New Reasons to Be Thankful

November 25, 2001

I have two readings this morning, both poems that I love. The first is "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests
in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

The second reading is entitled "Picnic, Lightening," by Billy Collins, who was recently named the U.S. poet laureate. The poet explains in a note that the title comes from a line from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which I might note is a book not often quoted in church. The line has Lolita explain, "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightening) when I was three."

Picnic, Lightening

It is possible to be struck by a meteor
or a single-engine plane
while reading in a chair at home.
Safes drop from rooftops
and then flatten the odd pedestrian
mostly within the panels of comics,
but still, we know it is possible,
as well as the flash of summer lightening,
the thermos toppling over,
spilling out on the grass.

And we know the message
can be delivered from within.
The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body's rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens-
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next.

I'm hardly a mathematician, but I love ratios. They help me evaluate things. Three parts good to one part bad - that's a pretty good deal. Three parts bad to one part good - Nah!

The word ratio comes to us straight from the Latin; in Latin it means reason. Ratios help me be rational, and right now I'm trying to be rational about the holiday season. This can be a real challenge for me, because I'm a bit of a humbug type. For purposes of comparing the holidays against each other, I use what I call the meaning-to-burden ratio, and by my calculations Thanksgiving offers the best deal. It lacks the burden of the Christmas shopping and gift frenzy that has just started its annual grinding march through our lives, and it's long on the meaning that comes from breaking bread, from communion, with people who matter to us.

As Harold says every Sunday when the announcements end and worship begins, It is good to be together. This sentence is deceptively simple - these six little words constitute a deep expression of Unitarian Universalist theology. At the core of our theology is the understanding that it is by coming together that we summon the holy. It is not for nothing that the ritual of communion goes back at least 4,000 years - people have been summoning the holy in community all the way back into prehistory. The Thanksgiving feast is a wonderful expression of this fundamental human yearning for connection - for connection with other people, and for connection with the ultimate force of the universe that, through mysteries that defy adequate explanation, causes the seeds to crack open and wheat to sprout and become the bread we share.

The fact that we get access to all this meaning and a feast too - all that wonderful food - piles bonus points on the good side of my meaning-to-burden balance scale. The heartburn goes on the burden side. I hope all you have recovered by now. I'm getting there.

At my house every year we prepare dishes that allow people who can't join us to have a presence at our table anyway. My mother, for one, is present even though she died more a dozen years ago. Her spirit is with us in the wonderful pumpkin chiffon pie that we make from her recipe. My friend Cary Kenney, who gave me my first cat, lives in Florida now but she is present nonetheless, in her special cornbread. I love Thanksgiving.

I also have a ratio for evaluating sermons. I call this one the meaning-to-platitudes ratio, and too often at holiday time, in churches across the land, the platitudes overpower the meaning. It's easy to mouth familiar words about how thankful we should be for the cornucopia whose abundance spills out across our lives, for the spare beauty of this harsh season, for family and friends, and for this community and this beautiful meetinghouse where we come together. These truly are things to be thankful for, the fundamental things of our lives, and I do not wish to suggest anything else - except that we shouldn't leave it at that.

This year there are new reasons to be thankful, even though this is the first Thanksgiving since terror became a defining aspect of our day-to-day lives and even though for almost everyone the terrorism has piled another load of anxiety on top of the great anxiety pile that is life in contemporary America. But not everything about anxiety is bad. In fact, thanks to an author named Robert Gerzon, I have come to understand that anxiety itself offers deep reasons to be thankful.

Gerzon, a psychotherapist who belongs to the big Unitarian church in Concord, wrote a book called Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety that divides anxiety into three categories.

Most fundamental is what Gerzon calls Natural Anxiety, which is nature's way of making us alert to actual dangers. This is the source of the famous fight or flight response. We share this form of anxiety with every animal from the lizards on up the evolutionary scale. But only humans experience Gerzon's other two kinds of anxiety.

The more familiar Gerzon calls Toxic Anxiety. We've all experienced this. It's emotional overreaction, a response out of proportion to the threat at hand - or perhaps to a threat that's only in our mind. At its extreme, Toxic Anxiety causes panic attacks.

The third category of anxiety - and the one that is at the heart of this sermon - is called Sacred Anxiety. Gerzon says this represents our soul's deepest yearning for love, connection, and purpose in life.

