First Parish Unitarian UniversalistLook at the View —
A Sermon for Thanksgiving
Rev. Cricket Potter
First Parish Unitarian Universalist – Canton
November 22, 2009
Thanksgiving – giving thanks, naming our blessings and all that we are grateful for.
We gather every year in our churches and around our dinner tables to honor this tradition with friends and family.
Yet, it is more that just a tradition – secular or otherwise.
Giving thanks and offering our gratitude is a profound spiritual discipline.
It is, after all, at the core of all the world’s religions – this naming and celebrating the true gift that life and so much of what we have is.
As one of my favorite spiritual writers, Brother David Steindl-Rast, once wrote:
We can drop all the big, cumbersome terms (about spirituality and finding meaning in life). Gratefulness says it all….Can the spiritual life be that simple? Yes, what we secretly hoped for is true: it is all that simple. (from Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer)
Deceivingly simple, he quickly adds, and I would say ditto to that.
Think about it.
How often do you stop and reflect upon the blessings both large and small in your life?
How often do you really take in all that is your life and, even amidst the hardships, say thank you?
I learned about the power of gratitude after a life-changing event that made me come face-to-face with both my own mortality and subsequently the sheer gift that life is.
Ten years ago, I was riding my horse in a jumping competition, and we had a very serious accident that left me with three fractured vertebra – I was lucky it wasn’t worse - and the shock of how everything in your life can change in an instant.
At first, I was devastated with the reality of it all.
I was alive, yes, and my doctors said I would recover mostly, but there was so much unknown and so much work ahead to recover.
I was fitted with a hard plastic brace that went around my mid-section and pretty much locked me in place.
And then after several days in the hospital, I was sent home to rest and recuperate over what I assumed would be a painfully long spring and summer.
For weeks I was confined largely to my house – my bed and my sofa – with short walks outside to loosen up my stiff body and short rides in the car to get to the doctor for a check-up or just to have a change of scenery.
I was reliant upon family and friends to help care for me, keep me company, and keep my spirits up.
And they did all of that in spades.
Even so, the first week was brutal.
I hurt terribly.
I couldn’t sleep because of the pain.
I hated the fact that so many people had to take time out of their busy lives to help me.
I missed my work as a hospital chaplain and the sense of purpose and meaning it gave me.
Quite simply, I was discouraged, worried, and hardly even thankful for the very fact that I was at least alive and not injured in a worse way.
But then one morning, I remember lying on the sofa, looking out the big picture window to my back yard, and I began to notice all the birds at my bird feeders.
The chatty goldfinches and chickadees, the demure titmice and downy woodpeckers, the noisy pair of house wrens and the extended family of cooing mourning doves, the curious nuthatches always hopping about upside down, the one pushy flicker, the bright red cardinal with his more subtly colored mate, and even the pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks who snuck in when all was quiet.
What abundance and joy right in front of me!
Mind you, the birds and the feeders had been there for years – I love birds.
However, they were largely something I had come to take for granted over time.
I tended to notice the birds in passing as I looked out the kitchen window while washing dishes or as I sat at the dining table with my morning cup of tea.
In my busyness, I had forgotten how incredible this view was and how lucky I was to have all these birds to watch right in my back yard.
My new-found awareness of this one view then helped me to appreciate other views and moments both alone and with friends or family such that I came to relish just about every day and feel a sense of abundance I hadn’t felt in a long time.
My dog nestled in my lap as I read on the sofa, the feel of the sunshine on my skin when I went outside to enjoy a short walk, the peonies absolutely bursting to life in my backyard, a phone call with an old friend now living in California and promises of a long-overdue visit, the many gestures of love and care offered from the people in my life.
I was alive and I had so much to be thankful for!
How ironic that during a time when I was supposedly limited by my injury, mostly cooped up in my house, and facing the uncertainty of how my recovery would go, life felt most precious and rewarding to me.
I am reminded of a story that the columnist Anna Quindlen shares in a commencement speech she gave at Villanova University.
Like all commencement speakers, Quindlen is trying to impart some nugget of wisdom on all the eager, shiny-faced grads.
Yet, she admits right up front that she doesn’t have any fancy degrees and that she’s not qualified to talk about fancy things like ethics or philosophy.
What she can talk about, she says, noting her experience as a mother, daughter, wife, and novelist is real life and what makes for a real life.
She immediately quips,
“Don’t ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year, ‘If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.’”
She goes on to talk about how precious the small moments in life are and how the glass is never half empty,
In fact, it’s usually brimming over.
“It’s so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes,” she warns.
“It is so easy to exist instead of live.”
Take time, she says, to get a life — a life of little things that you appreciate:
“I think of (life) in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close beside me on the couch; the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him; fettucine Alfredo; fudge; Gone With the Wind, Pride and Prejudice.”
As I said, nothing cosmic - just beautiful and wonderful in all that they hold for us.
Quindlen says that one of her best teachers about living life with gratitude was ironically a homeless man she found on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
She shares this about him:
“He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports (of the boardwalk), dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule panhandling the boulevard… sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing….(and most of the time sitting) on the boardwalk (looking out at) the water… even when it got cold.”
Why, she asked, didn’t he go where it was warmer or where he could at least be sheltered from the elements?
Surely there were ways to be more comfortable.
His response was simply this:
“Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.”
Even without a penny to his name and without a home to retreat to, this man had found something to be thankful for, a view that clearly sustained him in his hardships.
So, I wonder about our view.
As we look ahead toward a traditional time of giving thanks, I wonder about what we see in our lives.
Are you able to take time to stop and appreciate the people and moments in your life and to see just how wonderful the view is?
If you are in a difficult time, is there a view you can focus on in your life to see the blessings there to behold?
Are their small things that can uplift and sustain you, help to keep the doors of your heart open?
For I have learned that even in the darkest of times, there is always sustenance and hope to be found if we can keep our hearts open to it.
And keep our hearts open we must, I believe.
The words of Mary Oliver in her poem “Landscape” come to mind.
She is taking her daily walk in the early morning and her heart is full of gratitude as she notices the smallest details of beauty and mystery around her as only Mary Oliver can.
And she says,
“if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.”
I remember that first week after my back injury.
I was fearful, depressed, focused on the pain and frustration of it all.
I would definitely say the doors of my heart were closing.
It was a dark place I don’t want to return to anytime soon.
And if ever I do find things around me getting dark, I stop and ask myself,
“What can I be grateful for today?”
“What am I overlooking that instead I should be lifting up for the beauty or wonder or sheer gift of life that it is?”
So, we gather as community to encourage one another to keep those doors open wide.
We gather to sing our songs of thanksgiving.
We gather to share our joys and hold one another in our sorrows.
We gather today and hear the touching story about a boy and a tree and how after a lifetime of searching and slowly cutting the tree down to a stump, the boy, now an old man, comes back to the tree and is grateful for the rest the broad and smooth stump offers him just as the tree is grateful for her long-time friend’s company.
And, we gather to hear our children offer their own litany of thanks as they name the many things both big and small that make life special and joyful for them.
My hope is that the doors of our hearts are opened wide and will remain open through this week of Thanksgiving, through the coming holidays, and right on into the new year.
It probably won’t all be smooth sailing.
Life does bring us times of challenge and confusion.
But as I’ve learned, we don’t need to focus on just that.
May we be open to all that life offers us unbidden.
May we make the time regularly to take in the view – really take in the view – and see all that there is to be grateful for.
From my experience, it’s some view.
Amen.