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Poetry for Order of Service

For the sun and the dawn
Which we did not create;
For the moon and the evening
Which we did not make;
For food which we plant
But cannot grow...
We lift up our hearts in thanks this day.

(Richard M. Fewkes)

Opening words

This is indeed a beautiful "Thanksgiving Sunday" that has been given unto us.
Let us then rejoice in it and be glad.
And let us count our many, many blessings:
Let us be grateful for the incredible gift of life,
For the capacity to see, to feel, to hear, and to understand.
Let us be grateful for all those who have graced our lives with their presence and thus been a blessing to us.
Let us be grateful for our home, for this city and this state, and for this vast and abundant country stretching from sea to sea.
Let us be grateful for our church home, and for this sanctuary and building in which we are privileged to gather.
And let us then be especially grateful for the ties of love which bind us together, giving dignity, meaning, worth, and joy to all our days.

Lighting the Chalice

We drink from wells we did not dig.
We have been warmed by fires we did not build.
We light this chalice in thanksgiving
For those who have passed their light to us.

Responsive reading

MINISTER: On this Sunday set aside for giving thanks, let each one of us, and all of us together, express our gratitude for the incredible gift of life.

CONGREGATION: We are grateful for our beautiful world - for lakes and woods - oceans and deserts - mountains and plains - for the texture of land and the color of the sky.

MINISTER: We are grateful for the seasons - spring and autumn - summer and winter - warmth and cold - sunshine and rain - the wheeling of the heavens - the wandering of the planets - rise of sun - face of moon.

CONGREGATION: We are grateful for the abundance of the earth - trees and flowers - birds and fish and animals - for simple grass and all that grows from the soil.

MINISTER: We are grateful for parents and children, friends and community, and for every occasion of celebration.

CONGREGATION: We are grateful for the sound of voices, for songs and bells and poems, and for smiles on faces passing by.

MINISTER: We are grateful for all those who came before us, those who planted and built and toiled, those who suffered and sacrificed, those who established ideals of justice, equity, and democracy.

CONGREGATION: We are grateful for the innumerable gifts we have inherited, and grateful also for the responsibility of our privileges.

MINISTER: Let our gratitude pour forth without restraint to light up our world with joy.

CONGREGATION: For joy, like love, can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.

Reading

My reading this morning is very much a part of the sermon - really a shortened version of it - and so I ask for your careful attention to it. It's from the American poet and essayist, Gary Snyder, who, although raised in a Christian context, for most of his adult life has studied and maintained a Buddhist spiritual discipline. The essay is titled, "GRACE," as in saying a "grace" before a meal.

The primary ethical teaching of all times and places is "cause no unnecessary harm." The Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists use the Sanskrit term ahimsa, "non-harming." They commonly interpret this to mean "don't take life,' with varying degrees of latitude allowed for special situations. In the eastern traditions "cause no unnecessary harm" is the precept behind vegetarianism.

Non-vegetarians too try to understand and practice the teaching of "non-harming." People who live entirely by hunting, such as the Eskimo, know that taking life is an act requiring a spirit of gratitude and care, and rigorous mindfulness. They say, "All our food is souls."

Plants are alive too. All of nature is a gift-exchange, a potluck banquet, and there is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death.

Is this a flaw in the universe? A sign of a sullied condition of being? "Nature red in tooth and claw?" Some people read it this way, leading to a disgust with self, with humanity, and with life itself. They are on the wrong fork of the path. Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than the existential conditions they seek to transcend.

So again to the beginning. We all take life to live. Weston LaBarre says, "The first religion is to kill god and eat him," or her. The shimmering food-chain, food-web, is the scary, beautiful, condition of the biosphere. Non-harming must be understood as an approach to all of living and being, not just a one-dimensional moral injunction. Eating is truly a sacrament.

