Think Giving

November 20, 1983
Lakeland

We celebrate Thanksgiving in our own ways and necessities. For many, it is joyous with abundant food and treasured customs. For others, it may be lonely with sad remembrance of things past which are no more. For others, many of the 8½ million unemployed, economic fear will be a presence among them. For the 450 million people in the world who are chronically undernourished, there will be no experience of thanks for harvest home. For the parents of the 20,000 children (at least) who die today and every day from causes related to nutrition, despair and bitterness will be the prevailing feeling, not thanks.

Somewhere I read that thankfulness derives from an old Anglo-Saxon word which meant thinkfulness. One of the thoughts that occurred to me in thinking about thinkfulness is that Thanksgiving is two words, but giving could mean more than giving thanks for our own festival meals.

Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner
Eating a (holiday) pie
He stuck in his thumb
And pulled out a plumb
And said, what a good boy am I.

I don’t know anybody here who fits that parody of complacency and self-centeredness. Yet, I would urge you to think-giving. We have an annual custom of receiving voluntary donations for UUSC “Guest at Your Table” effort to raise funds for hunger projects. From Thanksgiving until an ingathering at Christmas service, December 18, we can, if we will, set aside a daily amount for an unknown hungry child or adult. We do not have this year the little boxes to drop coins in, daily, but you can respond, if you will. Set up your own system.

If you take the gloomy side, you can ask, well, how will such contributions from the members of one small religious denomination make any difference to the hundreds of millions who are hungry. Or you can be more positive and affirm that such gifts will make a difference to some. Think-giving.

Beyond that, there is a continuing need to recognize that the world food problem requires planning and provisions by the governments of the world. The World Food Council of the United Nations, meeting recently, observed “that food abundance in some areas and scarcity in others is deepening the tensions between rich and poor, but they also felt that food and agriculture still represent a likely entry point for building bridges of mutual collaboration and resource mobilization among and between developed and developing countries.” - UUSC Hunger Liberation Manual

Think giving in another way, too. Thing giving your attention to the ABC program tonight, “The Day After.” You have read some of the pre-publicity. Some may have a tendency to shy away – not want to know what the world would be like the day after the first day of nuclear war. I read that the militant religious entrepreneur Jerry Falwell wrote 80,000 ministers urging them to preach on “The Day After” as a program instigated by nuclear freeze advocates. I didn’t receive a letter from Mr. Falwell (I don’t feel deprived or rejected). I just wish that those who believe in a nuclear freeze had the clout and the resources to plan such a program. Think giving your attention, better still, seeing it with friends and neighbors and talk about it afterwards. [CJW note: viewers’ guide].

Celebrate Thanksgiving and think-giving.

Attachment:

The closing words are the closing words of George Willison’s great book about the Pilgrims, SAINTS AND STRANGERS (p. 434-5): “The (Pilgrims) were never ones for mummery and ceremonial. They had no use for precedent and tradition, and deliberately flouted both. They were innovators, revolutionaries, never being restrained by the dead hand of the past. They were interested in the immediate scene about them and in trying to make it better, even at the cost of their lives. They had no time for ancestor worship, no taste for monuments. Rather, they had the supreme human qualities – an intelligent awareness of things about them, a sensitive desire to do something to bring them closer to their entire heart’s desire, and an absolutely indomitable spirit in pursuing their own high purposes.

“ ‘True it was,’ they had said when discussing the question of leaving Leyden to plunge into the unknown, ‘that such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground and reason; not rashly or lightly as many have done for curiositie or hope of gaine, etc ... It was granted ye dangers were great, but not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were many of them likly, yet they were not certaine; it might be sundrie of ye things feared might never befalle; others by providente care and use of good means might in a measure be prevented; and of all of them through ye help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome....

“ ‘Yea though they should lose their lives in this action, yet they might have comforte in the same ... all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages....’”