The Many Dimensions Of Service

November 17, 1985
Lakeland

The Many Dimensions Of Service
UUSC Sunday
“Guest At Your Table”

At this time of year, we share in the UUSC program “Guest at Your Table.” The little boxes are available for you to share your meals with someone you will never meet. The boxes will be ingathered at our annual Christmas – Hanukkah – Winter Solstice on December 22.

One of the many definitions of service is “to be of use, to answer a purpose.” The intention of my remarks today is to highlight how we, by supporting the UUSC, can be of use and answer a purpose.

It is not easy to feel deeply the pain and suffering of those we never see and who exist thousands of miles from our comfortable lives. “How to Live on a Hundred Dollars a Year in Twelve Easy Stages” may touch our imagination:

How to Live on a Hundred Dollars a Year in Twelve Easy Stages

When we hear that most of the people in the “third world” have a standard of living of less than $200 a year, it is not easy to visualize what that means. Here’s a sample exercise in imagination designed to help us understand what it’s like:

Start with a typical American family, your family – a small home, maybe in the suburbs; a car or two; public utilities, paved streets, schools and hospitals nearby; a comfortable annual income.

1. Remove all furniture from the house, except a few old blankets, a kitchen table, and a wooden chair.
2. Get rid of all the extra clothing. This leaves each member of our family with one set of the oldest clothes they own; the head of the family may keep a pair of shoes.
3. Clear out the kitchen. Leave behind some matches, a bag of flour, some sugar and salt. Also, for tonight's meal, a few moldy potatoes, a handful of onions, and a dish of dried beans.
4. Dismantle the plumbing, sewage system, electricity, and telephone. Tear up the streets and sidewalks.
5. Remove the house itself and move our family into a tool shed.
6. The suburban neighborhood has now been transformed into a shantytown, but our family is fortunate to have any shelter at all.
7. Cancel all subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, book clubs. It doesn’t matter, because our family is now illiterate.
8. Leave one radio for the entire shantytown.
9. Move the nearest clinic or hospital ten miles away and fire most of the staff, except for a midwife and an aide. While you’re at it, demolish the post office and fire stations, and move the school into a two-room building three miles away.

There are many Service Committee programs to serve human needs. We cannot solve in a short time the massive problems of hunger, sickness, and despair. Others help. But we can make a difference, and the Service Committee has, beginning with its efforts in 1939, sheltering and assisting refugees of the Spanish Civil War and Czechoslovakia.

There are emergency programs such as the recent airlift of emergency supplies to help persons suffering from the disastrous earthquake in Mexico City.

On July 4, the UUSC, in collaboration with Oxfam and Operation California, airlifted to Nicaragua 25,000 lbs of medical supplies worth $250,000. It was the fifth collaborative airlift to Nicaragua. Distributions in Nicaragua were by organizations independent of the government of Nicaragua.

In collaboration with others, food and supplies have been sent directly to those suffering from drought and famine in sub-Saharan Africa.

Great as the need is to act in emergencies to assist the hungry, sick, and victims of disasters, the parallel emphasis has been to help people help themselves. “Harambee” is a Swahili word for “let’s work together.”

In Dakar, Senegal, Africa, the UUSC is supporting an urban skills training center (FAFS – French acronym for Federation des Associations Féminines du Sénégal – Federation of Women’s Associations of Senegal). At that center, 18 young rural women gain education in literacy, home economics, and family planning. Eventually the center will be expanded to house 60 women at a time for such training.

The UUSC also assists the National University of Benin on a 3-year demonstration project that utilizes village-level resources to prepare medical and nursing students to train primary health workers.

In India, where most women are still victims of a cruel social system, the UUSC helps women take more control of their lives.

There is support for a health and economic program in Bombay, an urban women’s resource center in Delhi, and a rural women’s social education center in Madras, and [in] Bangalore, and action research in community health in Gujarat.

For years, in the Caribbean, the UUSC has mounted pilot programs. In Haiti, the projects continue, emphasizing community participation in family planning, and maternal and child health care.

During 1984-85, the UUSC played a smaller supporting role in St. Kitts-Nevis, as the government assumed control of the program. The pilot project was established to reduce infant mortality, prevent second pregnancies, and provide jobs and education for teen-age mothers. Similar programs are supported in Jamaica, Anguilla, Antigua, and Guyana.

