Being Conscious of Our Treasures

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." -Thornton Wilder

It is famously said of Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise known as the Buddha, or "Enlightened One," that when asked to describe the source of his great wisdom, he replied, simply, "I am awake." Enlightenment, it would seem, has much to do with simply being fully conscious in and fully aware of the world around us: mindfulness, as the Buddhists have it. If we could only pay enough attention, the argument seems to go, our lives would be transformed and our world would be brighter. Indeed, we would have achieved nirvana; we, too, would be enlightened.

I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s familiar words:

I am grateful for what I am and have. My Thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite-- only a sense of existence. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession, but enjoyment.

Henry was famously attentive to his surroundings. He cataloged most of the animals and plants in his native Concord, discovering in the course of his peregrinations many new and previously unknown species. Perhaps this was to be expected from a man who, not ironically, claimed, "I have traveled much in Concord."

Thoreau’s ability to find Indian arrowheads was legend. Once, being asked how he did it, he simply bent down to the ground where he was standing and picked up an arrowhead which was lying at this feet. Viola! (As one of my English professors once wrote on one of my papers, "If this isn’t true, it ought to be.")

In the little quotation that I have included on your orders of service, Thornton Wilder, author of among other things the well known play Our Town, states that "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." Thoreau was, I think, but I often worry about the rest of us.

In a recent "In the Spirit" column in the Newburyport Daily News, I wrote about the challenge of being thankful even when we don’t feel like it. There is much in our world to discourage and dishearten us. Hope seems, at times, terribly elusive. Yet, I truly believe that we must give thanks in spite of what the late Paul Carnes, former President of the UUA, once called "the many causes of despair which life inevitably brings to us all."

James Carroll, the Boston Globe columnist, has written that "On Thanksgiving we choose to pay more attention to the blessings of our lives than to the troubles. The troubles remain, but for once we see them in proper context: the essential goodness of what is."

I admit that it is often difficult in these days to recognize the "essential goodness of what is," but I believe we must try. We must try, as Wilder puts it, to be "conscious of our treasures," and not to be dragged down by the manifold causes of despair which we find daily all around us.

I truly believe that we Americans, in particular, are not as thankful as we ought to be for the lifestyle that we are privileged to enjoy. I’m not sure we really grasp how fortunate we are, how lucky we are.

This is the part of the sermon where I try to afflict the comfortable, where I try to get us to wake up to the blessings that we share as citizens of one of the wealthiest nations in the world. I wish we would take it less for granted; I wish that we would understand more fully that our privileged place in the world demands much of us, even if our government does not. I wish we Americans could be known as much for our wisdom as for our power and our wealth. I wish.

On the personal level, I wish we would spend more time counting our blessings. I wish we would spend more time with our loved ones than we do in answering our e-mail and chasing the eternal buck. If Wilder is right that we can only be truly alive when we are conscious of our treasures in life, then hadn’t we better start paying more attention to what is most important to us? Hadn’t we better appreciate more our friends and loved ones while we have them?

I recently went to a book signing by my colleague Forrester Church. Forrest continues to recover from surgery for esophageal cancer which, about a year ago, his doctors claimed would take his life within two months. In speaking to Forrest, he said that he had recently passed his 59th birthday, and that since all of his grandparents as well as his father had died before reaching that milestone, he had always assumed that he, too, would be dead by now. So, he said, despite the devastating effects of his illness he was feeling extremely grateful not simply to be alive, but more importantly, just to have reached age 59! He was counting his blessings merely for having already exceeded his own life expectancy. (Something else Forrest said that day, apropos perhaps of something, was that the reason he has been able to write so many books during his busy ministry is that he is "not a perfectionist.")

Forrest once wrote a wonderful Thanksgiving newsletter column which he called "nostalgia for the present." He said,

Do you remember that perfect Thanksgiving? "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house" you went. Remember the wholesome bustle in the kitchen, the sweet smell of mince and yams, tart cranberries, two kinds of everything and turkey enough for thirds, everyone in his or her Sunday best, lots of winks and pats and kisses, not a tense moment, every word a gentle word, love overflowing from heart to heart? Remember?

It will never be like that again, of course, because it was never like that before.

Nostalgia is a sentimental tyrant. It selectively distills and embellishes our memories, fashions them into pictures, and leaves us longing, even aching for the glories of an imaginary past. We long for what never really was, regret its passing, and rue the present for its absence. The result is a fantasy, purified of imperfections, even of reality: the perfect Thanksgiving, the perfect anything.

I have a cure for this. Call it "nostalgia for the present."

Imagine that what is yours today--the companionship of loved ones, your daily tasks, the very air you breath--was not yours to enjoy right now, this very instant. Instead of pining over a past that never existed, at least not as you remember it, you greet the present with a wistful welcome.

With the glow of nostalgia softening the edges of here and now, how thankful we become for the moment we are given to love and share, to celebrate and live.

Instead, we too often take life for granted, begrudging it for what we have lost or may never find. But life is not a given. Life is a precious, undeserved gift.

As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, "Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours."

For Forrest is right: life is a precious and undeserved gift. We did nothing to deserve it, and we surely can do nothing to hold on to it. We can only savor it while it is ours. We are alive in this moment: on this day, in this place. We cannot know what the future holds. As it says in the Bible, with wisdom, none of us knows the day or the hour. We hang above oblivion by the slenderest of threads, and yet we usually act as if our days were numberless.

Marya Mannes has written with truth that, "The Good Life exists only when you stop wanting a better one. It is the condition of savoring what is, rather than longing for what might be."

I want to savor what is, if only for this moment. I want to be conscious of my treasures, if only for this brief time. And though I often fail to do so, I know in my heart that my life depends upon that consciousness.

I close this morning with a prayer by the Rev. Laurel Hallman of Dallas, Texas:

I say to myself: be grateful.

When the burdens of life seem overwhelming, when we cannot see our way and hope seems frivolous, it is time to "give an accounting of gratitude."

Be grateful for the path that has brought you this far. There have been some close calls along the way, some scrapes with disaster--but you have survived them. And so many of your fears and worries have been about things that never came to pass.

Be grateful for friends, for common tasks undertaken and successfully completed. For the encouragement of others who were healthy when you were sick, happy when you were sad, hopeful when you had lost hope. They reminded you that life was much more than your experience of it at the moment.

Be grateful for life’s celebrations and life’s joys. But be grateful, too, for that which you would have avoided if you could, but which taught you the harder lessons of life. For it is in those moments that you can find the workings of a mysterious wisdom, and know a more than human love.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock