

four prayers of thanksgiving for this fine clear day,

for this good brown earth, for all brothers and sisters, for the dark blood

that runs through me in a great circle back into this good brown earth. ("Early Song," Carroll Arnett)

I grew up with Cherokee history embedded in local culture in East Tennessee near the beginning of the Trail of Tears – The Trail of Tears being the Federal removal in the winter of 1838-1839 of the Cherokee people from their historic homes in North Carolina, East Tennessee, and Georgia. About 6000 Cherokees died on that sad journey to eastern Oklahoma.

As part of that history and my history, I attended Sequoyah Elementary School, named in honor of the Cherokee educator and inventor of his people’s alphabet.

As it turns out, my mother also attended a Sequoyah Elementary School; hers in Eastern Oklahoma, Tahlequah, the new capital of the Cherokee nation upon their forced march from their historic homelands.

My exposure to the Cherokee people was a romanticized history rightfully celebrating how innovative they were with their own alphabet and written language. It was also a white supremacist “appreciation” of people who no longer were present in any substantial way (except the enclave over the Smoky Mountains in Cherokee, North Carolina). Truth be told: I lived in an affluent section of the city called Sequoyah Hills; nearby there was also the fancy-schmancy Cherokee Country Club (to which my family did not belong, and I confess to a bit of childhood envy of friends who did).

My mother’s upbringing in Tahlequah, Oklahoma – the capital of the Cherokee Nation – was profoundly multi-cultural; at least bi-cultural, and I believe it contributed to her social justice and civil rights activities in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s – her total embrace of diversity and of equality for all.

Our national holiday of Thanksgiving is prickly, provocative, potentially powerful, and like most everything personal.

It is prickly because of the historic Native American genocide and expropriation of land across our nation… Where? Everywhere…. And disregard for Native American land (a sacred burial ground) has helped to inflame the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy with the Standing Rock Sioux.

Fittingly, in recent decades some from the Wampanoag and others have objected to the Thanksgiving Day celebrations in Plymouth. Having benefitted from the decimation of the native peoples and expropriation of most of the land, some descendants of white folks of Pilgrim stock up that way are distressed by these summons for truth-telling and for telling the larger story. Descendants of the native peoples are asking white folks to remember ALL their history and not just the sanitized version.

This morning I want to speak briefly about these matters of Thanksgiving Day, just a few of the other Thanksgivings that are helpful to me in my awareness, and the transcendent practice of giving thanks.

First, the main thing: The point of Thanksgiving as a holiday, quite apart from our New England traditions about it, is a transcendent one, and religiously, spiritually few things are so fundamental.

Give thanks. Give thanks. Give thanks.

One of my teachers in college via his writings was Abraham Heschel, rabbi, scholar, activist, and theologian. What is required of us? For him, it was, it is to live in awe and wonder in a way compatible with the mystery and grandeur of creation, which occurs in many ways, and first of all in expressing our gratitude . One colleague of mine, who died 20 years ago at age 44, Kit Howell noted (and I love the way he puts it), "Gratitude is like love. You don't have to feel it to know that it is one of the few things that keeps life from being stupid."

Gratitude, either spontaneously felt or as an intentional matter of spiritual reminder, helps keep life from being stupid.

As the 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank-you, it is enough."

Am I thankful enough? Are you thankful enough?

Are we thankful enough, for example, for this flawed, great democracy?

Do we have within us still the brazen, realistic, and still resilient faith of life's possibilities and give thanks the way Langston Hughes did?

With billowing sails the galleons came Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams. In little bands together, Heart reaching out to heart, Hand reaching out to hand, They began to build our land. Some were free hands Seeking a greater freedom, Some were indentured hands Hoping to find their freedom, Some were slave hands Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom. But the word was there always: FREEDOM.

In this flawed democracy, are we thankful enough? And those of us, especially, who have a decent roof over us, sufficient food, and a place we make as a home, are we thankful enough?