UUSC cannot solve the immense problems of hunger, sickness, and ignorance in the 3rd and 4th worlds. But through pilot projects that demonstrate that there are answers and methods, the respective national governments and indigenous organizations have a proven base to expand the programs of self-help and community participation. The journey from despair to hope is long and arduous, but all journeys begin with the first steps, and it is helping with first steps that the UUSC serves – helping but not controlling, teaching but not dominating. This accords with the Unitarian Universalist principle “to affirm, defend, and promote the supreme worth and dignity of every human personality, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships.”

Loyalty to that principle implies that there should be efforts to get at root causes as well as the grievous symptoms. Therefore there have been efforts for human rights education. The efforts of the UUSC in the last few years have targeted several areas of concern. Central America has been a focus, not only for medical and other aid, but to discover facts in situations fogged by contradictory reports. The Service Committee has sent at least 10 Congressional fact-finding delegations to Central America. Congressmen, aides, and others have visited El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Tonight at 7, here, there will be an audio-visual presentation prepared by the UUSC, “Windows on the Truth,” which describes the political situations in Central America. There is an obligation to be informed, even when the position may be in contradiction to the political stands and procedures of the Administration. There will be an opportunity for questioning and discussion.

Nor are the efforts of the UUSC confined to the needs and issues outside the 50 States. For 10 years, a major domestic program has been the National Moratorium on Prison Construction, [which] has been working to halt the building of new jails and prisons. Prisons are overflowing, with the result that in some places, by judicial order, no more can be locked up. Is it practical or wise to keep building prisons at enormous costs? No one wants chronic criminals free to roam the streets. But with the cast of prison cells and maintenance of prisoners exceeding the cost of a university education at Harvard or Princeton, eventually some common sense must prevail. Prisoners guilty of non-violent crimes could be supervised and trained for useful occupations at a fraction of the cost of keeping them incarcerated in the schools for crime we call prisons.

Aging – recognizing that aging persons are an increasing segment of the population, the UUSC works in coalition with such organizations as the Gray Panthers and the National Citizens Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. Older people are helped to make their voices heard on issues that affect their health, security, and well-being.

The domestic programs are supported by UUSC volunteer groups. This is a movement which can grow, and by common effort make the issues more clear and the programs more effective.

For these reasons and causes, the UUSC asks our support. Of course, there are many organizations that help human need and promote human dignity. Many of us support such organizations. But the UUSC is “ours” - we have supported it commendably, and I trust will do so this year and in the years to come. The UUSC makes no effort to recruit those it helps to become Unitarian Universalists. If the tribal religion of an African is satisfactory and inspiring, then there is no pressure or need to convert him or her. If a woman in India is loyal to the Hindu or Moslem religion, there is no price tag of conversion for our aid. If a Roman Catholic in Central America responds to the sacraments of that faith, we see no need to push on them our understanding or interpretation of what religion is, organizationally or liturgically.

Harambee – let’s work together for human need and human dignity. One of the tangible ways we can do that is by sharing our abundance by having a guest at the table at this season of Thanksgiving.

The flaming chalice is the symbol of the UUSC – to me, it represents the light of knowledge, the spark of hope, and the glow of persistence toward the goals of more just, more fair, and more free social orders.

Thanksgiving – Gratitude for Life

November 18, 1984
Lakeland

Harvest Home – that touches us at depth – for Harvest Home is the assurance that there will be food to eat.

We no longer, most of us, live on the land where our own crops mean ample food if the harvest is bountiful, or near-starvation if the harvest is lean. Corn, beans, meat, we buy at the super-market. But other places in our world, men, women, and children starve.

In our affluent nation, the prospect for actual starvation is non-existent for most of us. There are many people living in poverty in the U.S., but their despair and need is remote and abstract for most of us.

Our fears are of a different order – the razor’s edge of nuclear war, the possibility of chemical waste and pollution out-of-control, the threat to so many workers that their occupational usefulness to society is being permanently lost because technology develops machines to replace men and women. In our nation, these dispossessed may not starve physically, there will be a dole, but the damage to their spirit will deprive their lives of taste and tang.

The ceremonies of Harvest Home are older than history. Even in the worst of times, gratitude is evoked for the land and sky which sustain us.

