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	The Givenness Of Life

	Rev.  Edmund Robinson

	Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield

	November 21, 1999 - Thanksgiving Sunday

Reading:  Run River Run, by Susan Hull (attached)

I think we all experience what amounts to a powerful animal instinct
this time of year.  It is as if we suddenly lift our heads out of the
school-rut and the work-rut and the busy-ness rut and sniff the Fall
air and something in it tells us that our days are getting shorter and
there isn?t an infinite amount of time left and we?d better touch base
with the environment from which we sprung.  So we call around and make
the necessary arrangements, as does everyone else in the country, and
soon we will be clogging the airports and the trains and the highways
in pilgrimages to be with our loved ones.

And we do it even though we know that in many cases the pilgrimage
will engender as much strife, sadness, awkwardness as it will love,
affirmation and a sense of belonging.  So many of our family units,
including mine, are broken by death, divorce, alienation, generational
conflicts; some people simply can?t get away from job or school to
come home.

This seems to be a time of the year when things have come together for
me with particular poignancy.  I recently found on my computer the
sermon I preached at Thanksgiving 1996, and it brought back to me the
circumstances of that time in my life.  I had arranged early in the
fall to spend my Thanksgiving with my family in South Carolina, and
had agreed with my home church in Charleston to preach there on the
Sunday following Thanksgiving.  They had unanimously voted to sponsor
me for the ministry, and after a little over a year of seminary, I was
going to give them a report card.  I entitled the sermon "The
Education of a Minister."

What I had not foreseen when I set that up was that things would
deteriorate in my marriage to the point that my wife would announce
her intention in early November to end it.  Because our daughter was
then in her senior year applying to colleges, we decided to spare the
children the stress of announcing this news until Christmas, when
Sally would have heard on her early acceptance.  This meant that we
had to get through Thanksgiving as a family with two of us knowing
that it would be our last Thanksgiving together.  We spent the holiday
at the beach with my sister and brother, mother and aunt, nieces and
nephews.  All the adults knew what was going on, and none of the
children.

That was trying enough, but not as trying as giving that sermon the
following Sunday.  For the Charleston church was like an extension of
my family.  It is a beautiful structure, built in 1789, and a style
like no other UU church in the country, known as perpendicular gothic.
Each pillar comes up from the sanctuary floor and blooms at the top
into an effusion of fan tracery which merges with that from the other
pillars to form a delicate reticulum on the vaulting ceiling.  I stood
in the ancient, familiar pulpit of that place where both of us had
been pillars - vestry chair, canvass director, choir members, search
committees - and I knew that life would never be the same again.  I
looked down at my family and somehow got through the sermon without a
hint of what I was carrying in my heart.

I think of that time as I mull over the words from Susan Hull in this
morning's reading:  the injury of the river is also its gift.  It is
easy to be thankful for the good and happy things that life has
brought us.  Can we also be thankful for the hurts?

I think we go through life with a basic sense of responsibility for
ourselves and our actions.  We are brought up this way, and in fact,
it is good that we are.  A society has to be built on people taking
responsibility for themselves.  This idea is certainly a strong theme
of the Unitarian side of our religious heritage.  In Nineteenth
Century Unitarianism there was a belief in "salvation by character,"
the idea that we would bring about our own destiny by emulating the
character of Jesus.

The notion that we are authors of our fate and captain of our souls is
great in the sunny times.  We can take credit for the good things that
happen to us.  As a lawyer, for example, I tend to feel that if we win
our case, it must be due to my brilliance and hard work, and if we
lose, it must be because the client somehow muffed it before I got my
hands on it.

The downside of the notion that we are responsible for our lives is,
of course, when things don't go the way we want them to.  I spoke on
Halloween about the ghosts of the way things might have been, of the
roads not taken.  If we rely on a sense of personal authorship of our
lives, it is hard to avoid a sense that all bad endings are our fault.
I realized about a year into my divorce that the lawyer in me regarded
it not as something that just happened to me but as the biggest case
of my life, which I had lost.  There was some part of me that said, if
I had just made the right argument, I could have kept the marriage
together.

What's needed when we get trapped in these vortices - or is it
vortexes?  - of despondency is a paradigm shift.  Instead of looking
at ourselves as the authors of our lives, let's look at our lives as
given from someone else.  Our lives are a gift, not a purchase.  And
we can break it down, each day, each hour is also a gift.

I feel that this view of lfe as a gift is vaguely Universalist, as
opposed to Unitarian, though I can't point to any specific text from
Universalist writers to support this view.  Certainly Ballou denied
that humans had free will, since everything that happened was in the
hands of an omnipotent God.  To this extent, our existences are not of
our own doing but gifts.

Now I can hear the nontheists in the room sniffing suspiciously, "Uh
oh, if life is a gift, there has to be a giver?  He's going on God
again."  I don't think we have to answer the question of who the giver
is to realize the benefits of treating life as a gift.  I think Mary
Oliver said it better than I can in her deservedly well-known poem,
"The Summer Day:"

Who made the world?  Who made the swan, and the black bear?  Who made
the grasshopper?  This grasshopper, I mean -- the one who has flung
herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-- who is
gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.  Now she lifts
her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.  Now she snaps her
wings open, and floats away.  I do not know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how
to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll
through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.  Tell me,
what else should I have done?  Doesn't everything die at last, and too
soon?  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and
precious life?

Clearly we don't have to get off the secular or scientific plane at
all to realize that many if not most of the things that make our lives
what they are are not of our own doing.  Your genetic set is the
result of a chance combination of the genes of your parents.  Your
psychology and outlook on life is the result of your upbringing, your
education, your life experiences.

To some extent our sense of authorship of our lives is a function of
age:  when I was in my twenties, I was the captain of my fate, the
master of my soul.  Now in my fifties, I see how much of who I am was
given to me by others.