As people come to grips with the unsettling fact that terrorism has breached our shores - shores that have proved impervious to conventional invasion for almost two centuries - as people come to grips with the fact that terrorism has come, and come to stay, we certainly experience lots of anxiety of all types.

I know some people who were emotionally immobilized after the September 11 attacks. For a while I was one of them - my son's office is only blocks from the World Trade Center, and even though I knew the patterns of his life made it highly unlikely that he was in danger, I was useless - immobilized - till I heard his voice on the phone and knew he was OK. I'm sure we all know people who feel toxic anxiety more acutely, and our hearts go out to them.

Natural anxiety is very different. Rather than shutting us down the way toxic anxiety does, natural anxiety makes us alert. After the attacks, I for one rethought the way my retirement funds are invested; I read the newspapers more alertly, looking for clues, and I acted on them. This is natural anxiety at work, alerting us to danger so we can avoid it.

And sacred anxiety has brought people closer together. A survey a couple of weeks after the September 11 attacks turned up reports of an unprecedented wave of clients calling their divorce lawyers to say they they'd decided to stay married. Other reports informed us that crime had gone down and that shelters for battered women, usually tragically overburdened, had lots of vacancies. Church attendance went up across the land. If it is by coming together that we summon the holy, the holy is more accessible these days. There are silver linings in the dark clouds that have been cast over our comfortable lives. So let us pause, silently, to think of the ways we have been drawn closer to others, and they to us, and let us give thanks.

PAUSE

For many people, sacred anxiety is also setting off the re-examination of what's really important and whether we are in alignment with what the universe calls us to do with our lives.

In the First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn, the UU church nearest the World Trade Center, a lot of this kind spiritual introspection is going on. Six of its members, including Karen Geer, the soprano soloist in the congregation's fine choir, had offices in the Towers; all are alive because none was at work when the hijackers smashed the airliners into them.

Weeks after the attack, which killed five of her colleagues, Geer was using music as her therapy. "I just sing till my voice won't work any more," she wrote to a friend. "The other thing I'm doing is trying to find meaning in the big questions like, 'Is my life the way I want it?,' 'Does my life have meaning?,' 'Am I kind?,' 'Am I helpful?' These questions are more in the front because I began to realize that I could have been there."

The tragedy was terribly close to Geer's life, and her losses were very painful, so her response is very deep. But we all have losses from 9/11. If nothing else, we have lost the illusion of safety that has been a characteristic of life on American soil in recent decades. We have been forced to come to grips with our vulnerability, and when we feel vulnerable our questions about life's purpose take on a bright new vividness. Let us pause again in silence, to think again of the ways we have re-examined our lives since 9/11, and let us give thanks.

PAUSE

My wife Alex and I came into Unitarian Universalism two decades ago at All Souls Church in New York. A new minister, only 30 years old, was just settling in. His name is Forrest Church and he has since become perhaps the most widely known UU minister, but his brilliance was evident then. To this day I still remember how struck I was when I first heard his definition of religion.

Putting aside the dogma, doctrine, creeds, commandments and principles that define the various faiths, Church says the common denominator of all religions - and the common denominator of all individual religious understandings - is that they are an expression of humankind's response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die.

The tension between these two realities - of being alive and having to die - is something that only humans know, and this is why only humans know sacred anxiety. This is why the wood drake and the great heron express the beauty of wild things - in Wendell Berry's wonderful words from this morning's first reading, they "do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." Because of our brain capacity, we humans have no choice but to understand that we must die, so our lives are taxed with forethought of grief, and there is nothing we can do about it. This is the source of sacred anxiety. Our religious lives, whatever form they may take, grow from this.

Now, since 9/11, our forethought of grief is closer to the surface than usual, and thus so is our sacred anxiety. When I mentioned earlier that our illusion of safety has been shattered, the operative word was illusion. This is what Billy Collins was writing about in "Picnic, Lightning." At any time lightning may strike our picnic, a meteorite may obliterate our reading chair, the heart may decide to quit after lunch. Deep down we all know this, but deep down is where we prefer to keep this knowledge. Terrorists are called terrorists because they bring this knowledge to the surface, making us hear "the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone," as Collins wrote, and making us imagine "the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak." This is indeed terrifying.