Governor William Bradford, in his HISTORY OF THE PLYMOUTH PLANTATION writes of Thanksgiving of 1923. There had been fears of crop failure. Wrote Governor Bradford, “I may not here omit how, notwithstanding all their great pains and industrie, and the hopes of a great crop, the Lord seemed to blast, and take away the same, and to threaten further and more sore famine unto them by a great drought which continued from the third week in May till about the middle of July, without any rain, and with great heat insomuch as the corn began to wither away, though it was set with fish, the moisture whereof helped it much.”

Then after the Pilgrims set aside a full day for prayers for rain, showers came and came often enough to ensure a good crop. This apparent consequence of prayer astonished the Indians. Bradford notes “for which mercie (in time convenient) they also set apart a day of Thanksgiving.”

[CJW note: overlooked that harvest corn ceremony – before the Europeans invaded and possessed the land]

The landing of the Pilgrims is part of the fibre of the celebrations of Americans. After all, the Pilgrims were pioneers, seeking religious freedom in a new world. When I was young, I thought the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving, not knowing then how far more ancient is the feeling of gratitude that human life will persist through the cold winter and barren fields. Perhaps you, like I did, had to memorize Felicia Hemans’ poem “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England.” All I can recall now is the first stanza:

“The breaking of waves dashed high
On a stern and rockbound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed....”

Felecia Hemans was an English poet who had never seen Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. When an American told her that the shores of Massachusetts Bay on the South Shore were not stern or rock-bound, but sandy beaches, tidal marshes, and gentle inlets, Felicia Hemans cried.

[CJW note: forget it was a feast for the whole community – of neighbors of a different color invited - “guest at our table”]

But apart from all the romance of the Mayflower Compact, the Courtship of Myles Standish, the friendly Indians – Squanto, Massasoit, and all, there is something basic and mysterious about the vegetables, fruits, nuts, and fibers bestowed by the Good Earth. Better than church prayers, stilted by dogma, I like a Thanksgiving prayer of the American Indian:

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and squash which give us life;
We give thanks for the wind which moves the air and blows away diseases;
We give thanks for the sun which has looked on us with a kindly eye;
We give thanks for the moon and stars which give us light when the sun is gone;
We give thanks to the Great Spirit, who is all goodness and directs all things for the good of his children.”

(STORIES OF INDIAN CHILDREN, Mary Hall Husted)

The American Indians gave thanks, but they knew hunger, disease, disaster, and violence, too. The Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth were able to do so because disease or a plague had entirely wiped out the tribe which had been there – other tribes feared to re-occupy that tract.

Still, the Indians could give thanks to the Great Spirit for his goodness. Strange? There is a dogged persistence to life. We struggle to survive – and when we are honest with ourselves – we are pleased to be among the survivors, in spite of all woe and travail. We humans share more than brain, heart, lungs, intestines. [CJW note: we share resilience against disaster, and hope even when we are bruised and bleeding from terrible circumstances] Carl Sandburg grasped this in his gathering of folk-wisdom in THE PEOPLE, YES. You know the lines:

“We’ll see what we’ll see.
Time is a great teacher.
Today me and tomorrow maybe you.
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
What is bitter to stand against today may be
sweet to remember tomorrow.

Whether the stone bumps the jug or the jug
bumps the stone it is bad for the jug.
We all belong to the same big family and have
the same smell.
Handling honey, tar or dung some of it sticks
to the fingers.
The liar comes to believe his own lies.
He who burns himself must sit on the blisters.
God alone understands fools.
To work hard, live hard, to die hard,
and then to go to hell after all would be too
damned hard.

You can fool all of the people some of the time
and some of the people all of the time but
you can’t fool all of the people all of
the time.
It takes all kinds of people to make a world.

What is bred in the bone will tell.
Between the inbreds and the cross-breeds the
argument goes on.
You can breed them up as easy as you can breed
them down.
“I don’t know who my ancestors were,” said a
mongrel, “but we’ve been descending for
a long time.”
“My ancestors,” said the Cherokee-blooded
Oklahoman, “Didn’t come over in the
Mayflower, but we were there to meet the
boat.”
“Why,” said the Denver Irish policeman as he
arrested a Pawnee Indian IWW soapboxer,
“Why don’t you go back where you came
from.”

We are strange creatures. Yet we are conscious of gratitude at Thanksgiving. Something deep and primal within us resonates to Harvest Home, even when we are far removed from ploughing, planting, and praying for rain. We reap no corn, grind no grain, hunt no deer or turkey, most of us. But we respond.