So life is a gift, but of course one of the eternally irritating
things about getting gifts is that you don't always get what you want.
There was an office manager at the law firm I worked for who would
give me tie every Christmas.  Each year's tie was more hideous than
the last.  I would have to find a day when I didn't have any court or
public appearances and force myself to wear that year's tie for Lois
so that I could show her my appreciation before I put it in the
Goodwill bag.

But as I look back on it now, the gift was not in the tie.  Our office
manager was a childless widow who lived for her cats, our senior
partner for whom she had worked for fifty years, and what
companionship she could get from the rest of us in the small office.
Her gift to me was her way of making a connection, and viewed in that
light it was beautiful.

The injury of the river is also its gift.  Can we really believe this?
Can I really preach it?  Do I really believe it?  I look back at the
worst things that have happened to me, which are probably trifles
compared to some of the things that have happened to some of you, and
I ask myself, can I really see these things as gifts for which I
should be grateful?

I might have said this was Pollyanna thinking if I hadn't heard a
particular story last weekend.  I attended a conference on restorative
Justice.  Restorative Justice is a concept gaining a lot of attention
as an alternative way to think of and deal with crime, conflict and
harm.  We had presentations by the leading theoretician of the
movement as well as by a judge from the Yukon Territory in Canada, who
has instituted what he calls "circle sentencing," a process borrowing
Native American ideas in which the offender and the victim and
everyone else affected by the act gets together in a circle and
decides by consensus what to do to redress the harm done.  I
participated in a mock circle exercise and it was a powerful
experience.

More powerful, however, was a story told by one of the conferees and
her husband.  She had been driving along a street in Asheville, North
Carolina where she lived, when two teenage boys with guns attempted to
rob her at a stoplight.  The one on the driver's side became flustered
and shot her just behind the ear.  She managed to drive herself to a
hospital and her life was saved.

The boys were arrested, and they turned out to be two kids from the
neighborhood.  She had a dream, she said it was unlike any other dream
she had ever had, and it featured the teenage boy who shot her and in
the dream she was his savior.  She determined that the dream was
telling her something, and she set out to find out all she could about
this kid.  She soon came to know that in the context of his life, he
was probably more of a victim than she was, and realized that if she
could get him to take some responsibility for what he had done, he
might have a chance in life.  Working through the system, she has
gotten him back in school and he has some chances in life.  He now
reports to her periodically on what's going on with him.

In other words, through this tragedy that life gave her, this woman
was able to break through to a connection which has given meaning to
her life and to the life of this child.  After this story was told,
the room full of lawyers and judges and ministers and social workers
just sat in stunned silence.

Life is not one gift, but many.  If we can be grateful for the
injuries, it should be easy to be grateful for the joys.  The losses
and pains and harms are opportunities for us to grow in fullness.  In
my own case, I would not be as open to the world and to my fellow
humans today if I had not gone through the losses of the last few
years.

As Mary Oliver says, "doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?"
This Thanksgiving, let us feel the givenness of life, the invaluable
present of joys and blessings and sorrows and losses and triumphs and
defeats and loves and hurts and interesting characters and blue skies
and grasshoppers and grizzly bears.  And tell me, just out of
curiosity, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious
life?

Amen.

Run, River, Run

Susan V.  Hull

from Skirt, November 1996

We are what is given/and what is taken away - Wendell Berry

Norman Maclean wades into the swift silver of Big Blackfoot River,
casting for memories with the same reverence that he reserves for
trout.  Planting his feet in the slowly deepening riverbed, Norman
begins to hear the long story of his life cascading by - from his
birth in Missoula, Montana where the river banks were the breasts on
which he fed as a child, through a restive adolescent initiation in
the roaring rapids, the still reflections of his first love, to the
dark eddies of gambling and debt that pulled his brother under.  Now
all are gone home before him in that great race to the sea.
"Eventually," Norman concludes from the timeless sibilant prayer of
water on rock, "eventually all things merge into One, and a River runs
through it."

There is a river that runs through us.  It is Mystery, it is Life,
some say God.  It descends through my granite soul with the force of
gravity and love, plunges through empty canyons, chisels out corridors
with its wet hands and slowly, ever so, widens the cracks and crevices
of my failures into pools where grace collects.  The injury of the
river is also its gift.  Where I have been cut most deeply, so there
life most deeply, most surely, flows.

I don't believe that the gifts of God come in the form of goodness,
but in the face of Life itself.  In danger's shadow as in dazzling
light, in a disquieted heart as often as a still mind, in labor as in
love.  If we would receive the sacred, we must receive the river's
flow, even as it injures, even as it takes away.

I thank God for my handicaps, said Helen Keller, unable to hear a
babbling stream or see its glistening green or put it into praise.
Yet she praises, I thank God for my handicps, for through them I have
found myself, my work, my God.

That, to me, is thanksgiving.  It's not about being glad for the good
things that have happened to us - they are simply moments in the sun.
Thanksgiving is standing still, with an injured and opened heart, and
letting the River run freely through us.  Each year at this time, I
stop and cast into the water.  I recount the story of the year past,
of life given and taken away:  our planet's staggering losses, our
moments of forgiveness, our wonderment, our fulgent gains.  I think of
a friend's child swimming into the world on amniotic rivers, and I
remember my grandmother's final crossing over to the other shore.  I
remember the intense hope of eyes brimming with the vows of marriage,
and the loosening tears of those whose hope was broken.  I think of my
own love found, of friends lost.

We are what we are given and what is taken away, blessed by the name
of the giver and taker...  The confluence of all things returns to the
Sea, the Source.  The Gift unites with the Giver.  Let the river run.
The banks of my heart are wide with thanks.