THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
November 28, 1999Thanksgiving is sometimes hard for me. For as long as I can remember I have had difficulty manufacturing gratitude on cue. I have had a good many Thanksgivings where there was no difficulty at all. I clearly saw how blessed I was. In my case, this is not difficult. Having picked the right parents, I got great genes. Having stumbled across a really neat lady, I acquired a wonderful wife who, thanks to our respective great genes, has given us great kids. At so many times in my life when I was at a crossroads, not sure which direction to go, there was somebody there when I needed them. They did not have to, but they reached out with the insight or help or sometimes a good swift kick when I needed it.
So I have no difficulty when I stop and think about it to remember back to the things that I have lots of good reason to be thankful for. But there's something about Thanksgiving. There's something about being thankful when you are "supposed to" that someplace in the pit of my stomach just lays there like a leaden lump. Almost every year, as the season arrives, I have of get myself "up" for it.
Some years ago, when I was listening to talk radio, Doctor Laura informed everybody that gratitude is an attitude. You can choose it, you don't have to wait for it to happen to you. I realized that was something I had learned to do. But I had thought about it as something relatively cynical. When Thanksgiving or Christmas (with which I have the same problem occasionally) came around, I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and said, "Hey, you're supposed to be grateful now. This is the time to do it," Still I felt I was doing a rather cynical thing. Clearly, everybody else was acting very thankful and filled with gratitude and enjoying themselves endlessly and enjoying just how wonderful it felt to appreciate all the wonderful things that life had brought them. I was the only Scrooge that had to fake it. When I heard Mother Laura say that, I realized that it almost always did work ! Grabbing myself by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and saying, "Okay, you really do have a lot of things to be grateful for and it won't hurt you to act like it" almost always lifted whatever it was that had me soured on that occasion. It got me past that leaden feeling in the middle of the stomach that I was "supposed to." I really could choose to be grateful.
There's a wonderful phenomenon: you tend to get what you pay attention to.
If I am feeling all the various pressures of things I've got to get done, and there's no way that I can do all of the things that I am supposed to do, to say nothing of all the things that I'm quite sure everybody expects me to do -- wife, congregation, children, all of the various people who I at least imagine lay great expectations on me. If, at those times, I consciously and intentionally shift my own attention from that leaden feeling of expectations to be met to the wonderful opportunities that I have, I see opportunities that I didn't see before. What I pay attention to has a great deal to do with what I notice and what that noticing does to me.
I don't know that I get more good things from people when I am paying attention to the incredible number of really wonderful people who are constantly giving me good things, good feedback, good company, sometimes just their presence; but it certainly feels that way. I have the suspicion that how I come across makes it easier for people to give to me. Maybe, indeed, when I am open and enthusiastic about accepting and receiving I get more. All I know for sure is that it feels that way. Not only was it something I could choose, but occasionally I was already choosing it and I could also choose it more often.
I could choose what it was that I paid attention to, not always, not perfectly, but a whole lot more efficiently than I usually do.
This year, it did not take but a moment to look around at the incredible community that Nancy and I have for going on five years now come to share. It did not take a long time to look out from our deck at the incredible Kalihi Valley; the green and the birds and once in a while, the whisper of a suggestion that maybe there's a pig in the bushes across the stream over there. Phone calls from kids on the mainland. My son's doing wonderfully in Florida. My daughter is doing horribly in California. She is up to her ears with two kids. She has a good and a wretched job, having just been elected last April to the Board of Education for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is going absolutely bananas and loving every minute of it!
Yeah, there are things for which I am not grateful. There are problems that we're confronted with, issues daily that we see no easy solutions to. We were talking this morning in the Adult Religious Education discussion about one of those events that leaves me out of sorts and stumped as I look and listen to the news. The World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle is a symbol, at least, of the fleeing of the possibility of ordinary folks having serious power and control over the public policy decision-making that shapes the world we live in. That power flowing to a group of -- as one of the editorialists in the morning paper called it-- "men in dark suits, wearing dark glasses." And there are moments when that paranoid fantasy overtakes me and I say to myself, "The world is out of my control."
And who knows? I may be right. I know that the shifting of attention to those things that I can control and the awareness that I can pay attention to and be prepared for opportunities to take control, or at least nudge in the directions that seem right to me, makes a tremendous difference in that mood of paranoia.
One of the things that niggles at the back of my mind is: to whom am I thankful? I had enough philosophical and theological training to be unable to solve the question of whether God is in control of everything or not. But also enough to be wise enough not to wade into that thicket. I acknowledge the mystery that surrounds our very existence about who it is who gets which blessings on which kind of schedule when we expect them or least expect them. Still, to whom or what am I grateful?
The traditional answer that I was raised with is too easy. "It's just God's will." There are too many things that I know perfectly well I could have done something about had I the courage or the push or perceived the opportunity. I'm not ready to say that it was God's will that I was inadequate to the task at the time. There are too many things that happen in our world, tragedies that occur that I am not willing to write off as just "God's will." My heart aches when I see tragedies happening in the world where we have continued to build our homes -- this is a metaphor -- again and again underneath the same batch of rocks that continue, year-in, year-out, to keep falling. When we build our homes in avalanche country we really shouldn't be terribly surprised when rocks come through the ceiling. I'm not ready to call that "the will of God" except to the degree that God has decreed that things fall down, a set of circumstances infinitely preferable to circumstances under which you never knew, from day to day, in which direction things were going to fall.
[I once did a sermon fantasy, years ago, where I had a UFO captain, come speak at the church He was from a planet that circles a binary star system. A binary star system is where there are two stars, and this particular planet orbited both stars in a figure 8 pattern that was constantly shifting and changing. On the planet he came from, whenever you laid anything down it was never there when you came back to pick it up, the forces being what they were. A part of my task in the church service was to try to explain to him the concept of private property.]
So many of the things that we dismiss as "God's will" are like those rocks which fall down. My problem is that we too often decline to move our houses out from under the avalanche zone. Given the brain that we were blest with, that we continue to build them there is our will. I'm not ready to dismiss all of the tragedies and unhappinesses, the deep disappointments, the ragged holes left in the lives of real people when those sad events happen, as God's will.
Part of the reason that I'm not quite ready to dismiss them is my own recognition of the fact that all of those blessings that I gave a very brief litany of above did not come to me because I am deserving of them. Indeed, I could not have earned the overwhelming majority of them had I set out attempting to. They came as mysteriously as the bad things that have happened in my life come.
So, for me there is a sense of suspense that includes a great deal of awe. I do not know exactly which direction to point for the people who call me up and want to know where the higher power is, where the Supreme Being is, and what they might do to manufacture a belief in same. What I do know is that my life confronts me with such incredible, awesome mystery and that mystery, wrapping almost every perception I have about what it feels like to be a human being, is both frightening and consoling, both confusing and encouraging. I come to the conclusion tentatively held that the meaning of my life is wrapped in that mystery. The final answers to that mystery, if final answers there be, will not come until I no longer share life and breath with the rest of you. There is time enough in death for final answers. It is the very mystery itself that keeps me poking and looking, stretching myself and being stretched by both the wise decisions that I make and the dumb ones that I make.
So my gratitude, my thanksgiving, is in the direction of that mystery that seems to lie everywhere and nowhere. Or, perhaps it is 90 degrees to everything and no less real for that. Gratitude is an attitude that, when I choose it, seems to choose me.