Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
November 24, 2002
The Discipline of Gratitude
When Swami Muktananda first visited the United States, he deplaned (as flight attendants are fond of saying) and walked directly into a large, modern terminal. He stood for a while, looking around the enormous airport -- so different from India, he might have been on another planet. He saw a vast assortment of food, drinks, magazines and newspapers; padded, upholstered furniture was everywhere; the rest rooms cost nothing, and had hot and cold running water; everyone was adequately dressed; the airport was clean, well-lit, and the whole place -- the size of most villages in his homeland -- was not only air conditioned, but carpeted. Even so, he saw the passengers rushing by, hurrying to their planes, seemingly not appreciating any of it. "They live in paradise," he observed; "I wonder if they'll ever know." Now, I've been spending a certain amount of time in airport terminals lately, and I don't know that I'd want to call them paradise, but I recall this story from time to time, especially at this season, as Thanksgiving approaches. And it occurs to me that by certain definitions we live in paradise all the time, but I wonder if we ever know?
There are people who consider that our American tradition of Thanksgiving is badly placed on the calendar; it is too close to Christmas, they complain. Two such major holidays within six weeks of each other; the thing is unbalanced; it ought to be at a time of year when there is less going on, August, maybe. But here's what I think: I think that Christmas is a celebration of hope and new possibility, of birth and miracles and surprises, about the novelty that breaks into the ordinary with unexpected power, and transforms our otherwise commonplace existence. Christmas is about transcendence, and joy, whereas Thanksgiving is a much more modest observance. Thanksgiving is not about surprise; there is nothing unexpected up its sleeve, no stealth deliveries down the chimney, no mysterious packages. Thanksgiving is not about what we want or hope for; it is about what we already have. And there is something importantly appropriate about beginning this season of mounting expectation with an appreciation of the goodness of the world we already know. Thanksgiving looks not forward to the coming of a child, but backward to a harvest past, to hardships endured and survived, to the paradise we live in every day, but too seldom know.
The celebration of Thanksgiving, rightly observed, lifts up the understanding that both gratitude and satisfaction are choices that we make about how to appreciate the world, and its deepest teaching is that gratitude comes first. It is not when the world around us finally meets our expectations that we may expect to feel a response of thankfulness; rather, it is when we adopt the discipline of thankfulness in our attitude, that our world takes on a quality of sufficiency and even abundance, almost regardless of our actual circumstances.
Those early European ancestors, the Mayflower pilgrims, provide our mythical images of the Thanksgiving celebration, and the story of its origins in their experiences. Every school child knows the tale of their departure from their homes in England, in search of the freedom to believe and to worship as they thought right, and the horrendous difficulties of their first year of residence in what was to them a daunting wilderness. All of them suffered, and many died. Without the help of the indigenous peoples of the land to which they had come, even more of the newcomers would have lost their lives, and it is possible that their settlement could not have endured. My colleague, Daniel Budd, quotes a meditation from the Unitarian lay leader Peter Fleck, observing that many people seem to assume that the Pilgrims, following their tragic first winter in their new home, were thankful for having survived. "It seems to me," Peter Fleck says, "that they were able to survive because they were thankful." Thankful for life, no matter what. Not in spite of, or because of, but thankfulness no matter what. Thankfulness for life itself. And Daniel Budd reflects, "Despair is an enemy of thankfulness. Why bother? What is the world coming to? Is there really any hope? What's the use? The despair in all these questions can skewer the soul, deaden it. Such despair can ultimately destroy us" - as it might easily have destroyed that beleagured little Plymouth colony. "Yet," he continues, "a deeply held attitude of thankfulness can save us from despair. Out of thankfulness, hope can arise from the heart and cry 'Wonder!' Thankfulness is a way that is simple, yet so difficult. It is an attitude that is hard to attain, and yet so necessary. It is our strength in the midst of weakness, our lamp to light whatever darkness may befall us."
It is also worth observing one kind of gratitude that the early pilgrims did not have; in spite of their deep indebtedness to the Native Americans whose advice and assistance had enabled their survival, they spoke and wrote and thought of these people as 'savages'. Most of us know that the 1621 harvest festival was not the first in an unbroken series of consecutive Thanksgiving celebrations, but it is not as well known that only 16 years later the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a "Day of Thanksgiving." the anniversary of which was observed regularly for more than a hundred years. This was to celebrate the deaths of more than seven hundred men, women and children of the Pequot tribe, who were shot unarmed or burned alive by English and Dutch mercenary soldiers while the Pequots were gathered for their annual Green Corn Dance. The first century of colonial Thanksgiving holidays were explicitly designated to commemorate this "elimination" of people whom the settlers viewed as their enemies. I find it impossible not to wonder two things: One, I wonder whether, had the survivors of that first dreadful year more consistently remembered and expressed their gratitude for the indispensable help they received from Tesquanto, Samoset, Massasoit, and their tribes, might there have been less arbitrary and heinous violence against the indigenous peoples so soon? And two, I wonder about those we today call 'savages' and enemies, and on whom, it would seem, we are utterly dependent for the survival of our petroleum energy based culture. I wonder why it never occurs to us that we ought to be grateful that those who own the oil we so urgently need are willing to sell it to us? And I wonder how our society might change, if we began to think in terms of that kind of gratitude. It seems to me that whenever gratitude is absent, the door to exploitation is open; whenever we forget to be thankful, we become oppressors.
For the thing about gratitude is, that it changes you. It changes the way you see things. And that is why the gratitude comes first; it happens in our approach to the world, not in what we find when we get there. People who come to their lives from a position of gratitude experience satisfaction a lot of the time, whereas people who come to their lives looking for satisfaction seldom find it, and seldom discover the experience of gratitude either. I believe that our new members today will find this, as those who are celebrating their tenth anniversaries can testify, that the more they bring a satisfied and thankful heart to this Society and their activities here, the more nourishment they will get out of their participation. And the more they bring demands to be satisfied, the less their membership will mean to them, or lift up their hearts, or change their lives. Both gratitude and satisfaction are choices that we make, and Thanksgiving is the opportunity to be reminded of this; to look around us, and find that almost anywhere we live, we live in paradise, if only we know it.
"Ah," says the compassionate heart, "but my paradise is a very partial thing. It may be ludicrous for me to be dissatisfied with my own physical comfort and safety, with my own available choices, or power, with any part of my life compared to the age-old concerns of most of humanity for minimal sustenance, shelter, and health. But what about others? Can it truly be said that we live in paradise, when people very little different from ourselves dwell in danger, in constant hardship, oppression, and suffering? I may have ample cause to be content with all that is my lot, but I cannot be satisfied about the rest of the world. Does that make me ungrateful?"
This, I think, is the right question; the question that must necessarily arise out of Thanksgiving, and that in some respect paves the way for the coming of Christmas. For the impulse of Humanism often counsels us to be unsatisfied, to envision a better, more fair, more loving world, and to work to bring that better world about. None of us, I think, would want to lose that sense of aspiration toward a more noble and equitable paradise, and the awareness that it lies in our own hands to make it so. Indeed, one of the many gifts that I cherish in my own accounting of gratitude is that very sense of dissatisfaction, that hope and commitment that make me eager to give my own best gifts to the love and service of my fellow creatures on this earth. In this sense, I am glad to be not satisfied; I want more, not for myself so much, but a world of greater justice, and a life of more meaning. I would not want to be so satisfied as to not want always wider knowledge, deeper connections, greater freedom, more effective compassion for the suffering of others. But paradoxically, I find that it is my gratitude for the gifts of my own life that nurtures those larger dissatisfactions that I cherish. For my experience is that the more ungrateful and dissatisfied I am with my own life, the less concerned I am for the lives of others, while the more I appreciate the abundance of the world as I know it, the less okay it is with me for everyone else not to have enough too. Again, the more I demand that the world conform to my expectations, the less satisfaction and thankfulness I have, while the more I embrace the world from a position of gratitude, the less need I have to insist on my own way all the time.
A mature spirit, I think, is one which knows that there will always be more to wish for on behalf of the world, but chooses to be satisfied and grateful anyway. Grateful for life no matter what, out of its own sense of thankfulness, it offers care and hope to others. The Buddhist tradition has a beautiful image for this idea, in the concept of the bodhisattva. This word is sometimes translated as 'saint', but the principle is not quite the same. Bodhisattvas, of which there are many - perhaps, even an infinite number - are beings who have, through wisdom and devoted practice overcome all personal desire, and so achieved enlightenment. Although they are ready to step into the changeless bliss of Nirvana, with no more human attachment or pain, they stand upon the threshold, and will not cross over, refusing to extinguish themselves as perishing and suffering beings until all of humanity, and indeed all of creation, is ready to go with them. They are not satisfied with their individual salvation; it can only be paradise for them if it is shared.
Thanksgiving is an invitation to the spirit of the bodhisattva, a gentle reminder that if we will look around us with grateful hearts, we will find that we live in paradise, and our gratitude will urge us to make sure that that paradise is shared. I have learned to understand it, and yet it continues to astonish me, that communities of oppressed people often survive in dignity of spirit through the expression of gratitude - with thanks for the little they have, for life itself no matter what. The coming of Christmas is a promise and an expectation; it is about light in the darkest time of the year, and hope in possibilities yet unimagined. Thanksgiving asks only that we be alive to the present hour, aware of the bounty by which we are surrounded and the gifts of life we so freely receive day by day. This very moment, here and now, with its harvests gathered and its hardships endured, with its heritage from the past and its generous impulse to share our abundance, is life itself, is paradise, if we receive it in gratitude. The poet Walt Whitman puts it this way:
Will you seek afar off?
You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best,
Or as good as the best -
Happiness, knowledge -
Not in another place, but this place;
Not for another hour, but this hour.