November 26, 2006 Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley
Someone is sending me flowers, and catalogs, and fruitcakes…It’s a crazy-making time of the year.
I was seventh in line at the super market check out. It was last Tuesday, and when it came my turn, I mentioned to the clerk how busy they were. “Biggest food shopping day of the year,” she said. “Everyone’s getting ready for the holidays”
Forty-eight hours later, full of turkey and stuffing, and whatever else has been handed down for generations on tattered recipe cards, across the nation masses of people are going to bed early, to get up early before the crack of dawn, to be the first in line at the new super duper twenty acre consumer cathedral box store just across the town line where the prices are cheap and the taxes are low. The hopes are high, the competition stiff. Will you be one of the lucky ones to get this year’s incarnation of the Cabbage Patch doll, Extreme Tickle Me Elmo, or Play Station 3? We have just survived the annual busiest shopping day of the year.
What’s it all about, this gorging, gluttonous, greedy extravaganza?
And, if you doubt that “gluttonous” part, I learned the Friday after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for plumbers — freeing up all those peelings, turkey carcasses, and grease that get crammed down the drain.
Why, why oh why, do we carry on this ritual of overindulgence?
I really hesitate to suggest this. I don’t want to be seen as promoting the CCC, the Consumer Catalog Culture, but I do want to make my point. Take a critical look at one of those countless catalogs, those multitudinous magazines that are clogging up your recycle bin. What do you see? Here’s one: beautiful families in beautiful robes and slippers sitting by a beautiful fire opening beautifully wrapped presents having a beautiful holiday. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? Everything is perfect. It’s enough to make you weep!
When I was a child the only catalog I remember seeing was from Sears. Sometime during the last forty or fifty years we began converting more and more green trees into glossy, beautiful depictions of ideal life. My generation, the post World War II baby-boomers, has been on a lifelong media blitz inspired by the television and accelerated by digital technology.
Perhaps you saw Jon Carroll’s lament about this season, and praise for “the individual who at this time of year has to bear the brunt of all your passions and needs and quirks, as well as the amazing excesses of our consumer culture…Your mail carrier. Catalogs,” he says, “are heavy mothers, getting heavier every year. And somehow one catalog per household is never enough…It’s the end of a long…day, already dark outside, and [your mail carrier is] struggling down the street trying to protect the mammoth bundles of Lands’ End catalogs from the raindrops, so that recipients may curse and hurl them into the recycling bin — such a useful process: the unappreciated delivering the unwanted to the uncaring.” [SF Chronicle, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006]
It’s the time of the year when I have to sort through stratums of sentiment, layers of emotion, accumulated deposits over a lifetime of holiday hopes and high expectations. I get caught up in the glitz and need to find my way back to the gut. What is the heart of my desire for this season? How do I move beyond my Consumer Boomer state of mind?
I recently celebrated my birthday. I received some remarkable gifts. My older sister sent me a card made for a little brother. It was a fire engine card, complete with punch outs and stickers. I really did have fun putting it together. Daughter Laura sent me “The Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama’s book, to stimulate my mind, yet it was her phone call that touched my heart. Son Ben gave me a set of five brown paper bags and hours of work leaf raking to fill them. He gave me a strong rope, and the help of his muscles and companionship helping to cut tree limbs. Daughter Sarah gave me cds she had recorded, selecting songs she knew I would like. The night of our gathering we danced and I showed her some swing steps I learned in 7th grade.
Barbara brought together generations of family tradition making for me a banana cake from the recipe of my mother’s mother, and a coffee soufflé, from my father’s mother’s family. I must have gained five pounds, and that was before Thanksgiving! These were remarkable gifts.
Isn’t this what we want from holiday celebrations: To forget the glitz and glamour, and glory in the giving and the receiving of thoughtful tenderness.
Last week, in the midst of preparing for the holidays, Barbara and I made a decision we had been putting off for months. Our seventeen year old terrier was declining rapidly, losing her senses and her ability to maneuver and control her body. It was time to “put her down.” But it wasn’t easy. There was so much love and attention over all those years.
On my birthday, two nights before our appointment with the vet, we gathered pictures of Lottie and shared memories. With Sarah and Ben we told stories of Lottie following us home when she was six months old, cavorting in the snow, eating half a cake, escaping from the dog-sitter miles away and finding her way home. We laughed and cried gave Lottie loving rubs, and wrote our memories into a book. We were mourning the death of our dog and the passage of time. Ben was 10 years old when Lottie came into our lives. So much has happened to all of us in seventeen years. How fast the time goes.
The sharing of memories, and the making of new ones, isn’t this what we want from the holidays?
Besides being the biggest shopping day of the year, Friday was my father’s 86th birthday. In August, in Oklahoma, he had a stroke, leaving his mind sharp but with no control of his body from the neck down. With the help of physical therapists, he has been making a good recovery and is learning to maneuver in a wheel chair. For the first time since his stroke, he was able to leave the rehabilitation facility for his birthday. It was also the family gathering for Thanksgiving dinner.
