OH MY GOD!
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
November 30, 2003
I have a friend who celebrates Thanksgiving as Creation Day. Sixteen years ago his wife received five fertilized eggs as part of an in vitro procedure — on Thanksgiving Day no less! Nine months later she gave birth to a baby boy. Every Thanksgiving they give thanks for this miracle of life made possible by a miracle of science. Of course today, that boy is a teenager, so their thanks may waiver occasionally, but isn’t that why parents keep baby pictures within such easy view for a long long time? We really do want to sustain our gratitude for the life we’ve brought into the world and for life itself, whose mystery and miracle never cease to astound us.
"i thank You God for most this amazing day," wrote the poet e.e. cummings.
Gratitude is a form of grace, preventing us from buying into the illusion that we are Creation’s last stop. Thanksgiving stops us short, suggesting that we pause in the fast track of our daily existence, gather ‘round a table— usually a rather solid table holding an embarrassing abundance of nourishment— and, if we can contain ourselves long enough, we pause and give thanks for "all things which come to us as gifts of being from sources beyond ourselves." We give thanks also for friends, for that large and motley circle of friends described by Max Coots–generous friends, feisty friends, longtime friends, funny friends, crotchety friends too, and for friends now gone, who have fed us so richly as our lives overlapped.
Is it any wonder that Thanksgiving is the favorite holiday of so many and the only holiday that transcends the distinctions of America’s veritable cornucopia of faith traditions? My favorite rendition of this reality was penned just over a hundred years ago by Finley Peter Dunne in a quirky journal known as Mr. Dooley’s Opinions:
"(Thanksgiving)," he declared, "'Twas founded be th' Puritans to give thanks f'r bein' presarved fr'm th' Indyans, an' . . . we keep it to give thanks we are presarved fr'm th' Puritans."
Of course there are Puritans–or rather neo-Puritans–who probably keep it to give thanks that they’re preserved from Unitarian Universalists!
Whatever we claim in the litany of things for which we’re thankful, what’s central to all this is the giving of thanks, gratitude. As we stand on the threshold of holidays distinct to several of our world’s religions, it occurs to me that gratitude lies a short distance from reverence, and reverence lies at the heart of this season that includes Christmas and Chanukah and Diwali and Kwanzaa and the recently concluded Ramadan. Of course it’s hard to discern this reverence when the lights of holiday commerce twinkle in our streets and stores well before Thanksgiving, but I’m talking about what’s at the heart of it all, and I believe that is reverence.
Within our faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism there’s a conversation astir. It’s been simmering on a back burner for decades, but over this past year it’s been placed on a definitively front burner, as increasing numbers of Unitarian Universalists are compelled to speak of the spiritual forces that move within us and through us and emerge from Creation itself, a manifestation of the sacred in our lives.
Rev. William Sinkford, President of our denominational body, points out that our shared Principles and Purposes include not a single term for the divine, the holy, the transcendent. As much as we talk about the inherent worth and dignity of every person, our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the interdependent web, there’s not a hint of the sacred there. Bill recalls that when these principles and purposes were adopted almost twenty years ago, a compromise was struck. Those sticky terms of reverence were allocated to a separate and distinct text that names the sources of our faith tradition, sources that include: "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves," "Humanist teachings which….warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit," "Direct experience of that transforming mystery and wonder," moving us to an "openness to the forces which create and uphold life."
Is it any wonder that we have such a hard time saying what we believe when we find ourselves in a conversation with someone who has not a clue about our faith tradition and simply asks: "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" It’s a tough call when our only common language of belief has been subject to Solomon’s solution: You’re quarreling over the baby? Fine! Cut him in half! So one half of our baby is principles and purposes; the other half, those sources of our living but highly ambivalent tradition.
Whether we can put the baby back together again, like our own Humpty Dumpty, is anyone’s guess, but at least we’re talking about it. And language is important. It’s important, because the words and phrases that we use and choose to identify what matters most to us mirror the experiences that we’ve had that matter most to us. Those experiences give rise to our language, and our language, our chosen language, both opens and closes us to faith experiences.
But back to Bill and what he says on the spur of the moment, when someone asks him what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.
"The Unitarian side of our family tree tells us that there is only one God, one Spirit of Life, one Power of Love."
"The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, and valuing the spark of divinity that is in every human being. So, Unitarian Universalism stands for: one God, no one left behind."
Now this doesn’t have to be the stump speech for everyone who shares our liberal faith. We’re a large tent, a large and I daresay sacred tent–large enough to encompass many searches and a rich and varied language of reverence and sacred enough to encompass the endless varieties of the experience of reverence.
When I think of experiences of reverence and of the language of reverence, I think instantly of that early 20th century theologian, philosopher, master organist, Bach historian, and missionary physician, Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer developed an approach to life that he called reverence for life. It evolved for him over the decades of his medical practice serving the indigenous peoples of Labarene, in the West African nation of Gabon.
"As we know life in ourselves, we want to understand life in the universe, in order to enter into harmony with it," he wrote in 1936. But Schweitzer didn’t find harmony. In Lambarene, he bore witness to such a magnitude of suffering, that he found it impossible "to imagine that human life is nature’s goal" or that the "Creative Force" even concerns itself with preserving life. Rather than abandoning any deference to the Creative Force though, Schweitzer bowed before Life itself, claiming that "the first spiritual act in [one’s] experience" is "reverence for life." This reverence for life emerged out of what he termed "fidelity to my own nature" and blossomed into a regard for all life as sacred.
"I must regard other life than my own with equal reverence," he wrote, "for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself. ...Reverence for life is a universal ethic… We are born of other lives; we possess the capacities to bring still other lives into existence… So nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence…"
Where does this take him? To an understanding that, in Schweitzer’s words, "God does not rest content with commanding ethics. He gives it to us in our very hearts."
A large and over-arching God, indeed, a Spirit of Life, a Creative Force, that infuses our nature with the spark of divinity that allows us to hold all life sacred and the free will to act accordingly or otherwise. The spiritual life and everyday ethics are inextricably bound. Perhaps there’s cause for hope then that we Unitarian Universalists can affirm our principles and purposes and the sources of our living tradition under a common tent.
Let’s get concrete, real concrete. The #6, the A train, the E train. I take the subway almost every day. Once in awhile–usually during rush hour when I’m packed in like a vertical sardine–the car that I’m riding on becomes still. I mean really still. Nothing in particular has happened. No shootings. No one jumping on the tracks to halt the train. It’s just this astonishing silence.
I begin to notice my fellow passengers, as if we suddenly inhabit our own universe. I see faces with every shade of joy and distress and a rainbow of skin tones and profiles markedly different but each confirming a human countenance. Like Schweitzer, I’m compelled to realize how interdependent we are and how utterly dependent we are on forces beyond ourselves and the boundaries of that momentary world. And we’re in transit, just like we’ll be when the silence ebbs and the din returns and the train stops and we scatter. We’re in transit, yet still dependent on forces beyond ourselves and still ultimately interdependent.
Here I am, back to gratitude. For the unexpected silences, for the epiphany of solidarity, for the overwhelming mutuality that just is, and for that experience of the sacred that refuses to be cloistered by the conventions and compromises of how we name the sacred.
In this aftermath of Thanksgiving Day, gratitude resonates and lingers as we lean into the advent of so many holidays and holy days, each an interpretation of the sacred and surely celebrated by a compelling sample of those fellow travelers with whom I inhabited that silent subway car. Schweitzer was right. Reverence for life is a universal ethic. It dissolves the illusion of the other and allows us to embrace all of life—in spirit, in language, and in practice.
But how? How does this reverence for life call us to be? What does deep and layered gratitude for life call us to do? How might we honor the divine force that goes by so many names, none of them wrong?
We are challenged in countless ways to respond to the gifts we’ve been given and the gift of life itself. In this slice of history that we occupy and in this nation whose Thanksgiving table seems so quintessentially American, the writer/theologian James Carroll speaks to me in his musings of just a few days ago.
"On Thanksgiving," he writes, "we pause to reflect on what we have been given, but we also measure what we are making of our abundance. It is a time, therefore, of moral reckoning.
Can we be thankful for our national plenitude," he asks, "without reinforcing the virulent idea that we Americans are somehow destined to be blessed above others? …. Is it possible to feel grateful, that is, without feeling triumphal?"
It’s not necessary to choose between the joy of this day or any holiday and attentiveness to what a reverence for life might call us to do or to see. Gratitude is large enough to encompass it all. As Carroll says:
"…. we do have so much to be grateful for….why shouldn't our hearts be full? ….. And yes, admit it. Our hearts, equally, are sorely pressed with worry. [Our nation’s leaders want] us to ignore the human cost of the war. ….Yet [we as] Americans know that there [were] empty places at Thanksgiving tables this week, and the end of Ramadan for untold Muslim families in two nations [was] equally a time of grief.
That we human beings, all in the name of virtue, have fallen to killing each other again shows that prayers of thanks must equally be prayers for mercy."
For the fragile miracle of this life, of my life, of your lives, I am so grateful. For the wonder of it all, I am compelled to say, "Oh my God!" For the countless ways in which we trip over our own feet of clay in expressing gratitude, so quick to mistake the gifts we are given for abundance to be secured through acts of war, I say also, "Oh my God!"
Where is our reverence for life as a universal ethic? How do we honor the better angels of our human nature? How do we honor the sacred? How might we restore wholeness to that cleft that moves through our own Unitarian Universalism and let go of trying to micro-manage the language of reverence? Call it God, Creative Force, Allah, Yahweh, it doesn’t really matter. But it does matter that we embody a penchant for gratitude, an inkling of the divine, at the very least a gnawing hunch that we just might not be Creation’s last stop, and here we are under the same tent in a common universe. Here we are in the same subway car on a fast moving train.
I think again of that teenager, that well-loved son whose beginning was planted on Thanksgiving Day sixteen years ago. A walking miracle he is, but no less so than any one of us and surely no less so than each and every life that inhabits this good earth, divine sparks all. Now what will happen if we begin to believe that?
Oh my God!
Amen.
Sources:
Anecdote of child conceived in vitro on Thanksgiving Day, used with permission from the source, which shall remain anonymous.
James Carroll, "Of Thanks and Mercy," in the Boston Globe, November 25, 2003 and at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1125-02.htm
Rev. Max Coots, "Let Us Give Thanks," in the "Minister’s Monday Morning Memo," Birmingham Unitarian Church, November 6, 2001.
e. e. cummings, "i thank You God for most this amazing day," reprinted in Poems of Doubt and Belief: An Anthology of Modern Religious Poetry, Edited by Tom F. Driver and Robert Pack, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1964.
Richard M. Fewkes, "We Lift Up Our Hearts in Thanks," in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 515.
Albert Schweitzer, "The Ethics of Reverence for Life,"" Christendom, 1 , 1936, 225-39. Found at http://www1.chapman.edu/schweitzer/sch.reading4.html
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Lagoon/6069/quotes.html
http://www.swuuc.org/fjuuc/Guests/Sinkford_sermon.html
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