The ancient feelings still stir within us – we are bound to the Earth, nourished and warmed by the sun, the heirs of rain, frost moon, and tides. Even when one is among those (as I am) who perceive flaws in the intellectual and theological arguments for God or gods, there is still some deep empathy to that who or what that the ancients named Lord of Harvest. The path to full knowing is guarded and barricaded, but sometimes there is the feeling that the path is not long and far distant, even though the barrier is impenetrable in our minds.

But there is that in the bounty of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, which stirs us to be glad for life, no matter how difficult the journey and how sore the wounds we suffer along the way.

Abundance In Our World

November 27, 1983
Lakeland
Thanksgiving Sunday

When the colonists gathered at Plymouth on an autumn day in 1621 to give thanks to the God they worshiped and to feast with their families and Indian friends, a colonial tradition was born which both renewed and re-shaped a harvest festival which is older than recorded history .... We owe much to the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

When the historic compact was signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, new vitality was added to emerging dreams of government by free persons disciplined by self-imposed laws. A climax, but not the conclusion or achievement that goal was reached in the American Revolution when the grandest human goals were stated plainly: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Much remained to be accomplished when the Revolution was won – slavery, the right of all to vote, free public education. ... There are many important goals still before us.

There is much to be done, but we should not fail to return thanks for the many ways the Pilgrim tradition has enriched our public morality, freed us and put on us the pressure of Pilgrim example to discipline ourselves.

Celebrating harvest home is an ancient festival of abundance. I would like to remind you of abundance, as it is in our world. Furthermore, the Mayflower Compact signers agreed to a mutual covenant of law and order before they settled on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. Even as the Pilgrims faced an abundant future to be purchased at great price, and undertook their daring adventure supported by a mutual compact, so we in this world face a great potential which can be achieved only by daring involvements and more universal compacts.

“Theology of Abundance” is intended to indicate the ... manner the peoples of the earth have celebrated harvest with reverence. The wonders of growing things that nourish our bodies and are pleasant to our tastes have always gripped human imagination. The events of pre-history which we can infer from tribal memories, folk songs and remnants of ancient ritual, not to speak of the clearer records of history, all confirm the intensity of feeling that human beings sense about seedtime, growth, and harvest. We survive because of growing things that are the bounty of the good earth. Root, vegetable, grain, fruit sustain us.

But the origins of celebration of harvest home are not only in our Judeo-Christian cultural roots, but also in the heritage of the American Indians who were so cruelly despoiled and deceived by the European invaders. The late A. Hyatt Verrill, scholar of the culture of American Indians, observed in his book THE REAL AMERICANS, “In the eastern states, the Algonquin tribes, such as Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, Mohicans, Massachusetts and others held a great autumnal feast. [CJW note: hundreds of years before the Pilgrims landed.] The Indians gathered to give thanks to the Great Spirit and lesser deities for abundant crops, good hunting, and fishing. Dances were held .... Drums of a special form were thumped ... a new fire symbolic of a fresh start in life was kindled and there was a great feast with venison, roasted ears, wild turkeys, squash, pumpkin, pudding.”

Thus, Earth’s abundance might echo the Indian prayer, too -

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and squashes that give us life; ... we give thanks to the Great Spirit, who is all goodness and who directs all things for the good of his children.”

Addendum
[Editor’s note: the following addendum is printed on paper that appears to have come from a much earlier sermon, probably dating to the 1950s]

Let me conclude with a brief poem that appeared a couple years ago in the New York Herald Tribune, written up by Sam Bradley, entitled “Pilgrims, Pilgrims Yet.”

“They came as strangers, pilgrims of the earth,
to a wilderness of untried strengths, a West
for bolder covenants. And their unrest
is still in us. Each humbled line of birth,
rebel or not, yet far-ventures worth
of everyman. And our God-speeds attest
a perpetuity of trust, a quest
not halted by a dowsing at the hearth.

“A stranger’s hand? A promised world at hand?
Draconian rules to pass? If we undo
old mistimed power, tradition misapplied,
ours, fasces of new power! But to command
our sheaf of stars, we must somehow subdue
Our waylost fear and our waylaying pride.”

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....’”

The Land Was Ours, Before We Were The Land’s

November 25, 1976 – Orl
November 22, 1979 – Lakeland
Thanksgiving

The Land Was Ours, Before We Were The Land’s

In the land of the Senecas, which was roughly bounded by the Genesee River on the East and the Niagara joining of two lakeheads on the West, there still stand some of the longhouses of the Senecas, part of the Iroquois family of nations. The longhouse was a community residence of matrilineal families, but it was also a community council house.

