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
    • 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

Intergenerational Thanksgiving
Sunday Reflection

 

Given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
November 18, 2018
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak

 
In my experience gratitude comes in two varieties. 
 
The first is obligatory gratitude.  That social norm our parents or some other adult is charged with teaching us when we’re young.  To this day I can hear my mother’s voice in my head, “Don’t forget to say thanks.”  “Make sure you send a thank you card.” And I find myself teaching this to my nieces and nephews, “Make sure you thank Uncle Kevin too.”, I’ll remind them. 
 
It is worth noting however, because obligatory gratitude is..well, obligatory, it can feel inauthentic at times. I mean how many of us were made to send thank you cards as children for things that weren’t what we wanted?  Or as adults feigned gratitude for something as we plotted how or to whom we might regift whatever it was we’d been given?  “Oh, you shouldn’t have…really!” Here the expression of gratitude seems, above all, the fulfillment of social expectations. So the secret would seem to be give thanks because we should. Doesn’t sound like much of a secret!
 
Then there’s the gratitude we’ve been reading and hearing about this morning in Douglas Wood’s story The Secret of Saying Thanks and through the reflections offered by Cara, Zoe, Avery and JoAnn.  Gratitude I call awakened gratitude. Awakened gratitude emerges not by obligation but through awareness. 
 
Sometimes awareness comes on its own, but often it requires some cultivation. Shortly after I started I seminary I was asked by the Director of Religious Education (DRE) at my church to teach the Buddhism unit to the 6th graders in the religious education (RE) program. In addition to the basics, I wanted the kids to leave with a sense of how Buddhism or Buddhist concepts might be applied to “real life”.
 
It just so happens that one the most essential and impactful practices in Buddhism is the cultivation of awareness. And so during one the last sessions, after everyone had taken their seats, I asked the kids what they had had for breakfast. Many, if not most, of them said cereal. 
  
Sticking with cereal, the conversation continued something like this…
 
Where did the cereal come from?
The cabinet.
 
Before that?
The store.
 
And before that?
A factory.
 
As you can imagine the conversation went on a long time…ultimately we traced the cereal all the way back to the farm, plants, soil, rain and sun.  We also spent some time filling in other connections, like the people who planted the seeds, tended and harvested the plants processed the grains, drove the delivery trucks, stocked the shelves, and the parent who bought the cereal and put in the cabinet.  And there’s certainly many more gaps we could have filled in.  But even with the little bit we traced in that lesson, it was clear the kids had come into a new and deeper appreciation of that cereal and all that it took to get it to their table that morning. When asked how they felt after engaging in this exercise, many said, “grateful.”
 
Because it is not forced or obligated from the outside, but rather surfaces from within, awakened gratitude is feels more authentic.  Further, it is often expansive…self-transcending…revealing the interconnectedness of life, both symbolically and literally. 
 
Our story today is filled with wonderful examples which no doubt resonate with many here today…the sunrise…the dawning of new day or chance to start over.  The feeling of the sun’s warmth on our skin…the visual and olfactory delights of flowers…the grace of trees and their cooling shade and sound of their leaves…and the way trees remind us of the importance of roots and how rocks help us access stillness and stability in a volatile, ever changing world. Not to mention the animals…whether they fly, crawl, swim or slither…walk on hooves or run on paws, or are covered with feathers, scales or fur…and of course the waters…oceans, rivers, lakes and streams….all of which remind our own species of our blessings and responsibilities….and “save us from a great loneliness here on our small blue planet.”  A planet Wood describes as “sailing among the stars”…which speak to our imagination, as does the moon…the “night sun” as Wood calls it…that reflects its silvery light on the surface of the oceans, lakes, rivers and streams…bringing a bit of visual magic to a colorless necessity we might otherwise too easily take for granted…water. 
 
Here the expression of gratitude seems, above all, to be a natural or effortless effect of our increased awareness of our blessings and interconnection.  The secret thus might seem to be to give thanks when we become aware of things that make us happy.
 
But that’s not Wood’s conclusion.  Instead he writes, “For here is the secret, if you’ve not already guess it…The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time. The more we say thanks, the more we find to be thankful for. And the more we find to be thankful for, the happier we become. We don’t give thanks because we’re happy. We are happy because we give thanks.”
 
This is strikingly similar to an observation the Unitarian Universalist minister Peter Fleck made some years ago. Imagining the first Thanksgiving,  Fleck said, “Maybe the pilgrims weren’t thankful because they had survived. Maybe they had survived because they were thankful.”
 
Both Fleck and Wood recognize expressing gratitude or being thankful is more than a social obligation or natural response to favorable events. Seeking, finding, discovering and giving thanks for what is good, right and worthy in moments of joy and disappointment, in times of ease and hardship helps carries us through.
 
As Fleck also once said, “Thankfulness, while it may relate to specifics, has an absolute character. To give thanks is a basic human need, an essential element in our relationship to the universe. Thankfulness is independent of specifics.”
 
And as it turns out helps make us happy. 
 
All the more reason to give thanks.
 
Amen and Blessed Be
 
 
 
 

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