A friend who is a caretaker for a man in a wheel chair offered the services of a van equipped with a lift. Though he wasn’t excited about driving around town with bumper stickers saying “Prayer is the Answer,” and supporting candidates for whom he had not voted, Dad was filled with gratitude to be able to gather with his family for his Thanksgiving Birthday celebration.
In August, Barbara and I were at a cabin in the Sierras when Dad had his stroke. Though I went to Tulsa to see him a few days later, my immediate response to the news was to write him a letter. In part, I wrote:
Dear Dad,
I know you will not live forever, and I hope in whatever time you have
left in our presence you will feel bathed in the love and care
streaming from all our hearts. I hope you feel our love for a long
time.
I look at my hands and I see yours.
From my earliest days I remember your hands. I watched you work. I learned which tool to choose for each task. I watched you and learned how to become more fully myself. Hands, doing the work the mind conceives. Today you lie in bed with your mind sharp yet with little strength and ability to control your hands, ahh, but what wonders they have created. They have set up transits and held surveyor’s rods and chains. They have drawn plans for houses and great dams. Your hands have run power tools and turned screw drivers as I held a flashlight, for you to work, for me to learn. Your hands raised up the next generation.
In the third grade Mrs. Williams asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Of course I said, “An engineer!” I wanted to be like you.
Several years ago I asked you about your relationship with your father after his death. I find comfort and reassurance in your response. You told me you think of him every day. His presence is always with you. I know the time will come when I will not be able to pick up the phone and hear your voice on the other end. I will miss that. But you have taught me a generous lesson. I think of you every day. Your presence is always with me. As long as I am conscious, (and who knows after that) it will be so.
I write not knowing what miracles of modern medicine may restore the flow of your life-giving blood. On the deepest level of my being I know that whatever happens, all will be well. The old pine tree outside this Sierra cabin window will not stand much longer. But its life will go on. The young sapling just down the hillside is already producing cones, and inside them are the seeds of the future.
Your love and compassion, your curiosity and commitment, flow through all who have been touched by your life, to energize hearts and hands to shape the world.
On this day of uncertainty, when I am acutely aware of finitude and
grace, I call out to this magnificent forest, and to you, “Thank
you.”
In gratitude.
Ever your son,
Bill
I was able to visit Dad for a week after his stroke. I am grateful for that time. Dad grew up with physical contact between men being a handshake. That was hard for me. I craved his attention. I remember coming home from college and him reaching out his hand. I just ignored it and gave him a hug. It was awkward, but slowly, over the years, we have grown to embrace each other.
In August, Dad could not move his arms. I want to give to him.
I massaged his body. I stroked his head, and held his hand, expressing my love and appreciation for him. I feel closer to him now than ever, and have even had experiences when I hear myself speak and think, “That’s sounded like Dad.”
And though a serious illness is not how I would choose to receive these gifts, I’m closer to Mother, too. With the wonders of cell phones we talk almost every day.
Isn’t this what we want for the holidays:
the opportunity to open our hearts,
a chance to touch someone else,
to know beyond miles and differences of perspective,
that we are connected,
that life is the greatest gift,
and in knowing the depth of our gratitude,
to proclaim our thanks.
This holiday season I want to put aside my boomer consumer ways and
make my attitude gratitude,
to toss away — well, at least recycle —
all those catalog images of perfection.
I want to give gifts of gratitude, to create and give away memories,
to express love, and take time to be with someone.
I want to write out memories, a letter to a friend,
and reach out to new people in friendship.
I want to give from my many blessings
to make a difference in Richmond and New Orleans.
How about you?
I invite you in this holiday season
to put aside any proclivity you have
toward boomer consumer ways
and to make your attitude gratitude.
None of us will live forever,
and all that accumulated stuff won’t really matter.
I invite you to open your heart,
do what you can to spread the good news of compassion.
It is your relationships that make a difference.
I know it is not safe for everyone to try to repair family relationships.
If it is not for you, I hope you can strengthen the other relationships
around you,
giving the gift of compassion to someone in your family of choice.
Follow the Rev. Clark Wells’ advice. Draw up a list of the nicest gifts you’ve received. You may discover, like him, they are gifts that “have been enabling and confirming, bestowing understanding and self-esteem, help in time of trouble and delight for ordinary days.”
For all of us,
entering as fully as we can into the life of this religious community
would be a gift to ourselves, and to those around us.
Let us give appreciative listening and authentic meeting to one another.
Put the gift of a Guest At Your Table box on your meal table
and as you add to it each day,
give thanks for a community helping you make a difference in the world.
In these days to come,
we have choices to make:
boomer consumer? or attitude gratitude?
Happy Holidays! ♦