Soul Force

Holiday, Shmoliday

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

December 6, 2009

This is a story from Korea about a Tiger and a Toad – oh, and a Man, too.

One day a tiger was trapped in a pit, and asked a passing traveler to rescue it, promising to reward him. So the traveler poked a long branch down into the pit, and the tiger crawled out. But when it was safe again it turned on the traveler and roared with its mouth wide open, "I am deeply grateful to you, sir, for helping me out of my trouble. Nevertheless, as I am very hungry, I must eat you up."

The traveler protested and chided the tiger. "You are most ungrateful," he said. "You must not do that." But the tiger ignored his protests, and so the traveler appealed to a toad which lived under a nearby rock.

The traveler told the toad of the tiger's ingratitude, but the tiger insisted that it was hungry and meant to eat the traveler.

"I must look into this more closely," said the toad. "Will you show me the place where it happened?" So they took it along to the pit. Then the toad asked the tiger, "How did it happen? Let me see just where you were."

So the tiger jumped down into the pit and said, "I was down here at the bottom, see."

But the traveler took the branch out of the pit and said, "Of course, this wasn't there then."

The toad turned to the traveler and said with a smile. "You had better go now, and in future don't help such ungrateful creatures." And looking down at the tiger in the pit it said, "You ungrateful wretch! You can stay down there now."

The traveler thanked the toad and went on his way. The tiger trapped in the pit roared in fury, but the toad went back to its home under the rock and refused to help it.[i]

I don’t know if you’ve ever been a tiger like that, but I would have to say that I have been. Of course, I’ve never considered eating someone who helped me out, but it’s not very hard to forget to be grateful. In fact, it sometimes seems that the more we have, the less grateful we are and the more entitled we feel. Our standard changes from “enough” to “more than:” more than we got last year for Christmas, more than our neighbors, more than the other person at our job. The standard of “more than” as a way to live our lives is ultimately frustrating, because it is just impossible for everyone to have more than everyone else!

The reading from Deuteronomy that we heard earlier represents a warning that was given by Moses to the Children of Israel, a warning that when they have arrived in the Promised Land and become prosperous and built fine houses and all that they have has multiplied over and over, they must not say “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” [Deut. 8:17] Our town historians in their masterful account Not All Has Changed: A Life History of Hingham, take us back to the beginnings of our town and its good fortune at our founding. They tell us that:

The most wondrous gift of “Divine Providence” was the gift of incredible natural resources: pure water in the Town Brook and the Weir River, a protected harbor, abundant wildlife—fish, crustaceans, game birds and beasts, wild fruit, a sufficient annual rainfall, great stands of woodland, land of varying types and soils. It was “the Promised Land.” [p. 21]

It is fitting that in this the year of our celebration of 375 years as a town, we consider all of the blessings we enjoy here. These blessings – these abiding aspirations which we both inherit and maintain – were summarized in 1963 thusly by Francis Leonard:

Who wants to live in a town where there is no wild land? No sense of breathing space? No feeling of communal belonging that discourages lawlessness? No awareness of an unbroken thread with the past that is now a kind of folk-wisdom inherited by the people who live here? [xv]

We have all these in abundance and much, much more. For all of these we give thanks. It is therefore fitting that we should gather as a community from our various faith traditions and from none to take the time to give thanks together. We often go through our days without taking the time to say “Thank you” to someone who lent us a hand, without taking the time to give thanks for the bounties of nature all around us, without taking the time to give thanks to the source of all that is or can be.

The warning in Deuteronomy is one that we would do well to heed, because it seems sometimes that we become less grateful the more we have. Why do we often find those who are poor more grateful for what they have than those who are rich? Why do we find those who have recovered from serious illness more grateful for the life they have than those who have enjoyed year after year of robust health? Why do you almost never hear in middle class churches what you will always hear in inner city Black churches: “I give thanks to God that he allowed me to wake up this morning for another day”? How do we lose the impulse to say “Thank you”?

One obvious and easy answer is that we do a good deal to earn our daily bread. What does it mean to give thanks to God for our food each day when it’s clear that we had to earn the money to buy it and someone else planted, harvested, prepared and transported it? We set the table ourselves, didn’t we? William Ellery Channing, one of the founders of Unitarianism in Boston almost 200 years ago, invokes the direct link between our food and nature. We plant the seed, he reminds us, but

How many suns must rise and set, how many dews and rains distil! And what part in all these processes is due to our puny selves? Can our voice reach the clouds, and command one drop to fall on the parched earth? Is it through our direction that the root projects its tendrils through the soil, that the light stalk springs up, and the flower unfolds its beauty to the sun and sheds its fragrance through the air?[ii]

As we become more remote from nature and more dependent on layer after layer of human action between ourselves and the creation from which all things ultimately derive, it is easy for us to lose sight of our absolute dependence on the reality around us which we did not create and which we cannot ultimately control, on the earth, on the universe, on the source of all that is, on God.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, provides a meditation to remind us of our inter-dependence with all that is. Take a sheet of paper, he suggests, and look deeply into it; there you will find a cloud, for the tree from which the paper was made cannot grow without rain from the clouds.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore, the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.[iii]

All of the myriad things, as the Chinese wisdom tradition calls them, are interrelated. All ultimately depend upon a source. We too are part of that dependency, giving and receiving, depending and being depended upon. Whatever we want to call that on which we ultimately depend—whether we call it the Unnamable, the Mystery, the Spirit of Life, or God, we need to remember that we are dependent and to give thanks for our being. Finding shared rituals to give thanks is part of what we gather here to do together this evening.

