Dear friends,

Since I did not preach this past Sunday for our joint service of seven UU congregations, I wanted to share an old Thanksgiving sermon from 2015.  I’ve been thinking about it a long lately, as it feels especially relevant during these times.  I hope you are all doing well and can have a Happy Thanksgiving in spite of everything.

Blessings,

Reverend Janet

 

Gratitude Anyway

Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

November 22, 2015

 

“Now light is less,” we sang in a hymn last Sunday.  “The walker trudges ankle deep in leaves…at dusk our slow breath thickens on the air.”

 

We approach the end of the year, the darkest time, when light is less, the days short, and life enters a more challenging phase.  It can be a time of sadness, of loss as the holidays force us to confront the absences of those no longer with us.

 

The national and international news is also hard to face.  The storm clouds of war continue to hover over us.  Terrorism has appeared once again in new and frightening ways.  We feel a loss of safety.  Our national conversation about racism has been full of anger and hatred for over a year.  Now we are embroiled in new debates over how to keep ourselves safe.  Some of the overheated political posturing and commentary has approached the kind of language heard in 1930’s and 1940’s Germany.  This language flies in the face of our values, the principles that this country was founded on.  The fear and resulting hatred triggered by the needs of refugees fleeing their war-torn countries is chilling and sobering.

 

Then, too, there are all the other difficult things that happen in our lives: illness and injury, financial setbacks.  There are days when it can be difficult to feel grateful.

 

As difficult as it may be, we cannot wait until everything is going well to practice gratitude.  We cannot wait until there is no war, no poverty, no injustice, and no terrorism.  In other words, we cannot wait until all is well, until we are content and safe and secure. In fact, gratitude can be an act of defiance, a conscious decision to accept what is taking place in our lives and in the world as they are, and to choose to say ‘thank you’ anyway.

 

The irony about gratitude is that sometimes we need to be able to summon it the most when we have the least reason for it.  Think for a moment about the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday as we know it today.  It was created by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the depths of the Civil War.  Unitarian Universalist minister Daniel Schatz noted that this was possibly the worst year in American history.  A half million people had been killed already during the course of the war – 15% of the population.  No one knew where this destruction of life and of the nation itself would lead.  Schatz writes,

 

“The real spiritual discipline of thanksgiving is not to ignore suffering, but to fully acknowledge it, work to alleviate it, and yet still give thanks. It is to find reason for gratitude even in pain or chaos. It is to look deeper into the fabric of our world and see blessings where we thought none could exist.”

 

Schatz continues, “True thanksgiving is born of hardship as much as of joy, for it is in hardship that we realize and appreciate the foundations of our lives—the community and spirit that keep us going, the smallest blessings now thrown into relief, the tiniest seeds of hope that unfold in us when we thought all hope to have fled. True thanksgiving looks at life in its fullness and finds reason for gratitude.”   (http://www.questformeaning.org/quest-article/the-deep-thanksgiving-of-our-souls/ )

 

President Abraham Lincoln understood this.  It is hard to imagine the depth of the pressure and the sorrow he confronted during those darkest days.  Yet in his proclamations he was able to give thanks for the harvests, and for the strength and fortitude of the American people in the midst of war and deprivation.  He asked all of America to give thanks anyway, to defy the loss and misery and fear of wartime.

 

Gratitude anyway.  Gratitude as defiance, as acknowledgement, as saying, “yes, I know this life is not all I hoped, all I wanted, but I can find a way to see goodness in it anyway.”  Gratitude anyway – rising up through fear, anger, loss, or hunger. 

 

Today we have our own opportunity to rise up, to counter the strident and angry voices, and as Abraham Lincoln urged us to, to offer our thanks for our country and for our religious freedom.  Today at 2:45 we will be ringing the church bell for 15 minutes, in honor of all the victims of terrorism, and in honor and gratitude for the religious freedom we enjoy as Americans.  I hope you will come to hear this and join me outside as witnesses for peace.  The bell-ringing will be followed, as Charles Nazarian shared with us earlier, by a concert of interfaith music celebrating the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Much like the Thanksgiving proclamation of 1863, this concert represents the rising of the human spirit, the openness of heart and mind, the gratitude we share for people of different beliefs and backgrounds coming together to create a better world.  I hope you will join in the joy and gratitude of today’s event, which flies in the face of the anger and vitriol swirling around our national conversation. 

 

With gratitude for the world even as it is, and with hope for a world made safer by our connections, in the name of Love,

 

Amen.