Sermon:

Generosity and Gratitude

Rali M. Weaver

First Church and Parish, Dedham

I was in the bank on Friday and as I was leaving the teller said to me “just 39 shopping days left until Christmas”. And that left me feeling that even though Thanksgiving is just three days away the world is already tumbling headlong into the gift-giving season. I don’t want it to. So I hope you will slow down with me this morning and take a bit of time to reflect. Breathe in this moment in gratitude.

I must admit this has been a tough year. There seem to be a lot more things to complain about than to give thanks for. I could make a laundry list of the problems that seem to black out the beauty in the world and my list of things to be thankful for has felt like it shrunk. Not to mention that the state of the world sometimes leaves me so disgruntled I don’t feel like saying thank you to anybody. What’s the point? Will my giving thanks feed the hungry? Will my giving thanks cure the world of cancer? Will my giving thanks help the homeless problem or bring world peace? Probably not. Still there must be some good reason to say thank you or Thanksgiving would not be a national holiday. There must be some good reason to say thank you or my mother would not have spent so much time drilling the habit into my head.

While I generally think of the first Thanksgiving as a merry time when the 50 settlers hosted 90 Wampanoag (wam pa NO ag) for a three-day feast celebrating the harvest, the real story is much sadder. As our History books have told us, when the first pilgrims landed in Plymouth Mass late in 1620 they were not able to grow enough grain to sustain them through the winter. The winter was hard and nearly half of the travelers to this new land died. And the next spring Tisquantum (otherwise known as Squanto) like any good gardener and any good neighbor, taught the new settlers how to plant and gave them seeds of corn and wheat and barley that would grow easily in the new soil. So when that harvest came in, Governor William Bradford declared a day of thanksgiving. And the first festival of Thanksgiving became a special day not only to give thanks for the great harvest, and not only to thank the Wampanoag (wam pa NO ag) without whom the food wouldn’t have been possible, but it was also a celebration set aside to boost the morale of the surviving settlers.

And now people across this land gather with family and friends to share a meal, often including a turkey, and stop if only briefly between football games and parades, to say thanks for what we have been given.

American’s aren’t the only people to have a festival giving thanks for the harvest. Hindu’s have Onam. The Ashanti tribe in West Africa celebrates the festival of Yams. The Chinese have the Harvest Moon festival which takes place on the 15^th day of the 8^th moon of the lunar calendar, when the ancient Chinese felt the moon was fullest. And Jewish families have long since celebrated Sukkot (Sukkah) the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Ingathering, paying tribute to the bountiful earth.

I mention all this to keep us mindful that this festival of giving thanks is much older than our country. For longer than America has been settled, people throughout the world have given thanks for food, and for family and for friends.

I must confess that although this year I am escaping to the west for a vacation that will include being as far away from cooking turkey as possible—my days before thanksgiving have usually been filled with shopping lists, trips to the grocery store and endless preparation. I peel and chop and roast and bake and prepare, and prepare, and prepare. By the time I finally sit at the table on Thanksgiving Day I am usually too tired to enjoy the meal. I am happy when people say thank you but when I am responsible for preparing the feast I often don’t think about what is on my plate or what I am putting in my body.

In contrast, when I am not so busy preparing a meal I can be much more mindful. For instance in making a salad for lunch on Friday I found as I washed the lettuce and cut the onion and carrots and cabbage I felt awe at their crispness and texture. The colors looked wonderful in the salad and I felt gratitude for the beauty of the salad I was able to create with these fresh and vibrant vegetables. Romaine Lettuce, spinach, a ripe avocado, a red onion, grape tomatoes, broccoli and carrots and purple cabbage, I thought about each ingredient as I washed and cut and placed them in a bowl.

I felt thankful to the worker who planted the lettuce and the spinach and the onion and the tomatoes and the broccoli and the cabbage and the avocado trees. I was thankful to the farmer who tended the plants and cared for the tree. I felt gratitude for the person who harvested the vegetables. And I felt thankful for the person who put these vegetables I was cutting up for my salad on the truck. I felt gratitude to the driver who brought these vegetables to the store and thankful for the produce manager and the cashier at the store that worked so that I could prepare this salad fresh. As I prepared my salad and thought about each vegetable and each person, I began to develop a picture of all of the effort that went into this one salad I was creating. As I meditated on each ingredient I began to get a picture of the interdependent web of all creation that made my salad possible.

The medieval Christian Mystic, Meister Eckhart suggested that if we say only one prayer in our lifetime “thank you” would suffice. I know that Meister Eckhart was suggesting that we say “thank you” to the creator god, but as I was preparing my salad I sent my “thank you” to the interdependent web of all existence. I sent my “thank you” to the people that helped the salad ingredients to grow but also the mysterious creative life force that makes seeds sprout at all. As I gave out this cry of thanks my heart felt easy and free. As I gave out this thanks to no one but myself I felt good about the salad I was making. This giving of thanks became a gift I was offering the universe, as it also became a gift for me. It is sort of hard to explain but making that salad in my kitchen to eat all alone in my house when I might have felt lonely, I felt gladness, grateful at the beauty of the produce and my good fortune to have it to eat. And all of this gratitude seemed to turn to gladness.

I wish I could think of a better way to illustrate Rilke’s poem this morning.

Praise is the whole thing. Perhaps those words are enough To Praise is the Whole thing. In these dispirited times I believe it is essential that we do not remain dispirited too long. I believe that cultivating a rich bounty of generosity and gratitude is the key. This bounty has nothing to do with things. It is a bounty of the spirit. Cultivating a generous nature so that others may benefit from the fruits takes great effort. But to praise is the whole thing.

I believe our hearts are meant to soar out of the confines of our limited truths and out of the confines of our constricting disappointments. We have all experienced times in our lives when we feel alone, or the world seems unfair but I challenge you to think of Rilke’s poem. Remember that praise is the whole thing. Imagine yourself as the person “that dies, presses out for others a wine that is fresh forever.” Perhaps it is our ego, or our expectations that must die so that we can be free to offer love to everyone we meet. But when we can put aside our own sad disappointments, our hurry and distractions, what a gift of praise we can offer to every heart including our own.

This Thanksgiving you may not feel grateful for the dirty dishes but you might be able to cultivate gratitude for the people who dirtied them or the colorful suds the soap creates or for how it feels when the dishes are clean and put away. Gratitude can become a spiritual exercise where we collect the memories of things that give life beauty. The ice cream on a hot day, the phone call you received when you thought nobody cared, the song on the radio that you love, the smile of the person you pass every day on the way to work, the puffy pink clouds at sunset. We are surrounded by difficulties and hardship and sorrow but we are equally surrounded by a myriad of things to be thankful for. Noticing what we love can become a mental habit.

I am encouraging us all to participate in a celebration of gratitude by joining in a communion of the bread and cider. This communion is a ritual of celebrating the harvest of our lives and the life we live together. As we join in this communion together I suggest we aspire to cultivate thanksgiving in our hearts and may this time together help us to open our hearts ever more widely and in gratitude and in so doing let’s make this world a more loving place.