Thanksgiving Reflection

A homily given by Rev. Tricia Brennan

Westminster Unitarian Church 

November 21, 2010

 

I’d like to start today by telling you 2 short stories.

 

Barbara Merritt,  a UU minister from Worcester,

tells of being in India at a session with her spiritual teacher

and hearing another student ask her teacher this question  

“What is the worst karma a person

can undergo here on earth?

What is the greatest difficulty?

The harshest circumstances?”  

 

What do you think the answer might be?

To be born in extreme poverty,

as is one sixth of the world’s population?

To be born into a loveless family?

To have an incapacitating illness?

 

According to Barbara’s teacher it was none of these things.

 “The worst karma”, he answered,  “is to be ungrateful.

If you suffer from ingratitude

then it won’t matter what blessings and goodness

are in your life, you won’t be capable of receiving it.

In contrast, if you are grateful then

even in the most challenging of circumstances,

you will be able to recognize the many gifts

that you are receiving.”

 

The teacher’s answer reminds me of the story of a man

who would come in every day to a restaurant

that served a small loaf of bread with its meals.

Shortly after sitting down, he would ask for more bread

to be served with his meal.

After a few days of this,

the waitress got tired of running back and forth,

so she put two loaves of bread in front of him.

Much to her surprise, he still finished them in record time

and asked for more.

 

She then gave him two baskets with four loaves

when he came in next time-

only to have him eventually demand more bread.

Finally, she had it with him, so she talked to the baker

prior to his next visit.

The baker make a large loaf of bread four feet in diameter.

She thought to herself, “This will shut him up!”

When he came in and was seated,

she went back to the kitchen for the bread.

Struggling as she carried it to the table

but still smirking all the while she did it,

she dropped it on the table in front of him.

He looked at it, paused, looked up and said in a whiny voice,
“Oh, so we’re back to one piece of bread again, eh?”

 

More and more I think that a spiritual life

begins with being receptive.

And being receptive includes noticing all that is given to us.

 Meister Eckhart said that if you only say one prayer

in your whole life, let that prayer be thank you.

A real thank you, one that comes from the heart,

means that you have let in the love

that is sent your way.

 

Gratitude enlarges us-

makes us bigger, more connected to others-

to our past, and to our possibilities.

 

Gratefulness is a generative thing,

it moves us up and out,

gets us to do things we didn’t think we could.

And then we grow some more.

 

When I was a girl I swam on a girls swim team,

3 nights a week at the local YMCA. I had a wonderful coach. Coach Larrabee. I still remember the hearty welcome he gave me, the first day I showed up, a skinny 8year old who didn’t know many of the other kids.

 

Four years later I was ready to stop swimming and try another sport.

But I couldn’t just quit and not show up

when the new season started.

I had to tell him personally, I thought,

and I wanted to thank him for being so great to me.

 

But since my decision came in the summer off-season,

 that meant I would have to call him on the phone-

and this was back in the time when kids

didn’t call grown-ups on the phone, and we didn’t have the email option.

So I was scared about calling him,

and I kept putting it off and it weighted on me.

Finally one night when I was watching TV with my family

I suddenly just bolted up, making myself make the phone call.

Coach Larrabee answered,

I told him my news and said thanks.

It was a blissfully short phone call.

 “Why thank you for letting me know, Tricia,” he said.

I went back to my TV show- whew, that was over.

Coach Larrabee later told my parents that my call meant a lot and that he didn’t get many expressions of gratitude like that.         

I tell the story now as an example

of how gratitude isn’t just a fluffy thing,

a polite thing- gratitude can really change us,

help is grow and make us brave.

That night when I called my coach I not only did something

I was nervous about, I  also learned

that when I was nervous about something

the best thing I could do was not avoid it but just do it-

and that has stayed with me over the years.

 

If gratitude enlarges us, then its opposite is smallness.

Theologian Sr. Joan Chittister writes that ….

“the chief barrier to gratitude,

 lies in a stubborn refusal to grow beyond the limits of our lives.

If we were poor, or rejected, or unsuccessful yesterday,

we define ourselves as unable to be anything

but poor and outcast and a failure today.

We refuse to claim the power within us.

And we blame the rest of the world for the prisons

in which we place ourselves. “

 

That’s not really how we want to live, deep down.

Deep down we want to live large and generous lives, loving and brave lives.

And deep down is where the real gratitude lives-

not the polite kind, but the powerful kind.

 

Leonard Bernstein has that wonderful piece

with the lyrics

“ God loves the simple things,

for God is the simplest thing of all.”

In the end, gratitude is simple too.

 

For those for whom God is a unifying core,

to live in gratitude is simply to live in the spirit of God,

a God who gives all and a gratitude that acknowledges that gift.

For all of us- regardless of what we think or believe or don’t about God,

the world offers itself to our imagination,

as the poet wrote,

calling like the wild geese, over and over,

announcing ourselves in the family of things.

 

Simply put we do belong to this world,

it is here that we live and move and have our beings.

We and the world are in constant dialogue,

giving and taking air, seeing and being seen,

birthed into human shape

and dissolved back into the earth

when we die.

The world is our once and future home and here we belong,

here hopefully we know ourselves as belonging.

May this felt sense of the garden of earth as our home

gives rise to unceasing gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.