And those of us who seek to simplify our lives as we partake of American overabundance, are we thankful enough?

Or do we take it all for granted, or too much of it?

In these times of renewed exclusion, division, bigotry, and even hate, will we take our sacred places as witnesses and guardians of our cherished values?

An old Quaker prayer goes with me, “For all blessings known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we are truly grateful.”

Beyond gratitude itself, there are blessings often unknown, not remembered, forgotten that come to us, and among these are so many from the first peoples, their civilizations, and cultures.

Thanksgiving for so many things that we encounter daily:

Many come from the Iroquois, upstate in what we call New York… their form of government and their practices. Five nations with their own languages formed a confederation, and when was that? 1142, almost 900 years ago. A sixth nation joined the League in 1722.

It was a matrilineal society where women held the highest status and responsibilities, elected the chief, and were custodians of the symbols of power. Not our history.

Yet, historians trace various elements and traditions of our democracy to the Iroquois League and its influence upon many colonial leaders,

The Iroquois League, e.g., included a representative assembly, the provision for impeachment if removal from office were necessary, and the separation of civil and military divisions of national life. The word caucus does not come from Latin, but likely from the Algonquin people and suggested that there was at times a means of decision-making that proceeded through discussion, debate, and if possible consensus.

Furthermore, the Iroquois League Council, unlike British Parliament, provided for debate and discussion without interruptions of other speakers, or shouting, and a moment of silence afterwards during which the speaker could make any changes or additional comments. This latter practice is reflected in the Congressional privilege to “revise and extend" comments made on the House or Senate floor.

Of course, not all the Iroquois League's practices took hold. The practice of communal property rights – shared property – exists now only very narrowly. The deep communitarian spirit of Iroquois life has not fully entered our national ethos, although I believe we would do well to consider it more as we struggle towards economic democracy in our country. According also to the Hurons in the Great Lake areas, "Europeans lost their freedom in their incessant use of ‘thine’ and 'mine.'"(Indian Givers, Jack Weatherford, p. 123)

I do not wish to distort, romanticize, or falsely idealize Native Americans. Not all were democratic, not all enlightened in some higher sense. Yet for the most part, Native Americans did live in more egalitarian structures, in greater harmony with nature, and with greater sense of kinship to earth with gratitude for the gifts of life, for all blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten.

Other blessings from the first peoples of North America abound. Some examples:

Foods like turkey, cranberries, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, green beans, tomatoes, pumpkins. Do you have a taste for clams? Or snack food like popcorn? Or trail mix – that combination of nuts and dried fruit? Or do you sneak out and indulge in a box of Crackerjacks?

Give thanks to Native Americans. All of these are foods that they have added to the international menu. And beans! The so-called "Old World" eagerly adopted kidney beans, string beans, snap beans, common beans, butter beans, lima beans, navy beans, and pole beans.

Plus, peanuts, cassava, sunflowers, and corn.

Native Americans were also skilled kitchen/fireside chemists, who developed sophisticated techniques to extract vanilla from its beans and produced maple syrup and sugar from sap using processes unlike any others in the "Old World."

Then there are chilies, bell peppers, and hot peppers that have been thoroughly incorporated into cuisine around the world.

Sassafras, tapioca, succotash, forty-seven types of berries including blueberry, and let's not forget avocados!

Native Americans gave the world three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation!

And saving the best for last: chocolate! Isn't that a blessing?

There are many other contributions that I do not have sufficient time to cover in detail as I rush along. But I do want to note that most of our roads follow the paths established by Native Americans, including many of our interstate highways.

What else? Rubber, plus 109 dyes with the yellow color of oleomargarine that remains most often the same dye used by Native Americans.

Quinine was an early treatment for malaria…. Tobacco and American cotton were two natural products used by Native Americans with quite different results around the world.

Native Americans had extensive knowledge of healing salves, fever reducers, laxatives, muscle relaxants, goiter medicine, and one of the world's most widely used skin ointments, petroleum jelly.

