“A World of Untrimmable Light: A Sermon for Thanksgiving
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- Created on Sunday, 22 November 2009 00:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
This week I have enjoyed returning to the story of the first Thanksgiving
Through the eyes of my eight year old son
We gather up picture books I’ve collected over the years
And sit on the bed and read.
Stories about the Mayflower and the pilgrims.
“We’re learning about this in school” he tells me
“Mmm, hmmm, that’s nice, honey,” I say and keep reading,
Stories about John Alden and Miles Standish.
“No”, he interrupts me,
As if to say “Mom, don’t you know anything?!”
“It’s Miles Stanley, Mom!”
“No, honey,” I reply. “I think it’s Miles Standish”
“Stanley,” he barks “Miles Stanley”
(I’m thinking to myself: Is that what you’re learning in school?)
“That’s what it says on Charlie Brown”
On we go.
To the Mayflower and the voyage, this little band leaving England because they couldn’t worship in the way they wanted
That terrible journey, storms, 100 of them sleeping on the floor, crowded together in that part of this ship called “tween decks”
Stuffy, seasick, quarrelling
Hard biscuits, salted meats, no fresh fruit
They were headed for Virginia but the wind blew them off course
Nov 11 1620 they landed on Cape Cod
For a month, they stayed on the ship, making forays to land to look for a sheltered place
Late December, they found the cove at Plymouth
We read about that first winter
The snow, building the common house, the fire, the Great Sickness that came
I think to myself that the story is more straight forward than when I was in elementary school
I remember the ruddy faced pilgrims, men with those buckles on their shoes, women in white aprons and caps
It was always a cheery scene, pilgrims and Indians, as we called them then
A cheery scene with no hint of the conflict of cultures to come, the devastation that colonists would bring to the ancient peoples who had lived on this land for so long
Nick and I read about the first winter,
“The people died” he tells me
Governor William Bradford writes in his journal
“So they dyed sometimes 2 or 3 a day
And of 100 and odd persons, scarce 50 remain.
And of these, in the time of most distress,
There was but 6 or 7 sound persons who,
To their great commendations be it spoken,
Spared no pains, night or day
But with abundance of toile and hazard of their own health
Fetched them woods, made them fires
Drest their meat
Washed their loathsome cloaths, cloated and uncloated them—in a word,
Did all the homely and necessary offices for them
Which dainty and quesie stomaks cannot endure to here be named.”
It was a terrible winter, and the pilgrims only made it through
Because of help from the Wampanoag Indians
Who shared food and showed them how to plant corn
Without this, the new colony would almost certainly have perished from disease and starvation
But summer came, crops flourished, food was put away
And by November, they were, as Governor Bradford wrote,
“Safely gathered in
Before the winter storms begin”
And it was then that the Pilgrims held that first thanksgiving feast.
* * * * * **
“Harvest over,” writes the poet Wendell Berry
“Geese appear high over us, pass and the sky closes.
Abandon, as in love or sleep,
Holds them to their way,
Clear in the ancient faith:
What we need is here.
And we pray, not for new earth or heaven,
But to be quiet in heart and in eye clear
What we need is here.”
* * * *
The Pilgrims seemed to know that. They didn’t have a lot but what they had, they had and they gave thanks for it.
What we need is here.
Thinking of that first lean Thanksgiving, I thought of words by the Rev. Victoria Safford.
“At my house at supper we perform the most unholy and untidy little liturgy you can imagine,” writes Victoria Safford, “. . . .
The table grace we do does not look like religion;
It looks like a hungry, tattered family at the end of a tattered day,
Sometimes at the end of its rope.
We scramble to find the matches, to clear and set the table, to dislodge the cats and scrape our chairs into place.
We clatter in, then get up to wash somebody’s hands, then finally sit down.
We light the candles, reach for each other’s hands, close our eyes and sit in silence for as long as the youngest among us can stand it which is generally up to as high as she can count
Then on most nights we sing something. . . . .
The smell of the food becomes real. The sound of our breath and the feel of our damp sticky hands, these are real. . . . . .
And . . . . .where we may go that night or tomorrow fades away for a time,
And we are infused and time is infused, and something wells up.
Something like gratitude wells up . . . .
The whole thing lasts from candle to song about two minutes but the echo, the wake of it, lasts longer.