How to accomplish this? We can start by saying Grace. Grace is the first and last poem, the few words we say to clear our hearts, and teach the children, and welcome the guest, all at the same time. To say a good grace you must be conscious of what you're doing, not guilt-ridden and evasive. So we look at the nature of eggs, apples, and ox-tail ragout. What we see is plentitude, even excess, a great sexual exuberance. Millions of grains of grass-seed to become flour, millions of codfish fry that will never -- and must never -- grow to maturity: sacrifices to the food-chain. And if we eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, that we eat; let us not deceive ourselves. Americans should know that cows stand up to their hocks in feed-lot manure waiting to be transported to their table, that virgin forests in the Amazon are clear-cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Even a root in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from earth, air, water.

Looking closer at this world of one-ness, we see all these beings as of our flesh, as our children, our lovers. We see ourselves too as an offering to the continuation of life.

This is strong stuff. Such truth is not easy. But hang on: if we eat each other, is it not a giant act of love we live within? Christ's blood and body becomes clear: The bread blesses you, as you bless it.

So at our house we say a Buddhist verse of Grace:

We venerate the Three Treasures
Buddha, Dharma, Sangha
And are thankful for this meal
The work of many people
And the sharing of other forms of life.

Meditation

Let us now, on this "Thanksgiving Sunday," silently reflect, each in our way, on the rugged miracle that is life, and on all that graces and blesses our lives.

"AWAKENING GRATITUDE"

As it is

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,
[But] Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

(Walt Whitman, from "Song of the Open Road")

The question I want to address with you this "Thanksgiving Sunday" is perhaps the existentially most difficult question with which we human beings deal. It's the question of whether, given the realities and conditions of our world, we can love it and be grateful for it? Can we, in the knowledge of our own coming death and in the face of the necessity of causing death to maintain our life, embrace life and be grateful for it? Can we embrace our world as it is, with all that it is, and be grateful for it?

There are multitudes of religions and philosophies that turn their face from this world. They do so in order to make it through this world. Only the promise and pull of a future life in another place and another time gives them the strength and courage to live in this place at this time. Most religions and philosophies have a difficult time looking this present reality full in the face and saying, "Yes" to it as it is. It should not be too hard to understand why this is so.

One life at a time

But one of the identifying marks of our religion is that it is a this-worldly religion. "One life at a time" could be said to be our motto. Whether or not one believes there is another reality beyond this one, and whether or not one believes in continued personal consciousness beyond the grave, what matters for our religious life is this reality.

It is here on this earth and here in this dispensation that we have taken our stand. "Eternity" is not so much considered to be a long time after this time, but rather the depth dimension of this time, the experience of the fullness of this present reality.

The Kingdom of God, we have said, is not "out there" in another realm, or "over there" in another place; the Kingdom of God is to be found in this life. It is here; it is now; it is among us; it is within us. This is our "field of dreams."

"Is this heaven?" That's the question asked in the delightful movie, Field of Dreams. The father returned from the grave to play catch with his son asks him, "Is this heaven?"

"No, Dad," replies the son, "this is Iowa."

"Oh," says the father, "I thought it might be heaven."

So what if one were to return from the grave to tell you that this land where you now dwell is paradise? It might be easier to believe here in Port Townsend than in a lot of places, but the point of the movie, of course, was to say that the place where you live, wherever you live, is paradise. This is the land where the miracles occur. This is the "field of dreams." Or, turning it a bit, as another movie does, "This is as good as gets."

This has been our faith - a this-worldly faith. Reverence for this life, which is the only life of which we have concrete knowledge.

Thus, the admonition in our faith is to open your eyes and wake up to the reality about you, to be aware of what you have, and not look past what you have to something that might or might not be in a future life.

Is this your faith? Do you embrace this world and this life as it is? Do you love this world and your life in it as it is? Are you grateful for this world and your life as it is?

Says the poet, Mary Oliver:

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life."

(from "One or Two Things," New and Selected Poems)

Again she says:

Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

(from "October," New and Selected Poems)

And once more:

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

("When Death Comes," New and Selected Poems)

Have you found a way to love this world and your life in it? Have you found a way to be grateful for this world and your life?

We'll build a land

Our religion has not only been a religion of paying attention to the value and meaning of this life in the present, our religion has also been a religion of seeking a better world for the future, an improved world with "the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all," as the covenant of our religious association states.

