A SONG OF THANKSGIVING

James Ishmael Ford

22 November 2015

Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California

I really love Thanksgiving. I mean I love the whole thing, soup to nuts. Well, that speaks to it, doesn’t it? Most of all I love the fact that the major focus is getting together with the family and eating. I just love the fact that Thanksgiving is about nothing so much as pleasure in the moments of our lives, respite in the rush and worry of existence. It is a celebration of joy.

Of course as a holiday it is also profoundly shadowed. We should not, we cannot, forget how for some among us by hanging our autumnal celebration of gratitude on a story that has some ugly subtexts is past unfortunate. Here in the United States for some this day marks out being conquered and how one’s own cultures and traditions have been laid to waste. Also, there are those who are alone for the many reasons that can happen. And this is a hard time to be alone. So, this can be a very hard holiday.

However, in some ways because of that complexity this holiday might be particularly useful to us in this difficult season we currently inhabit, or maybe more correctly in this moment where so many contradictory things inhabit our hearts. Those horrific murders in Baghdad, Beirut, and Paris loom so large. As are the frightening responses to those horrors voiced by candidates for national office in this country, some disturbingly reminiscent of other dealings with minorities in years past. A subject I feel we will need to return to before long, although not today. And, and, today is the fifty-second anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy, for many in this room a life marker. It can all feel too much, just too much.

But. And. Then there is Thanksgiving itself, some deep calling of the heart to remember in the midst of all those sorrows the beauty of life. And so for us, with our hours of sadness and moments of joy, I suggest a reflection on Thanksgiving. And particularly, for us to consider that central emotion of thanksgiving in the face of everything taken together. I want to explore gratitude, and how that sense of gratitude can guide us toward something precious and even holy.

Now, there are many directions we can go in such a reflection. But, in our brief time together I want to hold us to two. First, there are those simple and pragmatic considerations we should take up in a time like this. Things have been hard. Things are hard. So, how do we actually engage all this so that it is useful for us, and for those whom we love and care about?

In this first, pragmatic context, I think of that old rabbinic story of the poor man who goes to his rabbi. He tells the rabbi how hard it has been as his family of eight must make do in a tiny one-room house. “The six children,” cries the man. “They roll like the sea. They are in constant motion. My wife and I never have a moment alone. I can’t stand it anymore.”

The rabbi says if the man will do exactly as he guides him, he can fix this problem. The man agrees. So the rabbi asks how many animals does he own, and is told of the conventional livestock to be found in old Middle Europe. This includes chickens, rabbits, a goat, a cow and a horse. The rabbi says, “Move all your livestock into the house.”

The man is aghast, but he’s agreed. So, he goes home and does as he’d been instructed. The next day he returns and says, “It is like living in Babel! I can’t imagine it worse. The chicken droppings alone are enough to make you want to throw up” The rabbi says, “Fine. Why don’t you move the chickens back out of the house?” Gratefully the man goes home and does it.

The next day the man returns and says, “Well, the chickens are gone. But the goat! Oh, the goat is horrible. It’s eaten half the only table cloth we own, and it jumps up on top of the chairs and onto our bed, wrecking havoc everywhere.” “Well,” the rabbi suggests. “Why don’t you go home and remove the goat?” Which, the man does.

The next day he returns and tells the rabbi, “Have you ever lived in a room with a cow? It is too disgusting to describe.” “Well,” the rabbi says. “Why don’t you remove the cow?” And it goes on, next the rabbits, then the horse. And finally, only the family remains.

With that the man goes to his rabbi and says, “I don’t understand. But, we are filled with joy and gratitude. Our children are happy and calm. My wife and I are at peace. Thank you.”

The old lesson of shoes and feet, perspective is important. Can be amazingly important. We should never forget the power of perspective. However, this season can reveal even deeper places we can go than that realizing how good we have it in the face of the many other possibilities. So, let me share my second point for this day. Drawing again upon the Jewish tradition, I find myself returning to the lessons to be mined from that ancient spiritual classic the Book of Job.

