Thanksgiving is a mixed up time this year. I’m thankful, but…. I’m thankful, yet…. How can I be thankful when….? For some folks, who squirm at the very idea of giving thanks to any higher being, let alone one called God, the issue is moot altogether. Such is the case with the optimistic soul of atheist persuasion who rose on one fine autumn morning, gobbled down a hearty breakfast, and set out for a hike in the woods.

"What splendid trees! What powerful rivers! What magnificent streams of light! What endearing animals!" he thought to himself. "How grand are the accidents of evolution!" As he paced on alongside a sparkling river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. Looking back, he saw an enormous grizzly charging towards him. He ran as fast as he could through the trees. The crushing sounds coming from behind told him the grizzly was gaining on him. Almost breathless, he somehow managed to run even faster. His heart was pounding. Then, Whomp! he fell to the ground, tripped by a pesky tree root. He rolled over to pick himself up, but the bear was practically on top of him, reaching out with her left paw and raising her right paw to strike him. At that instant, he cried out, "Oh my God!"

Time stopped. The bear froze. The forest was silent. Even the river stopped its flow. As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came from the sky, "You deny my existence for all these years, teach others that I don't exist, credit creation to a cosmic accident, and have the nerve to enjoy my handiwork! Do you expect me to get you out of this fix?"

The man looked directly into the light. "I know I would be a hypocrite to say, ‘Yes, please God, get me out of here,’ but perhaps you could do something to the bear!" "Very well" said the voice. The light went out. The river ran. The sounds of the forest resumed. ...and then the bear dropped her right paw, brought both paws together, bowed her head and spoke: "Lord, for this food which I am about to receive, I am truly thankful."

—(from a story sent by Colleen Cackowski (ColleenC@GoStarPower.com)

Needless to say, I don’t remember blessing any penitent bears during last Sunday’s Blessing of the Animals.

Thanksgiving is just all mixed up this year. For our hiker, so full of certainty about the day ahead and where he belonged on the food chain, and for all of us, so heady and hopeful as we basked in the sunlight of September’s earliest days, our basic sense of safety has been forever jarred.

None of us can doubt that the sorrow over those we have lost has been deep and the outpouring of compassion has been generous and profuse for families in grief and for all who have been displaced from jobs and homes. None of us can doubt that we have seen a surge of pride in the freedom for which America stands, a pride that streams through our national consciousness, for even though freedom for all is too often rendered as freedom for some, it is still a far more generous set of freedoms than we would experience in the lands that gave birth to the terror we have known.

None of us can doubt that we are also seeing the emergence of a peace movement that cannot be compared with other peace movements, for it is not essentially pacifist but seeks a multilateral strategy under the auspices of the UN and the venue of an international court to bring to justice those whom we identify as the perpetrators. None of us can doubt that this is an opportunity, however unwelcome, to hold up a large mirror to our own nation’s injustices and incursions into international terrorism. None of us can doubt that fear has become an undercurrent in our national psyche. After the cataclysm of mid-September, after the arbitrary outbreaks of anthrax, What’s next, we wonder? When Flight 587 went down in the residential neighborhood of Belle Harbor, we gaped in horror while breathing a large sigh of relief that at least it seemed not to be the handiwork of terrorists, though the losses are every bit as shattering. None of us can doubt that it is a wondrous thing to see women in Kabul shed their burkas, lift their faces to the sun, and hope once again for lives worth living.

There is much that suggests we give thanks, and there is much that explains why we hold back from a full-hearted outpouring of gratitude and celebration.

I commonly pair Thanksgiving with a crisp autumn day, with just enough leaves clinging to branches that offer their final spectacle of gold and scarlet wand waving. I rise early to stuff the turkey–remembering that my Mother told me never to stuff it the day before lest we succumb to ptomaine poisoning the day after. So I rise early to do it all that morning, and throughout the day we whiff the aromas pouring from the kitchen with almost as much relish as we indulge in the feast that follows.

Yet this Thanksgiving was marked by something that I have hardly ever associated with this holiday. I suppose I would call it a quality of lamentation. Not that each of us sitting here this morning has not known other Thanksgivings that we have grieved over a death in the family or known anxiety because of a lost job or a trying relationship with a spouse or a child. Not that each of us sitting here this morning has not known other tattered times that coincided with this or other holidays. We have. Many of us remember well the November 22nd of 38 years ago, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Camelot vanished from the horizon. We remember well and vividly. But what marks Thanksgiving this year is the scale and intensity of our spirits stretched in so many directions. There’s just so much to feel and to figure out. There’s just so much.