We are trying (all of us, in all our houses) to be aware. . . . .
We are trying to remember our true and real life.
We are trying to touch that, to call it up . . . . . .
We are trying to remember what we love and what to do and how to be ourselves, good gifts.”
* * * *
So Nick brought me back to the story of the first thanksgiving
And I saw in it the hungry tattered family of Victoria Safford
And I saw in this story a kind of ferocity I had forgotten
Usually we feast when we’re happy, but
After that terrible first winter when half died, and so many of them children,
The pilgrims were grieving, they were trying to hang on
They feasted in the face of suffering, they feasted in the face of death
They feasted in the face of a winter that was coming that they knew in their bones would try them to their very core
We can imagine thin bodies and faces at that first table
Faces ravaged by illness or grief
Faces with eyes that had seen so many things,
More of life than some see in a lifetime.
They were weary as they came around that table, they were scared as they came around that table, they were sad as they came around that table,
But you know what
They came. They cooked. They sat. They ate. They drank. They danced. They played games.
That’s what they chose to do in the face of all that life was bringing to them.
I imagine there were some of them tempted to go another way
To go the way of depression, just turn the face to the wall
To go the way of despair
Of cynicism, who really cares, we can’t do anything about what we’re handed in life so why try hard after all, why try
They were tempted.
But they made another choice,
A deliberate, faith-filled, radical choice.
In the face of all life was bringing to them
They knew what they needed to do was to celebrate
To eat and drink and delight in the day and in one another
For that is what God had given to them.
They were a religious people and this was a religious choice
They were a people grounded in the book, the Bible
It’s why they’d left England
We don’t need a church, a priest, a ritual, they said
All we need is this book and the life-giving story it tells us
“Surely the Lord is leading us into a good land, a land of milk and honey
A land where you will eat your fill and lack nothing”
This was the promise of their spiritual ancestors
And the Pilgrims put their faith in it so much that they sailed across an ocean and planted themselves in the wilderness
* * * *
I don’t know who will be gathering around your table on Thursday
But it occurs to me that we aren’t all that different from those first celebrants
We, too, gather and give thanks even in the face of peril
The myth of the ruddy faced pilgrims is just that, a myth
And the myth of the perfect family is just that, a myth.
It will all be there this Thursday, whatever is in our lives
You are welcoming young ones home from college
You are sitting at the table with a relationship that has come apart
There is the small pleasure of bringing to the table a dish your mother taught you to make or using a special tablecloth she gave you
And there is the empty place at the table of someone who is gone.
There is the energy and joy of a young child.
There is illness held, for now, at bay.
There are visitors from afar.
There are relationships in the family askew
It’s all there.
We bring our real lives to the table and so like the pilgrims, some years, it is as if we are feasting in the face of peril.
Like them, we remember that we need is here.
Like them, we turn and in the face of it all, we bless the food, we hold hands, we sink into the silence for a minute, time is infused, gratitude wells up.
* * * * * *
The pilgrims walked that land on cape cod 400 years ago and today there is a woman who walks that same land, looks out on the same ocean, and she carries, I think, the same banner of gratitude that the Pilgrims first hoisted high right there in that very place.
The woman is Mary Oliver.
“Every day,” writes Mary Oliver, every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight.
It is what I was born for
“To look, to listen,
To lose myself
Inside this soft world,
To instruct myself over and over in joy.”
“To instruct myself in joy.”
Words for Thanksgiving week if they ever were
She is the “good scholar” and the world is her teacher
And the subject she is pursuing with all the fiber of her body and blood and heart and mind
Her subject is joy
Why I wake early is the title of this book of poems
And she tells us right out
I wake early because I’m on the hunt,
I’m on the hunt for joy.
It is not the spectacular she is looking for,
Not the extraordinary.
Oh no. It is the ordinary, the common, the drab, the daily presentations.
The daily presentations.
What if this were our spiritual practice in this week of thanksgiving
This week of relatives and homecomings and some of it good and some of it hard
What if this were our practice
To watch for the daily presentations?
The small and ordinary things which grab our attention
Which makes us stop, which take our breath away.
“O good scholar
I say to myself
How can you help but grow wise
With such teachings as these
The untrimmable light of the world
The ocean’s shine
The prayers that are made out of grass”
* * * * *