"With Grateful Hearts - a Thanksgiving Sermon "

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
November 16, 2003

I wonder, for how many of us, the word "Thanksgiving" conjures up a feeling of fullness. I'm sure at least some of you know what I mean: that dreadfully uncomfortable, sleepy-headed, belly-groaning, oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-I-ate-so-much feeling. For many years in my family of origin, overeating and napping were Thanksgiving's chief competitive sports. Whoever groaned away from the table most loudly and waddled over to the sofa most quickly won.

One of my favorite images from this time period is a photograph someone took of my sisters and me, all three of us teenagers, lined up in a row at the dining room table. We have our knives in our right hands and our forks in our left, and our teeth are bared in lustful smiles as we regard the huge turkey and piled-high platters of food in front of us. It's the "before" picture: you can tell, because our plates are empty and we look lively. After the feast, you see, nobody ever had the ambition or energy to take another photo.

For many years I've wondered in a guilty sort of way about the American custom of feasting on Thanksgiving. Isn't overeating a strange way to celebrate gratitude? Sharing food is, of course a tangible symbol of love and caring, but there's more to Thanksgiving than that. The practice of sharing special foods in abundance, of feasting on holy days, is an ancient tradition, one that honors the sacredness of the earth and our reliance upon it.

But too often, in our modern-day celebrations of Thanksgiving, that link to the sacred is missing. We feast simply because we can, because it's expected; not with much intention to honor the holy or acknowledge the sacred.

So what, exactly, are we celebrating when we celebrate Thanksgiving?

The story of the first Thanksgiving, which took place in 1621 among the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts Bay, is familiar to us. The Pilgrims had a very difficult first year in the "New World," for nearly half of their numbers died. At the end of that year, the Pilgrims' Governor, John Bradford, declared three days of rest as a time set aside to enjoy the fruits of the harvest. The Pilgrims had much to be thankful for: they were grateful for their survival, and grateful to their God that they were free to worship in their own way. But taking time to celebrate didn't mean that they were safe, settled and established, nor that their future was assured in any way. They faced severe hardships, and they knew it. But even in the midst of difficulty and uncertainty, they responded to a call to pause, to reflect, and give thanks.

The Pilgrims declared another day of thanksgiving two years later - but there's no evidence after these two that such a day was regularly observed. During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress set several Thanksgiving Days for the people to rejoice in their homes and churches for victories won. In 1778, George Washington proclaimed a day on which to give thanks for treaties signed with France, and in 1789, he declared a day of thanksgiving at the end of November to honor the adoption of the Constitution.

But Thanksgiving as we know it today was not established until Civil War times, when Abraham Lincoln made a presidential proclamation about it after the Battle of Gettysburg. I'd like to share part of that proclamation with you.

Lincoln wrote, "It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God;. . . "We know that by his divine law, nations like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

"But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelt in the heavens."

"We have forgotten God," says Lincoln. His proclamation names the last Thursday of November a day of Thanksgiving and praise to "our beneficent Father who dwelt in the heavens." It's hard for those of us who are not theistic by nature not to be stopped by Lincoln's choice of words, until we remember that he was, by his own repeated admission, not an adherent of any Christian faith. Indeed, like the early Unitarians, while he believed that there was some form of providence at work in the universe, he was unable to believe in a personal God or in Jesus as his savior. But he did believe that we are called to lives of integrity by an authority higher than that of humanity.

In that way, Lincoln's proclamation answers a question asked by a friend of mine when I told her I was writing about gratitude. She asked, "Doesn't gratitude imply being grateful to someone?" According to Lincoln, the answer is yes. We are not only to be grateful for the blessings in our lives, but he admonishes us to be grateful to God. As Unitarian Universalists, we might broaden the term "God" to include the Spirit of Life, the Goddess, the Universe. Or we might reject the god-idea entirely. But no matter what we do around the issue of God or not-god, we need to remember Lincoln's point.

We need to remember, because Lincoln is directing us to something more important than figuring out to whom we ought to be grateful. He is reminding of the peril of assuming that we prosper because of some special virtue we have, or because we've worked harder than someone else. He offers us gratitude as a corrective for our natural American egotism.

Lincoln encourages us to be humble, to leave room for grace, for mystery. The human will, he asserts, is important, but it is not the only or the most important part of the equation. Indeed, we must remember that the fortunate accident of our being born was indeed chance, not a result of our own special merit or deservingness.