How the words of our hymn speak to me in this season.

Amid the flood of stimuli that threatens to bombard our souls, "our vernal wisdom moves from ripe to sere," from full to parched. What the day holds has always been uncertain. It is the depth of uncertainty, a dusk that hovers, that draws us in to ponder this season.

Forget for a moment that Thanksgiving is a holiday or family gathered around a table that bends. Thanksgiving is a peculiar state of being. Its counterpoint, I suppose, is a mindset of entitlement, a mindset that I deserve all the good stuff that happens to me and don’t deserve whatever mars my sense of well-being. Giving thanks, on the other hand, is an acknowledgment that whatever I have and enjoy is a gift. It is not the rightly owned property of my life. Nothing is. The 13^th-century poet, Rumi, born in that part of the Persian Empire now known as Afghanistan, knew this well:

—quoted by Christopher Merrill,
The Hour of Lead, Thoughts on America:
Writers Respond to Crisis,
oriononline.org

Last year at about this time, a young woman named Heather, a college senior home for winter break, was out driving on holiday errands. She didn’t make it back. A drunk driver smashed into the side of her car, and her life was snuffed out, just like that. No warning, just like that. Just like there was no warning for what happened on September 11, just like there was no warning when that plane went down over Belle Harbor.

Ann Sill, a longtime friend of Heather’s father, Tom, tells of a conversation with him a few months after his daughter’s death. In the public arena of a diner, he leaned across the table and within earshot of most folks present, announced: "’I don’t know if I believe in a God, but if the bastard exists, I hope we never meet face to face.’" Ann listened. She just sat there with him and took in his grief. And she realized that Tom’s words echoed those bone-deep laments of the Psalms, of Job, and of the book of Lamentations itself. No less caustic than Tom’s words, she reminds us, are the words of the poet of Lamentations:

He has made my teeth grind on gravel,

And made me cower in ashes;

My soul is bereft of peace,

I have forgotten what happiness is;

So I say, ‘Gone is my pleasure in life,

and anything I might hope for from God.

And then a few verses later:

What is going on? Looking into the face of her friend, bruised in mind and spirit by the loss of his daughter, Ann Sill watches a peculiar unfolding across that rocky ground of love and despair and has this to say:

—Ann Sill, "When Words Fail," The Other Side, November-December 2001

It’s a thin line we walk. It’s a thin line when we "rage against the dying of the light," especially when that light goes out on those so dear to us, especially when it hits us like lightning, and our lives are turned upside down. It’s a thin line we’ve been walking as we vacillate between love and despair, between compassion and vengeance, since that bright September day. And when only a few weeks ago smoke rose over Belle Harbor, it was a thin line we walked between horror at the loss and relief that it probably wasn’t an act of terrorism.

It’s a slender line that connects the seemingly unconnectable, yet is agile and resilient as it winds through the conflicting passions of our souls and weaves its way into the holidays upon us.

We have barely left the high ambiguity of this Thanksgiving before entering a season for which we are not quite prepared. Rarely does Ramadan, the Muslim "month of blessing," overlap with Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. It does this year. And then comes Christmas and then Kwanzaa, the "first fruits of the harvest." What a melange of holidays and holy days. What an intersection of observance of what matters to so many millions, so many billions on our planet.

The scale and intensity of our spirits are stretched in so many directions. There’s just so much to feel and take in. There’s just so much.

Shortly after September 11, Kelly Murphy Mason, our seminarian here at All Souls, reflected on what she calls "the Sacrament of Gratitude:" of waking to "the shock of being spared," of the "tender mercy of…how many managed to escape downtown alive." And she called to mind our need to "fully appreciate the sweetness of still having so much to lose."

Of course it’s a bittersweet notion, "the sweetness of still having so much to lose," for many of us have lost so much. Many of us, like our morning hiker, were taken completely by surprise. Many of us have raged at a God we conceived of in such varying proportions and with such widely strewn expectations. Many of us have broken bread over our Thanksgiving tables with a lump in our throats as we dared perhaps to be thankful for whatever blessings we recognized.

All of us are reminded that nothing is sure, and nothing is ever really ours. It never was. It never will be. Yet, as we lean across our tables of thanksgiving, as we take in the outpourings of love and despair, grief and rage, fear and uncertainty, that those we love have brought to a table now larger than we could possibly have imagined, we just might touch the hand of that angel rising from deep within us. We just might take the hand of that angel of hope in whom despair and love quite naturally coalesce, and move into a slow dance across a thin line that is the rough and wondrous spine of this world we know and share. And for this dance I am thankful. Amen.

 

 

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