at Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church
Tuesday evening, November 25, 2008
Texts: Psalm 137:1-6, Jeremiah 29:1-14, “Thanks” by W. S. Merwin
I am deeply honored by my interfaith colleagues for asking me to give the homily this evening. Unitarian Universalists are strongly committed to interfaith community work, and it is a gift for me to be home, and have the opportunity to work with such dedicated comrades in the sacred work of healing the world. As a former Roman Catholic, there is special resonance for me to be in the pulpit of Holy Name Church – where my graduation from Loyola Institute for Ministry was held, 16 years ago next month. So I come to this service in a spirit of gratitude.
Our Psalms reading relates of a time when, after an inglorious defeat in battle, a large portion of the Hebrew people was carried away by the victorious army of Nebuchadnezzar to exile in Babylon,where they were confronted with alien customs and traditions, as well as having to deal with the heartache of loss and bereavement, of being in exile. The people despaired of being able to keep their faith alive in that foreign place; they grieved all that they had lost. In the Psalms they cry out in a complex mix of mourning and anger, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
The answer they receive to that heartfelt cry was not one they expected or wanted. In the book of Jeremiah, we find the prophet left behind in the desolated and half-destroyed city of Jerusalem, receiving divine inspiration to send a letter to the exiles in faraway Babylon. The letter said, in part, “Seek the welfare of the place where you are.” The word used in the text that is usually translated as “welfare” is shalom, which also carries implications of peace in addition to health and wholeness. The exiles are being told: Seek the health and peace and wholeness of the place in which you are now; do not pine after that which is gone. Seek the welfare of the city where you are, for in its health and wholeness you will find your own.
Well, here we are, my brothers and sisters, gathered together in this sacred space, people of different faith traditions and backgrounds and life experiences who live together in the Crescent City, on this week of the national holiday of Thanksgiving, and we too find ourselves in a kind of exile. We too feel grief and pain and fear and rage; we too look back longingly to a place and time when we felt secure and safe and our city, however imperfect, was at least whole. We are caught in a time of economic upheaval, a time when many people who had previously thoght themselves safe, find themselves in danger of losing homes and/or jobs, losing retirement funds and/or college savings for children and grandchildren. And we think to ourselves, aloud or unspoken, “How can we give thanks in a time such as this – our nation at war, our economy in shambles, our beloved city still not rebuilt after 3 long years – what kind of Thanksgiving can this be?”
It is only natural that we should feel this way, current events being what they are, but it is a misreading of both sacred and secular history to succumb to this kind of despair. Although the exact circumstances we face may be unique to our place and time, our situation is not new. Even though it felt like complete disaster at the time, it was during the Babylonian exile that the leaders of the Hebrews brought together and codified their scrolls of law and history. The psalms of exile written during that time are some of the most powerful and moving pieces of spiritual literature ever written. And let us not forget that back in the devastated city of Jerusalem, the prophet Jeremiah bought a field as a sign of long-term hope and renewal. Almost makes you want to go out and buy a blighted property here, as a sign of our faith in long-term hope and renewal of beloved city.
Even the holiday of Thanksgiving, so important in the “civil religion” of our country, was not born in a time of peace and plenty. We forget that the near-mythical first thanksgiving occurred following the harvest of the Pilgrims’ second year on these shores. That first winter was a disaster, with failed crops, rampant disease, and the deaths of fully half their number. Families bereft of children; orphaned chiildren crying for lost parents; widows and widowers in grief; the entire company burdened by hard work without the love and companionship of those who had died –- and yet, and yet, that second autumn they gathered together with their Indian neighbors and helpers in a spirit of thanksgiving.
In 1863, through a declaration by President Abraham Lincoln, Thanksgiving became an official national holiday. By that time, already tens of thousands of men and boys had died at Gettysburg and the end of the Civil War was nowhere in sight. No one knew what the eventual outcome would be; a sense of despair and hopelessness permeated the riven nation. And yet, and yet, that terrible autumn, Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a day of national thanksgiving.
We have been through our own disaster here in the Crescent City, and for a time, we too lost fully half our population. Despite the 3 years that have passed, every one of us passes or lives with some awful sign of our on-going recovery and its snail’s pace forward. We mourn the losses of neighbors and neighborhoods; many religious communities, like mine, struggle with rebuilding with fewer and less affluent members than before. The crash of the economy offers us little prospect for immediate improvement.
We tend to think that people are grateful because they are happy, because their lives are going well. But surely if that were the only time human beings were grateful, there would be precious little gratitude expressed by precious few people throughout history. Perhaps it is more true that we are able to receive and appreciate the blessings of life, whatever our circumstances, because we know in our hearts it could be otherwise. We could have lost everything, even our own lives; we might not be here at all.
In City of Refuge, the book chosen for the “One Book, One New Orleans” campaign this fall, author Tom Piazza writes of that first difficult Thanksgiving after the Storm. Craig and Alice and their 2 children, a white middle-class family from Uptown whose home is relatively unharmed, have evacuated to suburban Chicago to stay with Alice’s elderly uncle and aunt.
Uncle Gus is a crusty old man who listens to conservative talk radio; several times in Katrina’s aftermath, he and Craig have come close to verbal conflict, but were always steered away by one of the women. Craig and Alice have found an apartment in the area, but have returned to Uncle Gus and Aunt Jean’s to share Thanksgiving dinner as an expression of their gratitude. Craig is feeling more than ambivalent. He thinks
…what right did he have to be grateful, when so many other people had lost everything? Blessings seemed so arbitrary, and if you didn’t deserve your blessing, how could you be grateful for it? Why had God been good to them and not to others? It didn’t make sense…
Then Uncle Gus speaks, remembering another Thanksgiving:
…I spent Thanksgiving of 19 and 52 in Korea… And, you know, so many of your friends die when you are in a situation like that, or get injured, disap-pear, and you wonder why you are still alive and they aren’t…
We had a chaplain there with us, named Father Bill Joseph. He gave a blessing over dinner… everybody was thinking about home and our fam-ilies, and thinking about our pals who would never see their families again, and wondering whether we would make it home.…
Anyway Bill Joseph said, like he was reading our minds, he said, ‘We don’t know why we are here, and others are not. It’s not just that we don’t know; we can’t know. People go away for reasons that make no sense, and we are left here. All we know is that’s how it works; we can’t know why. So the question for those of us who are left, is not why but how – how do you use your time you have left, which you don’t know how much it is. How do you want to live that time? Because that’s the only thing you have any control over.’
And I’ll tell you, that made so much of a difference to every man at those tables in that big hall. It was like he gave us back to ourselves, or…put us back where we needed to be. I don’t know how to say it better than that.”
There’s no need to say it any better than that. It is that very sense of thankfulness despite all outward appearances and despite all pain that enables us to go on and endure, through tragedy and loss. We have God’s scriptural promise to be with us, to restore “our fortunes and gather [us]… from all the places” we have been driven. That that restoration in New Orleans might take as long as the biblical 70 years is perhaps a given in our situation. And yet, and yet, we can say “thank you” for all that we have and all that we are.
In a poem of terrible beauty, W. S. Merwin takes up this thread of giving thanks in a complex world, a world that continually hurts and disappoints us, that manages to keep surprising us with its apparently inexhaustible inhumanity.
…back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you…
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is.
Dark though it is, though terrible choices are forced upon us, though we live in permanent exile from New Orleans as she used to be, though evil and pain seem rampant and even sometimes regnant, we still have the power to see and claim the good and the beautiful in each day – and to give thanks for it. And so we say together in this painful time in this complex world, “Thank you thank you thank you.”
