BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
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  • BUUC Home
  • Events
  • About the BUUC
    • Our History
    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

Thanks for the Memories

Reflection for All Souls Thanksgiving Service
November 22, 2020
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Craig M. Nowak, with Zoey A., Jack A.,
Brigid C., Avery A., Teagan A., Jefferson U.

We’re about midway into that period in American life we pass through each year that stretches from early October to late December. A period in which we celebrate three culturally significant, but historically dubious, myths. I am speaking of course about Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas -which while not an American holiday, is arguably one of the most culturally influential religious holidays celebrated in the United States.

Now,  traditionally, a myth is simply a story that points to or is employed to convey a deeper than literal truth. This is why we still study the world’s mythologies and why religious stories endure and continue to instruct and inspire people to this day. However sometimes the story itself is taken as the truth to be conveyed or is used to mask a complicated or less admirable historical reality. 

We see this with the Christmas story where the pursuit of spiritual truth is too often abandoned in favor of defending or refuting the literal accuracy of the story's details. And we know Columbus neither discovered America-there was already a native population here- nor was he even the first European explorer to reach the Americas. As for Thanksgiving, well, it turns out the Thanksgiving story those of us over a certain age grew up with is more revisionist than actual history, obscuring a painful and unjust legacy of occupation and oppression.

So what are we to do in such cases? Well, rather than abandon myth altogether, we might grow in our awareness that sometimes we need to take a closer look at how we engage myth and the impact our engagement has on the truth it contains, that we may again (as the choir sang) “walk in beauty”, that is, in harmony or right relationship with all.

Thanksgiving Day is only four days away. And justice demands we acknowledge that the traditional retelling of the story obscures a tragic legacy of injustice perpetrated against indigenous peoples. But the origin of the holiday isn’t the only story connected to the Thanksgiving myth needing our attention, particularly this year. 

Indeed, perhaps even more present in the minds of many than the story of Thanksgiving’s origin is another about family. Thanksgiving is, after all, traditionally one of the busiest travel days of the year, when family, given and/or chosen, some of whom we may only see once a year, gather from far and wide to be together. A part of the Thanksgiving myth that Covid-19 promises to disrupt this year on a scale rarely encountered in most of our lifetimes. 
Simply put, many people will not be able to engage the Thanksgiving myth around family the way we’re used to this year.

Undoubtedly those who are able will utilize Zoom, Facetime or some other similar technology to connect with those whom they can’t be with physically this year, but there’s another way we can engage regardless of whether or not we have an internet or phone connection, and that is via gratitude.

Writing on gratitude, the poet David Whyte states, “Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.”

Presence here doesn’t mean physical closeness, but refers instead to showing up and giving life our full attention. Gratitude then, according to Whyte, concerns not so much recognizing and appreciating something we receive but rather, that we and others are… or as he writes, “that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even”, he notes, “if that something is temporarily pain or despair….”

And indeed, rare it seems, even in years uninterrupted by a global pandemic, is a Thanksgiving, that we’re not met by some degree of pain. Part of that familiar blend of joy, melancholy, and nostalgia, that seems to accompany every holiday. The exact proportions of which depends on any number of life events..births, deaths, marriage, divorce, graduations, and, of course, the passage of time.

Behind all of these life events are people. People as varied as the flowers, fruits and vegetables to which they are likened in Max Coots beloved Thanksgiving poem and are described as feisty, generous, crotchety, gorgeous, silly and so forth. Similarly, Maya Angelou, in her poem “Human Family”, reminds us of the many diversities of human beings, noting what she calls, “obvious differences” in temperament, skin color, and life philosophy. Both Coots’ whimsical comparisons and Angelou’s straight forward enumeration of human difference teach us something essential to gratitude: paying attention. As David Whyte observes, “gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

One of the things that lives within us are memories. Which need not be a perfectly accurate record of what or whomever is remembered to have meaning for us. There are people, even pets, who may not be around our table on Thanksgiving because of illness, breakups, separation, divorce, work, or because they or we can’t travel this year. And there are others, as Max Coots writes, “now gone”, who won’t be there because they have died. Whatever the reason we can’t be with them physically, we can, by being awake in the presence of their memory living within us, be with them in gratitude.

At this point I should tell you I’m not the only one who has been thinking about these things as Thanksgiving approaches. Our children and youth have been giving this some thought as well. In fact, as part of their exploration of Samhain and El Dia de los Muertos (or The Day of the Dead), which, like All Souls Day, seek to remember and honor the dead, the children and youth were asked who they are missing, person or creature, that has passed away.

Here is how they responded…

Zoey (remembrance of her cat)
Jack (remembrance of his grandfather)
Brigid (remembrance of her triops with hand drawn picture)
Avery (remembrance of family dog)
Teagan (remembrance of family dog with hand drawn picture)
Jefferson (remembrance of Ruth King)

Using words and images Zoey, Jack, Brigid, Avery, Teagan and Jefferson show us how by paying attention, by being present to the memories that live within us, gratitude arises and connects us with those we’re unable to be with as usual this year or forever more. Indeed, they remind us all that in the absence of our loved ones physical presence we can still be present to, and say thanks for, the memories.

Gratitude, we learn, is restorative as well as sustaining. It is the harmonizing effect of paying attention, that, as David Whyte says, “shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.” A profound realization that, as Maya Angelou reminds us and repeats in  “Human Family”, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” 

And indeed, it is so.

Amen and Blessed Be.

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