Not only is every day we spend above ground a gift - a gift that all Thanksgiving sermons remind us to be thankful for - every day we spend above ground is also a stroke of blind luck. Luck that - so far - the lightning has struck other picnics. Luck that - so far - no safe has fallen from a rooftop when we happened to be walking by. Luck that we were not among the 3,264 car accident victims who died without much notice during the four recent weeks in which four postal workers and others died very visibly from anthrax. Luck that the anthrax letters were mailed from leafy suburban New Jersey, not the leafy suburban Merrimack Valley. Luck that the terrorists did not chose to direct the airliners they turned into guided missiles against the Seabrook nuclear power plant.

Let me tell you about luck. My colleague Tracey Robinson-Harris, who heads the UUA's department for congregational services, needed to be in Los Angeles on September 11 to conduct a meeting of the people whose work is to help West Coast UU congregations. She went to Logan Airport the evening before to check in for her American Airlines flight and even though she had a ticket they had no record of her. The flight was full. The agents were apologetic and offered to put her up in a hotel that night at American's expense so that she could get out on the first flight the next day. Tracey persisted and got on her evening flight as a standby passenger. Had she not succeeded, a glitch in the reservations computer would have sent her to be vaporized when American's first L.A. flight the next morning smashed into the World Trade Center.

On a less dramatic but more fundamental note, all of us here today got lucky when we were born into situations that allow us to be living in this comfortable community and worshiping in this beautiful meetinghouse, that allow us to be feeling sacred anxiety about our loss of a sense of safety that literally billions of people around the globe have never known even for a day. We were NOT born in situations that would make us refugees from the seemingly endless series of wars that have devastated Afghanistan for centuries; we were NOT born so that we could starve as children in sub-Saharan Africa. As we give thanks for the bounty of our lives, there is so much - way too much - for our prayer to lament. Let us pause in silence once more, this time to give thanks not only for the gift of life but also for blind luck, for the fact that our presence here today is evidence that we are survivors.

PAUSE

Michael Berenbaum, president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, has given a lot of thought to people who have faced death. "For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning," he says, "it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Survivors will not be defined by the lives they have lived until now, but by the lives that they will lead from now on."

This fits nicely with Forrest Church's corollary to his definition of religion - if religion is humankind's response to the dual realities of being alive and having to die, then the point of being alive is to live a life worth dying for. When sacred anxiety forces its way into our lives, it insists that we figure out how to do this, it insists that we figure out what really matters, it insists that we figure out what it is that each of us is uniquely called to bring to the world. And then it insists that we do whatever this is.

In the words of Jack Mendelsohn, a retired UU minister and long a leader in our denomination, "The fundamental question of life is not why but how. How shall I live while I live? This is the bedrock question."

So now that the terrorists have dumped this new load of anxiety on us, how shall we live while we live? How can each of us live out the UU principles, how can each of us best do what we are uniquely called to do so that we can move our broken world toward justice and reduce the terrible cause for lament?

There are a myriad ways. Some are through other organizations, some through this church. You might volunteer to help enrich this church community, as Debra Thompson did in the Parish Hall Monday night. She led a deep and meaningful group discussion of grieving, which is a form of sacred anxiety that with Debra's help we came to understand as a force that can help people open their lives to generosity, to forgiveness, to creativity, and to many other positive things. The people who make up our congregation have many needs - and we have many skills to bring to each other. Or, did you know that a social justice committee was formed here a few months ago? It has only six members so far; perhaps one way to make a difference would be to bring your energy - your sacred anxiety - to it. Or join the long-established Human Services Committee.

When sacred anxiety demands that we live lives worth dying for, our senses become more acute. In Brooklyn, as Karen Geer sang and sang to deal with the grief of having lost five colleagues, she reported that "I feel the music in a much different way than before, and words mean more to me than they used to." They are the same words, but sacred anxiety opened the way to deeper meaning.

Billy Collins, thinking about lightning and picnics as he shovels compost in his garden, experiences his wheelbarrow "as a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white," and notices that the soil is full of marvels. It was the same wheelbarrow, and the usual soil, but sacred anxiety cleared Collins's soul so that he can see all the blue there is.

What about us? What is vividly clear to us about ourselves now that sacred anxiety is front and center in our terrified lives? How shall we live while we live?

Amen.

Tom Stites