When we celebrate Thanksgiving, then, we slip sideways out of our normal, busy lives, out of the working world of ego, achievements and striving. We step over a threshold into sacred time, into mystery. When we prepare our Thanksgiving feast, we re-enact a ritual that far predates the Pilgrims. We make room for grace, for the beyond-our-knowing side of life, as we take time to rejoice, to break bread with friends, loved ones, or companionable strangers. We make room for mystery by reflecting on our fullness - and I don't mean the state of our bellies, but rather, the state of our souls.

Fullness of soul. That's what I believe Thanksgiving is really all about. About feeling full, content, blessed - right here, right now, without needing to change anything. Some of us know how this feels - we feel it often, that cup-running-over sensation that life is just so very good.

I felt this way very recently - standing here in this pulpit only two weeks ago at the Installation service. I felt blessed be here, blessed to have the opportunity to serve such a warm and gracious congregation, blessed by the presence of my family with us, blessed by the music and words and the many minds and hands and hearts that created the Installation. My gratitude knew no bounds.

But I haven't always responded this way to such events. Like many of us, most of the time I tend to absorb the good in my life without reflection, almost as if it were owed me.

And there have been many times when I have not felt very full, when, indeed, I have felt empty, used-up, and put-upon by the whole Universe. One of my friends says that when he was a child, whenever things were looking bad for him or his family, his mother used to encourage him to count his blessings. My mother would give her version of the count your blessings speech, too - mostly when I was sulky or petulant. It didn't make any sense to me then, it just made me feel guilty for being unhappy.

But cliché as it may seem, counting my blessings does make sense to me now. It makes sense because gratitude is not something that necessarily comes naturally. It takes practice.

Gratitude takes practice because we inhabit a culture where millions of advertising dollars a day go into making us feel that who we are and what we have is not good enough. Gratitude takes practice, because like the Pilgrims, life does not always treat us gently. Sometimes we find ourselves weathering one storm after another, facing one failure after another, until we are left with the feeling that there is very little to be grateful for.

Practicing gratitude, ironically, is often the one thing that can lift us out of that place of depletion and despair. Try it sometime when you are feeling desperately bad - try thinking of even just one good thing in your life - perhaps even something relatively trivial. I cannot tell you how many times over the past eighteen years that my gratitude for my little old cat has rescued me from the pit of despair, and helped me begin to shift my thinking from all that I lacked to a more realistic and hopeful place.

That's the magic of practicing gratitude - that shift in awareness from how bad things are to a place where we can gain a toehold to lift ourselves out of the pit. I'm not saying that this shift is easy, or instant. It requires that we take the time - over and over -- to pause, to open our eyes, and to notice what is good. But with patience and practice, we become more open and more aware; and our lives fill more with blessings than curses.

Stephen J. Foster, a Quaker who has written a number of books on spiritual disciplines suggests this: "… (we must) Develop a habit of giving thanks for the simple gifts that come our way day by day. Carolynn and I have just returned from feeding some geese that now and then visit a small pond behind our house. That is something to be grateful for. I am glad for the cooler air today… And for the marvelously symmetrical white fir outside my study window, I give thanks. You get the idea - food, home, clothes, life itself - for all these and more we practice gratitude. Try to live one entire day in utter thanksgiving. Balance every complaint with ten gratitudes, every criticism with ten compliments…"

Anne Sexton talks about this in the poem I read earlier - saying: There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning,…

So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.

M.S. Merwin reminds us about it, too, in the poem "Thank you," though he also reminds us of the despair and desolation in our world.

When we practice gratitude, it is as though we are taking a gentle chisel to the rough stone of our hearts. We begin by chipping out a small, rough cup - perhaps big enough only for a thimbleful of love - but with each gratitude felt and expressed, we hollow out more and end with smooth, rounded vessels that might overflow with feeling. With each occasion of gratitude, our hearts become more open to receive life's blessings and joys, and to pass them on to others.

Because, truly, that's the heart of the matter. Gratitude inspires us to connect with one another. It can lead us into acts of generosity and compassion and kindness. Practicing gratitude surely makes us feel better in ourselves and about ourselves, but the intention of such a practice is to move us out from ourselves, into community and communion with others. Its aim is to remind us that whether or not we believe in any kind of God or higher-than-human authority or deeper mystery, we all are connected, interdependently, with one another and all of life. We are responsible for one another.

And so remembering the Pilgrims, who took the time to practice giving thanks, even though their lives were precarious; remembering Abraham Lincoln, who invited our nation to practice giving thanks even when war raged, dividing brother from brother, let us practice gratitude this season. Let us call ourselves into awareness of all the blessings around us, and pause whenever we can to open ourselves to the power of gratitude.

Thus may our hearts fill to running over. Thus may we give from the joy of our fullness to one another, and to all those others who have need of us.

Amen.