The Word of Thankfulness

“Let us give thought to the word of thankfulness.”
--Robert Arthur Storer

Among the books I treasure in my ministerial library is a little one by Bob Storer entitled Prayer Thoughts. Storer was for many years the minister of the Winchester Unitarian Church. I never met him, but a brief biographical note reveals only that “He has been identified with a pioneering interest in church drama and religious dance.” On several occasions, I have been asked by grateful former parishioners of his if I “knew Bob Storer?” and have had to reply, “Only by his little book of prayers.”

In a foreword, Storer writes, “I must confess that my own personal prayers are addressed to an ‘ever present help’ even though it is not possible for me to define this ‘help.’ My faith rests in the way my own prayer thoughts give energy to my thinking and impetus to my doing.”

I suppose that kind of honesty is one of the reasons why I persist in the Unitarian Universalist ministry. For I, too, pray to an undefineable but ever present help. It is something that I feel more than I know, and certainly it is not something that is susceptible to proof. Sometimes I use the word “God” to identify the source of that help, but it matters little what I call it. Besides, as my colleague Forrester Church is fond of saying, “God is not God’s name; God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each, a mystery that cannot be named or known.”

One of my favorite Storer prayers is entitled “Thankfulness.” I have used it on countless occasions, both as a pastoral prayer and as a responsive reading, and I have used it at practically every Thanksgiving Sunday service I have ever conducted:

Let us . . . give thought to the word of thankfulness.
Let us pause to be grateful for the new day that never fails to come,
For the earth with its high places and its low places,
For growing things,
For treasures that we can see, and for treasures that are
hidden,
For the places where we live,
Where we are at home and safe,
Where we learn how to share and to understand one another;
For people we have learned to trust, and who trust us,
For people who never let us down, who believe in us when we fail,
and who help us over the rough places, and for whom we
would wish to give thanks;
For the life that is ours, the life which we would not exchange with any other person.
Help us, we pray, to know what is good in us, to use what is good
in us, and to share what is good in us with one another.

And so I try to give thought to the word of thankfulness whenever I remember to. Oh, I know that there is much to be thankful for, but I struggle with dark thoughts. Perhaps some of you do, too. Perhaps I have too much of the dour Scot in me, too many long, cold northern European nights bred into my genes. I have long suspected a chemical misbalance somewhere deep in the interstices of my brain. Or, perhaps, it is just a failure of courage.

Like many a faithful Christian, I turn to my religion to help me through the “dark nights” of my soul. Like a moth, I am drawn to the light of our optimistic faith, drawn out of the darkness of my pessimism and my defeatism toward something resembling appreciation and gratitude for all that I am and all that I have.

Confession is good for the soul, you know! I just want you to know that thankfulness doesn’t always come easy for me, either. In so many ways, the world belies it. Suffering and tragedy and loss are part and parcel of this life we share, and sometimes they are the larger portion. This is a fact, and we had better not equivocate about it.

So, I don’t want to offer you just another glib catalog of all the reasons why you should feel thankful. Certainly, there are manifold reasons for sorrow and sadness in this world, and in many of our individual lives. But part of what we need to get over is the idea that an attitude of thankfulness must preclude the element of sadness and regret. Indeed, it would seem to me that a mature thankfulness must include a recognition of these other realities of our existence. That is, we must be thankful in spite of those realities, and even, in some instances, because of them.

Perhaps a true spirit of thankfulness is impossible without them. Not that we must have them, but that, as the Buddhists recognize, we do have them. The Buddha’s great discovery was that all existence is suffering. Despite his parents’ best efforts to protect him from this reality within the walls of his palace, Prince Siddhartha Gautama found out, as we all do eventually, that life is not the proverbial bed of roses. His Buddhahood--his enlightenment-- resulted from this initial discovery of the suffering which existed beyond the palace walls and united every living being.

I daresay that the most inspiring people we know in life are those who remain grateful and optimistic in the face of great suffering. Those who have suffered loss but who have transcended it. As someone has said, with truth, the greatest company is of those who have suffered loss and overcome it. And all of us will suffer loss and disappointment; all of us will experience sorrow and sadness and regret.

Fortunately, that is not all there is! The vast majority of us do survive. And that, to my mind, is the true source of thankfulness. It resides in that resilience of the human spirit and its ability to rise above the suffering and to be grateful once again. We need to give thought to the word of thankfulness so that we will be reminded of that ability to rise again, so that we will remind ourselves of what is precious and life-giving in this world and in our lives.

And so I remind myself to be grateful for the new day that never fails to come. It will come even when I am gone, for others to enjoy as I have, and there is comfort in that. For the earth with its high places and its low places: for my native coast of Maine with its dark spruce trees against granite and ocean, for the prairies of Minnesota and Black Hills of South Dakota, paha sapa to the natives, but heaven on earth to me. For the beautiful green mountains and valleys of Transylvania, home of our Partner Church.

For growing things, for my own ability to grow, for our children who outgrow us. For treasures that we can see, and for treasures that are hidden. There is always hope, and if we are patient our treasure will be revealed to us, and it may be buried under our own kitchen.

For the places where we live, where our true treasure lies, where we are at home and safe, where we learn to share and to understand one another,--perhaps the most difficult and challenging task, as we must reveal ourselves, our own true, hidden selves, to discover the ground of that understanding.

For people we have learned to trust, and who trust us: that is faith in a nutshell, my friends. Be ye faithful people: that is, trust.

For people who have never let us down--we know who they are--who believe in us when we fail (over and over again), who help us over the rough places (and on the long haul, they’re mostly rough places), and for whom we wish to give thanks (for whom we must give thanks, if we think about it).

For the life that is ours on this once only day of our lives, the only day of which we can be certain, the only day that really matters at all, since none of the others is certain, and all the ones that have gone before are gone for good. The life we would not exchange with any other person: this one is hard, because it is always tempting to believe that the grass is greener in someone else’s yard, isn’t it? The life we would not exchange (it’s the only one we’ve got) with any other person (because it is unique and it is precious and it is ours, and we are loved if we are loved at all for what we are, not for what we might be).

Help us, we pray, to know what is good in us,

to use what is good in us

and to share what is good in us with one another

My prayer to the ever present help for each of us is that we will give thought to the word of thankfulness today and in all of the days still to come. Not because we are naive and foolish optimists, but because we have looked at all of the realities of life and of our lives and know that we must be thankful.

May we be truly thankful for every gift of life which we have received. And may we have hope and companionship to carry us through the many causes of disappointment, and over those rough places where we cannot yet be thankful, that our lives might be filled not with despair and loneliness, but with the possibility of grace and life. So be it.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock