Thanksgiving Givingthanks

Welcome. I am looking forward to spending this time
together today. We will get a chance to listen, speak
and share our thoughts of gratitude on this day of
Givingthanks. Thank you to Ann Milliken for sharing
music with us today, to Roger for the opening reading,
to all of you coming here to share yourselves in
community. For those of you staying for the meal,
thank you for bringing your gift of food, conversation
and appetite. May we all share our wholeness in
community union. Our bread, our laughter, our joys and
sorrows all feed us.

In preparing for this service I did a little
historical research and thought I would share a few
bits with you all:

In November 1621, one year after the Pilgrims
arrived in Plymouth, they celebrated harvest festival
jointly with Wampanoag Indian leader, Massassoit and
ninety of his tribesman for a three-day feast of
thanksgiving. The Wampanoag had been celebrating
harvest festival for hundreds, perhaps thousands of
years. Most of the food at this “first Thanksgiving”
was supplied by the indigenous people. The meal
consisted of Native American foodstuffs Pilgrims had
never tasted. The main meal was a sort of corn meal
mush along with nuts and fruits such as gooseberries,
strawberries, plums, cherries, cranberries and a
groundnut known as the bog bean. Popcorn and popcorn
balls made by the Indians with maple syrup were served
as a sweet.

Those Pilgrims fed and later taught to farm by
Massassoit are some of our American Unitarian
ancestors. Celebrating their 400th anniversary of
making a covenant with each other, breaking from the
Church of England and forming a democratic
“congregational polity” structure still used by UU
congregations today.

The congregation in Plymouth settled there in 1620
after an escape route that took them through Holland.
In 1801 after a contentious vote to become Unitarian
in theology, a conservative group split off, moved
across the street, and became a Congregationalist
Church. The First Parish in Plymouth is now a
Unitarian Universalist congregation whose building is
in the same location as that first Pilgrim church. The
church building itself has been rebuilt three times.

That first pilgrim community honored its 40-year
peace pact with the Wampanoag and stood up for
religious tolerance in the overwhelming Puritan
near-theocracy refusing to persecute the Quakers or
participate in the witch hunts.

Our Unitarian Universalist heritage has a deep root
in the Pilgrim beginnings of this country and though
we have radically diverged the Calvinist theology and
socially from having to wear only black and not
bathing, we have kept the lineage of tolerance,
democracy and a non-creedal faith tradition alive.

Let us be thankful for our tradition’s ancestors.

I also want to share with you today some reasons I
give thanks and will invite you later in the service
to share some of your own.

I am of course thankful for the nice things I have in
my life: decent health, a wonderful healthy happy
child, a partner who cares, incredible choices of
fresh food daily, clean water out of the tap, and a
generous amount of sunshine throughout the year.

As I reflect more deeply I feel my gratitude for the
Spirit of Life giving me a chance to live another day
in this incredible universe on this precious planet
unlike any other in the galaxy that we know of.

I am grateful for a body which I am and inhabit with
an evolutionary miracle of consciousness, one of many
species, matter made aware of itself, a blend of
consciousness and unconsciousness, in every moment
operating on multiple levels: breathing and being
breathed by the universe, pumping blood, taking in and
expelling parts of the world, listening,
smelling, tasting, seeing, hearing, and perceiving,
making goals, assessing information and dreaming
dreams, connecting my being to others in emotional and
physical ways that are joyful.

I am grateful for the chance to notice that I am an
ongoing miracle of life. Filled with stirrings of
compassion I give thanks to the Spirit of Life for all
that I am, that we are.

Yet I often find it difficult to appreciate and give
thanks for the difficulties given me in my life. When
in the midst of struggling with a paper due the next
day, I forget to be thankful for the opportunity to be
in graduate school and being stretched into new
abilities. When I am exhausted from a long week and
the demands of family keep me awake until 1:00 in the
morning for the fourth day in a row, I sometimes
forget to be thankful for the sweet moments that can
fill my heart and soul to bursting. When I am having
trouble with my left knee I sometimes forget to be
appreciative that my right knee is pain free, as well
as my feet, back, neck, hands, nose, eyes, ears,
hair….

I know I am not the only one who forgets to be
thankful for so much that we have. I hear people in
the market complaining about this or that relation,
work situation, weather, and on and on….

Often events that challenge us to grow we do not
feel thankful for in the midst of the discomfort,
tumult, or pain. Often these situations are the times
that can, if we allow them to, expand our sense of
self, broaden our minds, sharpen our skills, deepen
our character. Many of these difficult situations we
try and put out of our minds or let them float away
without reflection on the hidden gifts they may have
brought. Last Sunday we heard Melissa Corrigan
intimately share in service the lessons learned from
her cancer and how the glass half full means there is
room for more joy to enter in. May we more often
remember our glass is half full and open to more joy.

Amen. Blessed Be.  ♦