For hundreds of years before the Pilgrims came, the American Indians celebrated the gathering-in of harvest. The Senecas were an agricultural tribe which had evolved an intricate Thanksgiving ritual. Thanksgiving was Ganon:yonk, celebrated with poems and the Feather and Drum Dance. Skilled orators would recite the age-old poems. Tribal chiefs Cornplanter and Red Jacket were among the most famous when the Europeans invaded the peaceful land of the six nations. At harvest time, there was a belief from the most ancient of times that when the thanksgiving ritual began, even the wind stopped and all spirit forces listened.

To the cadence of the drum, the rhythmic stomp of dance and the measured chant of the poem, the Longhouse people gave thanks for the structure of the world and for the grain, corn, squashes, beans, venison, and wild turkey provided there so that the people of the six nations might survive and mate and endure.

We know more of the psalms of thanksgiving created by the Hebrews, but the peace loving tribes of the Iroquois had their songs of thanks. Part of their thanksgiving chant went:

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and squashes that give us life;
We give thanks for the Great Spirit who is all goodness and
who directs all things for the good of his children.”

We are a long way from Cornplanter and his people. We buy turkey and squash, not grow it – but we are alive; we know love and pain an anxiety – and at times, assurance that life is good. And we give thanks.

The Senecas’ and Pilgrims’ survival depended on the favorable allotment of sun, rain, heat, frost, and cold. Our survival is dependent on complexities of culture, needing generosity and understanding that can break through much more difficult boundaries than the Genesee and the Niagara. Our breakthrough has to be through thick walls of international fear and, within our own country, through walls of racial mistrust and the wall of ignorance and hostility between groups.

Perhaps Sam Bradley puts our thanks and fears in words:

Pilgrims, Pilgrims Yet

“They came as strangers, pilgrims of the earth,
to a wilderness of untried strengths, a West
for bolder covenants. And their unrest
is still in us. Each humbled line of birth,
rebel or not, yet far-ventures worth
of everyman. And our God-speeds attest
a perpetuity of trust, a quest
not halted by a dowsing at the hearth.

“A stranger’s hand? A promised world at hand?
Draconian rules to pass? If we undo
old mistimed power, tradition misapplied,
ours, fasces of new power! But to command
our sheaf of stars, we must somehow subdue
Our waylost fear and our waylaying pride.”

The Fire and the Rock

November 23, 1966
Plainfield
Thanksgiving Eve

The Fire and the Rock

Underlying all the dynamics of social change and beyond the undeniable cultural differences in the family of man, there is an imperishable truth which needs emphasis at the time of Thanksgiving. To feel good about the bounty of the earth while being irresponsible about the obligations of proper stewardship is to ensure disaster by remembering the fire and forgetting the rock.

The Promethean myth has remained an enduring symbolic creation, particularly for those who are optimistic about human nature and hopeful about the possibility of human progress by human effort. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Man’s mind became the difference between human and non-human animals. The fire of the gods symbolized man’s acquisition of the power to reason, the skill to invent, adapt, and use tools. This evening, perhaps, the theft of god-fire represents the discovery and refinement of agriculture. In ancient days, more remote than history records, man learned that he need not wander in search of wild berries, nuts, and game. He learned to scatter the good seed on the land, to domesticate goat, sheep, and cattle, and to wait patiently as the seed germinated, as green broke through the crust of earth, then bud and bloom and harvest. Man learned he had to store his crops in order to live from harvest to harvest. Paying the high costs of experience, man found that soil must be fertilized and fields like fallow now and then if the harvest was to remain bountiful.

The cost of storms and the terrible experiences of flood taught the human family to be wary of weather. So ingrained is the sensitivity to weather that even today with our steam heat and air conditioning, seldom does a conversation proceed without reference to sun and shadow, rain and clear, freeze and thaw.

Much has changed, particularly in the lifetimes of many of us. Our barns are supermarkets or freezers in the basement. Few of us ever till the soil. Our work on the good earth is largely confined to manicuring lawns and tending domesticated flowers. Our milk is powdered; our peas are frozen; our bread is fortified; our diet reinforced with capsuled vitamins; our potatoes come already fried; our meat boned; and in some households, even the Thanksgiving turkey arrives already roasted.

