Giving Thanks for the Pizzazz ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
November 21, 2021
Yesterday afternoon the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation hosted a symposium on refugees and immigration right here in our sanctuary. There was so much information shared, so much wisdom and experience offered to those of us who don’t know what it is like to land in a new country, a new culture, and have to learn how to navigate it. But one piece of information really stood out for me in all the presentations, and that is that here in Gloucester, at Wellspring House, a local social services organization, the staff in 2021 has been serving people from 16 countries. Among them, these clients speak six different languages.
Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.
This is a week when it feels so natural to talk about bounty, about abundance in our lives. So often, since we name our holiday of Thanksgiving as having its origins in a harvest festival, it’s easy for us to think mostly about the great abundance of food in the stores, the number of dishes at our tables, the calorie intake. But there is bounty to celebrate every day, in abundant ways, just by looking around at all the diversity surrounding us, diversity of people, and plants, and landscapes, and taking it all in.
This is also a week when we confront the great differences, the diversity, among humans. We have been looking carefully at who is our neighbor, who is living among us. It has been a week of important conversations. At a meeting this past Tuesday, we learned about the needs of Afghan refugees, some of whom will hopefully be coming soon to Cape Ann. Yesterday, we heard the experiences of refugees and immigrants who shared their life stories; people from the Dominican Republic, from Haiti, and from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yesterday was also the Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual day when we observe and acknowledge the great violence caused by transphobia, and the loss of life that seems to grow worse each year.
Too often we marginalize those who are different, those who are fluent in other languages, those who take great risks so that their outsides can match their insides, the risk-takers who leave behind country and family and all they know to come to a country that does not always welcome them.
Today is a day when we celebrate abundance, but when we also must acknowledge all the complexity of our feelings toward each other, and our fear of those who we perceive as different.
We live on a fertile, life-sustaining planet. Many of us take immense joy in discovering the vast range of species who share this Earth with us. Annie Dillard, the author of the passage Pat read a few minutes ago, called it “the extravagant landscape of the world”. This landscape is given, she wrote, “given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 148.)
“The creator loves pizzazz,” wrote Annie Dillard. And so it seems, if you walk through our world with your eyes and your ears and your heart open, to hear the variety of sounds and see all the colors and shapes, the variety of people, and languages, and cultures. Life forms emerged and evolved with extravagance, with joy, out of a creating force that some of us call Love.
But so often we forget to give thanks for this. We can walk through our days scarcely noticing: not noticing how the clouds dissipate and reform, how many colors we can see in the ocean water, how many different pollinators are buzzing amid the flowers, how many shades of green we can count when we look at a distant hillside. How can we be grateful if we do not notice?
We can forget to notice. And we can also forget to celebrate all the differences among our fellow humans. For some reason, these differences can too often be threatening. And how can we be grateful if we are afraid of our differences?
I learned the name of a new language yesterday. It’s called Kinyarwanda, and it’s spoken by some nine or ten million people in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. And it’s spoken by a family here in Gloucester. I could marvel at the fact that there are languages spoken by millions that I have never heard of. But in fact, it turns out that there are some six or seven thousand different languages spoken in the world. How much richer we are for having such diversity. From that starting point, imagine the cultures existing alongside all those languages. The variety of food. The clothing and jewelry, the songs and dances.
Annie Dillard thinks of this diversity as texture. “What do I make of all this texture?” she asks. “What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.” (Ibid., p. 140-1.)
Imagine the world without this texture; both the texture of landscape and of culture. It would be simpler, certainly. There would be less to learn, less to challenge us. But we humans are meant to strive, to respond to callings, to challenges. Here in the 21st century we are challenged and stimulated by the level of connections across cultures, time zones, and continents made possible by travel and by technology. We are challenged by the growing number of people who are not just like us, who are willing to share their stories, to insist that we see and hear them; all the people with the courage to no longer hide in shadows, in closets, in bodies that do not express who they really are. How do we respond? Do we celebrate and enjoy the pizzazz, or do we react in fear and turn away?
Ironically, because of our human diversity, we do both. We sometimes turn away and we sometimes celebrate. It’s easier to celebrate the more alike we find ourselves. But too often, we turn away, and reject and marginalize. “Speak English!” some people might yell at someone in the grocery store. Some object to seeing women wearing hijab – head scarves, or men wearing Sikh turbans. But how much less texture there would be without those cultural differences. Imagine the sameness, the conformity. How boring it would be.
Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.
We often claim to be a nation of immigrants, but we are not, not really. We are a nation of settlers, who first laid claim to all the land, and then gave themselves permission to decide who could come in, and who should stay out. We have seldom welcomed others with open arms, and have repeatedly passed laws trying to limit others from coming. As though we did not have enough for everyone who asked to share our bounty, as though we could not see that others could lend their strength and courage, their curiosity and intelligence, to join us in building a greater and stronger country.
But people come anyway. One speaker yesterday at the symposium told us that they come for the possibilities. People are willing to leave so much behind, in order to have possibilities.
In her novel Behold the Dreamers, author Imbolo Mbue tells the story of a family of immigrants from Cameroon, as they fight to find a foothold in New York City. In a job interview, the husband of the family explains to his prospective employer why they are here:
“Everyone wants to come to America, sir. Everyone. To be in this country, sir. To live in this country. Ah! It’s the greatest thing in the world, Mr. Edwards…Because …because in my country, sir,” Jende said …for you to become somebody, you have to be born somebody first. You do not come from a family with a name, forget it. That is just how it is, sir. Someone like me, what can I ever become in a country like Cameroon? I came from nothing. No name. No money, my father is a poor man. Cameroon has nothing-”
Despite everything, the United States still offers hope. And the people come, adding their color, their culture, their myriad languages, and strengthening us with their courage, their resolve, their pursuit of their dreams.
So let us give thanks for a bounty of people. Let us notice the differences, and respond with compassion and curiosity. Let us celebrate that we live in a part of the world where people, no matter the hurdles we try to place in their paths, try to come anyway. They try to succeed, to stay, and in doing so, lend their own textures to the fabric that is our culture.
This Thanksgiving, may we celebrate, and may we give thanks, for the bounty, and the pizzazz.
Amen.