There are all these horrors in his life. It is very hard to find the shoes and feet thing here. He is actually the one without feet. In the face of that harsh truth in this lovely story collected in the Hebrew Bible, Job cries out to the divine his anguish and fear. Job bitterly laments that the divine “murders both the pure and the wicked. When the plague brings sudden death, he laughs at the anguish of the innocent. He hands the earth to the wicked and blindfolds its judges’ eyes.” I’m sure everyone in this room knows this rebuke, and I’m sure many of us have cried it out to the heavens, ourselves.

That old rabbi’s wisdom for the man and his family is practical. We should count our blessings as we can. And this is a season to do so. But, here, I suggest, as we don’t turn away from any of it, from the great mess, from the worst things of our lives, from those dreadful events that do not bare comparison; something might happen.

It starts with vulnerability. With seeing how while we can adjust our attitudes and that can be valuable, in the last analysis, however, we are not in charge. And, with that admission, with that opening to the vulnerable places, we are also opening ourselves up to possibilities. Kelly Murphy Mason is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in New York City. She writes of 9/11, where she was in the area of the Twin Towers when they fell, and she had not control, was just caught. And, how on that day unbidden “an angel in a business suit grabbed my hand and ran me through the smoke and ash overtaking Wall Street.” “An angel in a business suit.” What an image. How wonderful, how mysterious, and this is most important, how true. We never know where the hand of God will appear, or in what form. Even in the darkest moments something can appear. Although we almost certainly will not find in a direction we are expecting.

Job, when he raises his anguish straight to the divine, in that amazing story, apparently ancient on ancient, doesn’t even appear to have a Hebrew origin, but the compilers of the Bible saw how true it spoke to how our prayer of anguish is answered. Not answered with an essay, not answered with a list of reasons. But answered as we all may be in our own dark moments, when our hearts turn, and we give ourselves whole. Like a hand extended by an angel in a business suit.

Now we have a part in this, it isn’t deus ex machina, where some god descends when the plot becomes totally confused and fixes everything. There is a small act of will necessary. We need to be open, open to what is presenting, and to not project too quickly any sense of meaning or meaninglessness for that matter. We need to attend carefully to that line in the story where God declares:

“Where were you when I planned the earth?/Tell me, if you are so wise./Do you know who took its dimensions,/measuring its length with a cord?/What were its pillars built on?/Who laid down its cornerstone,/while the morning stars burst out singing/and the angels shouted for joy?”

Certainly a superficial reading of this statement and Job’s response is one of a person groveling in the dirt and mud, fearful of the great bully in the sky. But it isn’t. It really isn’t. This mysterious passage is our gateway into joy, the joy of the angels witnessing something astonishing. And, here’s the real miracle: it is a witnessing we all can experience.

My favorite commentator on the Book of Job is Stephen Mitchell. He says of this moment where Job makes his plea, and its response; that “God will not hear Job, but Job will see God.” Here we move beyond the simple frame of comparison and even of good and evil. At such a moment our best reflections, our purest analysis all fall away. Here we move to the deep waters of existence, where every idea is shattered.

And it is at this place where the divine lurks, a monster of our dreams. Here, when we shut up and just notice, we are gifted by a tumble into the divine’s presence, and our deep longing is answered. It is here we find angels in business suits, as well as dragons and faerie, and all sorts of mysterious creatures that normally only occupy our dreams, are now revealed whole and true. The world becomes unveiled at such a moment of raw confrontation. And it is big. And it is scary. And we are totally consumed, you and I, in the face of it, like a moth before a flame.

So, what response do we have for such moments? e.e. Cummings, son of a Unitarian minister, sings of it all. “I thank You God for most this amazing/day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/which is natural which is infinite which is yes//(I who have died am alive again today,/and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth/day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay/great happening illimitably earth)//how should tasting touching hearing seeing/breathing any—lifted from the no/of all nothing—human merely being/doubt unimaginable You?/(now the ears of my ears awake and/now the eyes of my eyes are opened)”

At these moments of great sadness, of broken hearts; if we are lucky, we step back, away, mysteriously refreshed, as we could never have dreamed. Out of that experience, out of that full confrontation, we can return to the world of the relative, of good and ill, of choices that count, with some new understanding. It is, I suggest, an understanding that allows us to celebrate Thanksgiving for both its joy in family and food, and its sorrow in lost nations.

And, I suggest, it is the perfect holiday for these difficult times, come at just the right moment.

A song of thanksgiving.

In the face of it all.

So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.