Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
"Deep is the Hunger"
We are all of woman born. I celebrate that fact this morning with a poem by Elizabeth Holmes - it is a woman's reflection upon seeing the photographic image of a baby which is growing inside her. It is entitled Sonogram:
To call you baby is the wildest
leap. Gargoyle hunched there,
shrimp body curled, with your black big
eye sockets, bones showing white,
and the four black heart chambers
fish mouths shuttering.
Tad-pole blunt, and blind
as a cave fish – webbed, curled,
aquatic, raw – you multiply,
ravenous to the last cell:
my blood makes and remakes you
while your heart gapes, already
wanting everything.
I love that – we are born already wanting everything. You were, I was...
We all hunger from the moment we are born - for all sorts of things - for our mother's milk, for shelter, for attention, for love, for fun, for kindness, for things to work out, and for our dreams to come true. The fact of our hunger doesn't mean that we aren't provided for. To hunger is part and parcel of the human condition. And our hunger runs deep.
Spiritual hunger is an apt theme for a Thanksgiving sermon- for what is the essence of Thanksgiving, but an attempt to run counter to this drive within us to want and to hunger and to practice a ritual that brings us to an awareness of what we have been given? But I confess to you that I came by this topic another way. For today happens to be the birthday of Howard Thurman a spellbinding Baptist preacher who wrote the two books which you see at the foot of the pulpit. Thurman was a man who was deeply aware of our hunger and whose works - his sermons, meditations and essays, bear witness to a deep, lifelong spiritual practice of giving thanks. Gratitude was simply part of his presence, and was, I suspect, part of the charisma of what drew people to him.
anecdote..... early 40's the President of Boston University, Harold Case, (a Methodist affiliated university) and his wife sought a young black minister had been refused service at their hotel restaurant during their Methodist conference. They wanted him to know that the racial incident was not... in keeping with the true genius of the Methodist church.... Thurman went on to cofound the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco possibly the first church in the United States without racial barriers and eventually became its pastor - the church was, by then, large, interracial, intercultural, interdenominational. In 1953, in a startling move, President Case invited (Baptist!) Howard Thurman to become dean of (Methodist) Marsh Chapel at BU, making it, officially, an ecumenical worship setting. Thurman's appointment as the first black dean at a predominantly white university made national headlines....
Thurman described humankind and himself as "always roaming with a hungry heart." Mystics, he said, see human restlessness as the homing instinct in the human spirit. The intent of his preaching, was to address our 'divine discontent.' It was, proof for him, of our innate ability to sense and be drawn toward the infinite. The work of his illustrious career was to guide us on our way. His preaching helped people to balance the books, to acknowledge our condition of want, and then to equally pay homage to what we have been given.
Howard Thurman was born on this day in 1899. Thurman lived a practice of daily Thanksgiving and shared it in his preaching.
What is Thanksgiving, but a day set aside to symbolically make visible, by our feasting, and gathering of family and friends, the bounty we have been given?
The fact is, feed ourselves and feast as we may, none of us will have a perfect Thanksgiving. We will still want. The pie will burn or some of your family will be away. Or worse - loved ones may be choosing to carve out a life apart. Then again, sometimes when a whole family gathers in one room, they can't be more separate. Also, this year we are all, as Americans, in uncharted waters. The World Trade Center bombing and the threat of anthrax has brought home that we are vulnerable to random acts of cruelty. Our country is waging war abroad, and we are bewildered emotionally. It is easy to feel lost in these waters. We are tired. Our spiritual need is great this Thanksgiving.
But Thanksgiving is a time when we focus, not on our hunger, but on what has sustained us thus far. It is a time set aside on our calendar to stop the preoccupations of daily lives and our frantic pace, and to acknowledge the natural wealth of our lives that's so easy to overlook.
I walk in the woods a few times a week. Walking is good exercise but it can be more. When I walk with another person, we tend to talk, and neither one of us will notice much along the way. I have developed a habit of trying to remember to stop, put the conversation on mute every so often, just to look around and take in the sights and sounds of my surroundings. Otherwise I miss the morning fog, and the sparkle of the dew, the patterns and colors and the sounds. Without stopping to look around, I might as well have been on the phone. A truly good walk and a truly good Thanksgiving both take a sense of purpose, a deliberate appreciative assessment of our surroundings, and both are an accomplishment of the spirit.
The Litany of Thanksgiving that we read together earlier are things we can all can be thankful for. But the consistent Unitarian Universalist message about our spirituality always remains - you will get out of your spiritual practice what you put into it. I wrote a litany of Thanksgiving for my life in preparation for this sermon and was surprised at what surfaced - I will be forever grateful that my father washed my hands inside his when I was young, for so many people, and wild things that have touched my life in generous ways and helped me grow. Like you, I could write a tale of woe and get stuck in it on a bad day. Giving thanks puts your life into perspective and rights the balance a bit. Consider writing your own litany or a litany for your family to read at the table.
Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but our participation, our willingness to reflect, to engage a practice of gratitude is a personal choice and a discipline. Gratitude won't bring back a loved one who has passed away or heal the sick or fix what is broken. But what it can do is restore the balance of our spiritual record-keeping and re-awaken us to the gifts we have been given. Gratitude softens the heart and prepares a place there for new life.