We lose sight of our dependency in the hustle and bustle of everyday living and we need to remember to take the time each day to call ourselves back to mindfulness of our selves, of the reality which surrounds us and makes our lives possible, and of the source of that reality to which we give thanks. But beyond that there’s an arrogance which leads us imagine that we have somehow “made it” and made it on our own.

Living in the midst of plenty here in a prosperous town it’s easy to lose sight of where we come from and where we’re going. Besides, we have to work pretty hard just to stay ahead. We have high standards for ourselves; we want to be independent, we want to take care of our own needs. All of that is to the good and is what makes us prosperous and productive. We are put in circumstances where we must work hard to survive and prosper, and hard work usually is and ought to be rewarded. But let us not in succeeding imagine we have done it all on our own, that we are (if such were possible), “self-made.” As Channing warns,

“Surrounded by a visible creation, on which we act with success, we call ourselves its lords, and forget its creator and upholder. Our own will seems to work out our welfare. And selfishness magnifies our agency, until self-idolatry creeps in to poison all life’s blessings.”[iv]

Many of our Thanksgiving dinners offer the opportunity to meditate on the concept of “enough.” Too often the temptations of the table leave us unpleasantly full with more than enough. Tomorrow is a good opportunity to give thanks for abundance, and, at the appropriate time, to say “Enough.”

I find that on Thanksgiving it is also necessary to consider the Native Americans who occupied this land before the Europeans came here starting in 1620 in Plymouth, in 1630 to Boston, and here in Hingham in 1635. A recent visit to Plimouth Plantation included an interesting conversation with one of the Indians in a re-creation of a 1620 Wampanoag village who reminded us that many of the travelers on the Mayflower had come with the intention of profiting from the fur trade and the extraction of minerals. The result was that the careful balance with nature in which the Indians had lived was disrupted by the newcomers, who were not interested merely in having enough to live on but were instead intent on gaining as much profit as could be found in this new land. This was very much the European attitude toward nature in general at that time—especially nature in the New World, which they hoped would reward them with sufficient riches to claim a higher position in the Old World.

Have we changed our attitudes toward nature so much from those days? Or do we still see nature as an infinite resource from which we may extract whatever profits us regardless of consequences? The Northern Banks have been fished for cod so intensively that the codfish population off our coasts collapsed long since. Our fishing fleets have only grown larger and more aggressive in the meantime, and now we find fishing factories which are literally cleaning out all of the fish down to the bottom of the ocean. Recent predictions that all of the fish in the ocean could be essentially extinct within the next fifty years may be overly pessimistic, but natural resources are not infinite. Can we humans learn to say “enough” before we have put Mother Nature herself into an irreversible decline? Can we as individuals, as families, as towns, as nations, as citizens of the world, find ways of saying “enough,” of trusting that we will receive our daily bread, of being grateful for what we have rather than believing that we need constantly yet more? Our reading from the gospel of Matthew shows Jesus telling his followers not to worry about material possessions; as he reminds us, pointing to the bounty of nature, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” [Matt 6:28-29]

Gratitude is an important part of learning to say “enough.” Gratitude allows us to bring our focus around to what we have rather than what we don’t have. It relieves us of worry because it helps us to enjoy things as they are. It relieves us of stress because we come to understand that our lives are not solely dependent on our own efforts. I’m glad I decided to say “enough” to the monetary rewards offered by working on Wall Street and find more lasting rewards working here in Hingham. I know some of you have made similar choices to orient your lives around quality rather than quantity, time rather than money. Praise and thanksgiving give us freedom; they prolong our lives by allowing us to enjoy our days and to draw from our living the strength to face each passing moment and to benefit from it, whatever that moment may bring. They remind us that we’re not ungrateful tigers!

We give thanks for the blessings we have received, for being well fed and housed. We give thanks for our lives. We give thanks that we were able to wake up this morning to enjoy another day. We give thanks for each breath we take. We give thanks that we have enough. I give thanks to the builders of this great meeting house who had the foresight and courage to crate this place where we can gather to give thanks together. We couldn’t have done it without you. I thank all of my colleagues for joining together in this service as we join our hearts and voices in thanksgiving. I couldn’t have done it without you. I thank each of you for joining us on this evening of thanksgiving; we couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Amen www.secondparish.org