We want to be involved in creating a better world, a more just society. We want to pass on to future generations more than we have known. "We'll Build a Land..." "I'm On My Way..." "Forward through the Ages..."

And does it seem to you, as it does sometimes to me, that often we are run ragged in this quest to improve our world and our lives, so focused on making a better future world for ourselves and others that we hardly have time to love and appreciate our present world?

How do we put these two impulses together: our longing to improve this world, and our desire to love and appreciate this world as it is?

The source of our conflict

What is it that brings about this pull of impulses, this tug-of-war tension, between present life and future life?

The source of this tension can be stated quite simply (though it is an amazingly complex phenomenon): it is the evolution of self-consciousness, the awakening into self-conscious awareness, which includes the following three main elements:

1. the awareness of personal identity;
2. the awareness of individual death;
3. the capacity to project ourselves into other lives in both their life and death.

This is what self-consciousness primarily comes to. This, as the poet Robinson Jeffers says, is "our honor and hardship."

We have awakened into the awareness that we are life. We have awakened into the awareness that we want to live, to live well, and to live better.

But you can't awaken into the awareness of life without also awakening into the awareness of death, the shock of realizing that this miraculous carrier of life will also dissolve in a process we call "death."

And along with this awakening into the knowledge of our life and death, there is an awakening into the knowledge of other life, the awareness that we are life in the midst of life that also wants to live.

We have the capacity to project ourselves into other life, which is the origin of ethics - the idea that we ought to love and care for our neighbor even as we love and care for our self.

And the accompanying question: Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me?

As we project our awareness of life onto and into other life we begin to see that our "neighbor" can even be that pesky insect that disturbs our peace. And the question of whether to swat or save that insect life enters our consciousness. We come face to face with the terrible truth that life feeds on life, that to maintain our own life we have to take other life that wants to live just as badly as we do.

How do we come to grips with this collision in our consciousness? Is there a flaw running down the middle of the fabric of reality that our consciousness has exposed?

This is the burden of self-consciousness!

The burden of consciousness

In a couple of months I plan to begin facilitating a study of some of the poems of Mary Oliver. In poem after poem Mary Oliver is seen to be struggling with her own awareness. Often she wishes self-consciousness away. She wishes she could be like the animals and other forms of life that seem to go on their way without "forethought of grief," as poet Wendell Berry puts it.

("The Peace of Wild Things.")

In one poem the poet takes note of the lilies of the field, remembering the words of the spiritual master who said that they "toil not, neither do they spin."

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.
They rise and fall
in the wedge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,
and have no closets and cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful
as that old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face
of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself
even in those feathery fields?
When van Gogh
preached to the poor
of course he wanted to save someone -
most of all himself.
He wasn't a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas
it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river -
where the ravishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues -
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

("Lilies, New and Selected Poems)

Do you wish sometimes, or often, that you could just rise and float away from this difficult world?

Mary Oliver tried to project her life into the life of a lily of the fields but found she could not really do it. She found that if she were a lily she would keep waiting for the green face of the hummingbird to come by. No escape for her from consciousness.

Embracing the world as it is

Can we embrace this world with its realities and conditions? Can we embrace our own consciousness that looks upon this world and wishes for and imagines a different and better world?

In my reading this morning from Gary Snyder we find a person who does attempt to embrace this world as it is. He embraces the reality of death as part of the equation: his own death, death that he must bring about in order to live, and death in general as an integral and necessary part of the whole.

"Cause no unnecessary harm," he says. That's the main ethical precept. But, on the other hand, don't apologize for your own life. And don't apologize for the necessity of taking other life to maintain your own life. And don't apologize for trying to fashion a more just and beautiful world.

And when the time comes in the time of your life to let go of your life, let go of it willingly, completing your small circle of birth and death within the larger wholeness of Being.

Above all, and through it all, be aware and be grateful. Make of this potluck banquet, this life-exchange, a sacrament, an act of mindfulness and holiness.

However you draw the line, Snyder says, whatever you determine it means for you "to cause no unnecessary harm" - whether to take animal life or not, whether to swat or save an insect, whether to participate in war or to be a pacifist - however you find your way through these issues, let it be a sacrament, an act of reverence, accomplished in the awareness of the miracle of Life and Being that includes and incorporates both birth and death.

The Prophet

The Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran, had the same basic idea. He begins with the wish that reality could be different than it is, but then he affirms it, making of it a sacrament. Listen to these words of "the Prophet":

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it be an act of worship....
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is nothing but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.

(from "On Eating and Drinking," The Prophet)

In other words, there's a unity of Life and Being that transcends the twin poles of birth and death.

The basis of courage

That, it seems to me, is how we have the courage and the power to embrace this world as it is: by focusing on that transcending unity, by seeing that we are part of a larger reality, that we belong to Being-itself, and thus we can look into the face of death and see the Life that embraces and transcends it.

That is my encouragement to you on this "Thanksgiving Sunday": the encouragement not to turn from death, but to move toward it, to embrace it. Because as you move toward death you move in the direction of perceiving a larger identity, a reality larger than your individual identity.

This is what the Buddhists so wonderfully teach: the idea that our self is an illusion, ultimately an illusion. This body and brain is just a temporary conjoining of the stuff of matter and spirit. Our real identity must be with Being-itself, letting go of the individual self, seeing that it is secondary. It is real but only secondarily real; primary is the Reality that rolls through all things, putting on bodies and throwing them off as one dresses in the morning and undresses again in the evening.

A payoff

There's a payoff for being willing and able to look at death and see it as one pole of a larger reality, a payoff for seeing this self as something secondary and temporary. The payoff is the experience of gratitude.

Because when you take death into yourself, when you go toward it rather than flee from it, then you become free to enjoy the miracle of the moment, the marvel of your present existence. You are related to "yourself," but you are not tied to it. You are connected to the moment, but you are not identified with it. Thus, you can enjoy it; you can be grateful for what you have here and now.

The teacher

Death, paradoxically, can be the awakener to the miracle of Life.

Surely you have felt this on various occasions when the threat of death or loss has shaken you from slumber. Suddenly you come alive to what you have. In that moment you are so grateful, you are so very, very grateful for what you have.

Death is, or can be, the teacher, the awakener. Says Carlos Castaneda:

Death is our eternal companion.
It is always to our left, at an arm's length....
The thing to do when you're impatient
is to turn to your left
and ask advice from your death.
An immense amount of pettiness is dropped
if your death makes a gesture to you,
or if you catch a glimpse of it,
or if you just have the feeling
that your companion is there watching you.

How strange, how utterly strange, that the consciousness of death, which has the potential to drive us away from this world, also has the potential to precipitate our greatest gratitude for the world!

And how strange, how very strange, that the greater our embrace of death and the more we can let go of our identity with this body and brain, the greater, paradoxically, can be our gratitude for it!

Communion

Incidentally, the poet Mary Oliver did find her way through the "burden of consciousness." Like Gary Snyder and Kahlil Gibran, the sacramental nature of our life was revealed to her. I end with one of her "communion poems" titled, "Blue Heron."

Like a pin
of blue lightning
it thrusts
among the pads,
plucking up
frogs, flipping them
in mid-air, so that they
slide, neatly
face-first, down
the long throat.
I don't know
about God,
but didn't Jesus say:
"This is my body,"
meaning, the bread -
and meaning, also,
the things of this world?
This isn't really
a question.
It is the hard
and terrible truth
we live with,
feeding ourselves
every day.
The bird
stared again into the water,
and dashed forward a little,
and stabbed
and swallowed,
and then just stood there
shining,
like a blue rose.

("Blue Heron," White Pine)

Benediction

Now may peace be in our hearts,
and understanding in our minds,
may courage steel our wills,
and the love of truth forever guide us. Amen.

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this chalice
But not the light of truth,
The warmth of community,
Or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts
Until we are together again.

(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A. Bode at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on "Thanksgiving Sunday," November 21, 2004. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette at the Fellowship, may differ slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)