Home
Good morning!
I hope you all had a happy thanksgiving.
It often happens that our expectations for holidays are better than the actual event; l today we all know what the actual event was really like. I hope it was good.
More than that, I hope we all took time to count our blessings, to remind ourselves of that which we can and ought to be grateful for—all our many blessings.
My family always comes to my home on Thanksgiving, and I cook the dinner. It is one of my great pleasures.
This was the fifth year without my father’s presence, and somehow that fact was more poignant than the fourth year. It is odd about calendrical numbers, isn’t it.
May our losses of loved ones now gone remind us to appreciate those now present.
This past Tuesday I left the office early hoping to get home before the great traffic rush. Despite that, I found myself stuck in heavy traffic wondering who these people were and why they were on my road. As I was driving past one of the exits for Stamford I remembered that--like all too many American cities these days--Stamford has a growing number of homeless people. Many of those people would love to be stuck in traffic if it meant that they could own a car, own a warm home, and have someone waiting for them when they arrived there. It was a mental slap in the face, a mental wake up call. I decided to feel gratitude rather than frustration.
In thinking about the things we ought to feel grateful for, I have divided them into two categories: the things we have earned and the things we are given by grace.
Friendship, for example, is a wonderful gift, but it is a “gift” that we have earned by being a friend. Friendship arises from a mutuality of caring and thinking about the other.
If we are fortunate enough to have children, and to have children who love us, that, too, is to some extent an earned blessing. Now the truth is that even if we do our best and work hard and long our children may still not love us; but if they do it is at least partly because they are returning the love we gave to them over the years.
I don’t describe these things as “earned” to minimize how wonderful they are—ion fact, I hesitate to describe them to myself as “earned” for fear that hubris will grow within me and I will fail to see the beauty of the gifts that they truly are. Calling them “earned” in some ways is a delusion: nothing I have ever done really earns, me the love of my wife or daughter. The only reason I describe them as “earned” is so that I will recognize the even more wondrous nature of the gifts of pure grace.
Having a child is an act of grace—most of you know that Genie and I lost two children through miscarriage and almost lost the one owe have.
Think of the very quality of love itself. It is astonishing that such a thing exists, that we can feel love for others and feel love in return.
We too often skim over the great truths such as that one—the existence of love—because we are so used to living in them, and we take them for granted. But true gratitude arises when we stop and see precisely those things we just assume as givens.
Somewhere in the process of evolution our ancestors developed the ability to love and accept love, to enjoy sharing time together, to need other beings.
Whether a gift of God, the Goddess or the Cosmos, our spirits are imbued with the painful, pleasurable, ecstatic, awful need and ability to share companionship with other human beings.
N an even deeper level, whether we know companionship or not, we have the extraordinary quality of awareness—awareness of existence, of the world we live in, of the vast universe our small planet is part of. So far as we know, we human beings are the only creatures on this planet to have that ability.
Consider it: consider what it means to have that gift.
When I was a child, the smallest things fascinated me. I could sit and watch ants for hours, watch their coming and goings around their anthill. The day I received an ant farm was wonderful! I could now actually see what took place down in the tunnels!
As an adult I tend to walk by and not notice ants and other little things. I have more important things to focus on.
Is that true? Is it really true?
In readings of sacred texts, many religious leaders—Buddha, Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad—said, at least in part, notice these things, these little, insignificant things—see that they are not insignificant at all. Those speakers said, “open your eyes and see; see that the little things contain within themselves all of the same magic and wonder that fill the universe, and they contain all of the same magic and wonder that they did when we were children. Feel that wonder and awe that even the smallest of things can bring”.
I would ask each of you to do now a little thing. Like a child, feel once again your breath as it enters and exits your lungs—feel the flow and rhythm of it.
Feel also the beat of your heart, and the pulse it sends throughout your body. Are these two rhythms, breath and heart, one in time, or do they pulse separately?
Now feel how these are connected to the ebb and flow of tides in the sea and the pulse of light rays as they flow from the sun and from a myriad of stars.
Imagine yourself surrounded by the rhythms of the cosmos, the rhythms of pulsars and quasars. Know that your breath and your heart beat are connected to these, that they are formed by and help to create the great pulse of the Cosmos.
From the simple ant to the star Antares, from pismire to pulsar, we are part of the oneness of all-and yet, we are unique in ourselves.
Able to see and feel all of these things, we are witnesses to the wonder of the Cosmos.
On a level deeper than words, deeper even than emotions, we can have a consciousness that we are part of the all, connected to the stars and the stags and the stones.
May that sense of oneness give rise to feelings of peace and calm; may it give rise to a thankfulness and a gratefulness that fills our being. Deep down, deeper than appreciation of things, of food, of friends, may we have a thankfulness for the gift of life itself.
So let it be.
Return to
Home
Return to Sermons Index