Maybe some of these blessings will be remembered if/when you sit down for a Thanksgiving meal later this week.

And, what kind of thanksgiving story does your life tell when you listen? Blessings remembered, or forgotten and now recaptured?

When you sit down to eat on Thanksgiving alone or with family or with friends, will you be bold enough to offer thanks? Humble enough? What kind of thanksgiving story do you wish to tell in conversations with Life, the universe, God, a friend, a partner, family?

One of the Thanksgiving stories I have collected comes from Malcolm X, who as an adult offered resistance to white supremacy and who at his life's end offered struggle, vision, provocation, and reconciliation. From childhood, he recalls:

One thing in particular that I remember made me feel grateful to my mother was that one day I went and asked her for my own garden, and she did let me have my own little plot. I loved it and took care of it well. I loved especially to grow snow peas. I was proud when we had them on our table. I would pull out the grass in my garden when the first little blades came up. I would patrol the rows on my hands and knees for any worms and bugs, and I would kill and bury them. And sometimes when I had everything straight and clean for my things to grow, I would lie down on my back between the two rows, and I would gaze up in the blue sky at the clouds moving and think all kinds of things.

Am I thankful enough? Are you thankful enough?

To be sure, we can prefer bitterness over what we have received in life. We can harden our hearts to beauty. We can do that and so much more to diminish our souls. You can do that, and some of us do.

Or we can be humble enough and bold enough to offer gratitude, to give thanks, to God, if God is with you, to give thanks, perchance at least to Life, to Creation, to one another.

Give thanks.... again and again and again....

The political and personal combine in words of Audre Lorde: she was a black feminist, writer, activist, lesbian who eloquently spoke truth to power with provocation and wisdom. "Can anyone here," she wrote, "still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?" (Sister Outsider, p. 140)

Again, the old Quaker prayer, which I love, which speaks to me, which I have used many a time in worship, and it offers the theme this morning.

"For all blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we are truly grateful."

The assumption is that we live with many blessings – many unearned gifts – the gift of Life for example.

The assumption of that prayer is that some of them are known to us, but many remain unknown. The sacrifices, for example, that past generations of your family may have made for your parents or grandparents may be well known, but so much inevitably can never be known.

The assumption is that some of those gifts given us we do remember, honor, and celebrate, but many others we may forget – small kindnesses, ordinary moments.

o Someone encouraged you at the right moment. o The sun setting – or rising – caught your eye and soul in a way that melted your heart. o You figured something out that had been troubling you, and relief saturated you. o A loved one gave, gives you a wink and a hug … just because….

Can I convince you with another example? Of course not! I probably cannot convince you of much of anything. But there are reminders, and this incident helps my perspective in sour moments.

Jerry Jones lives in Washington, D.C., often lives on the streets and stands in line to get food from pantries. He collects aluminum cans for income, and one morning met up with a friend, Dan, who for a while helped at the food pantry, and was then in a graduate program in social work.

With Dan’s greeting, Jerry responded, “Hello, I'm fine.” “How are you?" Jerry asked his friend. And Dan continued saying, "I'm not doing well at all. I didn't even want to get out of bed this morning..." “Wait a minute," Jerry interrupted resting on his shopping cart. "You woke up this morning, right?" “Yeah." You're out walkin' around, right?" “Yeah." “And I bet you got [enough to eat,] right?" “Yeah." ‘You're all right then," declared Jerry. He took his aluminum cans and moved on.

There but for grace… go you or I….

At times, if not often, we too may easily forget ordinary kindnesses, ordinary miracles of the day and night and seasons, ordinary insights and inspirations, and daily routines, and blessings.

Counting your blessings is not complicated as a healing, spiritual discipline.

Blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten – for these let us give praise and thanks, and especially so at the holiday of Thanksgiving.

As you celebrate Thanksgiving this week, with family, friends or alone, I do hope you will think of some of these blessings, perhaps now better known and more fully remembered.

Gratitude is the secret that makes all things new.