One of the jingling songs one hears around Thanksgiving time is “over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go.” For a few, perhaps this is still true to their experience. But for many of us, one grandmother may have lived in a thickly-populated city; and the other grandmother we never knew because she stayed in the old country. Today when we go over (or under) the river, we are more likely to go through a toll booth than through the woods.

But the basic insight of the Promethean fire remains. Man has converted the powers and abundance of earth to man’s use. Because of man’s ability to think, to reflect on experience, to propose change, to pass on to his posterity the lessons he has learned and the tools he has developed, man has accumulated skills and knowledge in an amount and complexity that is a perpetual astonishment.

Man has converted the plant to fiber; the chemical to fabric; the herb to medicine; the rocks of the earth to shining steel bars and shapes; the sap of trees to flexible rubber.

Man has converted the drops of petroleum to combustible power; man has converted the falling waters to light and power; man has converted mass to energy, unlocking the door to incredible power.

The fire Prometheus stole from the gods symbolizes these – the power to discover, know, re-learn and pass on the tested knowledge so that the new generation does not have to start at the beginning. A son could pick up where the father put down.

But one of the tragic oversights of man has been to forget, or underestimate, the other half of the Promethean myth, the rock. For his presumption and impertinence in stealing the fire of the gods, Prometheus was condemned to be forever chained to the rock in never-ending torture as a vulture continually ate his body. This was the punishment for stealing fire – knowledge. There has been a price to being human because we have not always been proper stewards of the abundance and energies we have converted from the bounty of the earth.

One of the memories our family has of Yellowstone Park is the instruction of the Park Rangers not to feed the bears who beg so cutely (or fearsomely, depending on how scared one is when a ... bruin approaches). Bears should not be fed candy bars or peanuts or crackers or sugar-lumps because then they may fail to eat sufficient wild-berries and other foods natural to them. The bears require this natural diet in order to put on enough fat to live through the hibernation season. When that instinctive diet is upset with tourist food, the bears may die.

This is suggestive of matters more vital. Think of the great rivers of our continent – try to imagine our routes of commerce, our water for cities, our development of homes for man without the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Platte, the Snake, the Sacramento, the Columbia, the Merced; or in our immediate surroundings, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Raritan, the Passaic.

We have used the fire of the gods to make servants for us of these great arteries of civilization. But also we have abused them. Did you swim this summer in the Hudson, the Raritan, the Passaic? Our own man-made pollutions have placed us on a rock of torture.

There has been a ruination of the Redwoods and other forests. The air is unhealthy in our cities; the skylines obscured by the smoke of our indiscriminate use of the powers we have acquired and our heedlessness for our long-run welfare.

One of the favorite themes of horror movies is the man-made monster. The scientist experimenting in the lab creates a Frankenstein [monster] he cannot control. Terror, death, and destruction inevitably are in the plot. Or the experimenter makes a mistake and is exposed to terrible radiation or electricity. In the fantasy plot, he does not die but loses his humane qualities while gaining immeasurable strength and immunity to the usual weapons of man. There seems to be something obsessive about this theme, as it appears again and again.

The Promethean myth of the fire and the rock is relevant enough so that man should never forget the controls needed for his marvelous devices and astonishing technologies.

Amid the abundant thanksgiving for the majority of Americans, can there be reflection on the fire and the rock? The conservation and pollution studies as well as efforts to increase controls receive too little attention. Beyond those, we should realize that the problem goes deeper. As we overpopulate the earth, we undermine our reserves in the soil, air, and water. Failure to establish international controls on nuclear weapons ensures that the atmosphere will become increasingly poisonous as tests will multiply on the part of nations who are not parties to the agreement to test underground only.

If we people of the world are to come to grips with such awesome problems, we must learn from the ancient of days. The ceremonies and celebrations of primitive man were founded on the belief that human survival was possible only with a correct relationship with the powers that provided growth and harvest, the forces resident in the universe.

We no longer are naïve about fertility rites and sacrifices to the gods to ensure harvest, but the need is great, still, to recognize the relational nature of man and his world of sea and oil and air and climate.

May not only our thankfulness be plentiful but also our responsibility deepen.

Addendum: handwritten by CJW

As is a ceremonial custom, the President’s proclamation was read. There are those of us who would assert that there is an overflowing of pride and an insufficiency of humility in the nationalistic rhetoric. Penance is more appropriate than boastfulness.

Yes many of us are better fed and housed, but not all – extensive pockets of poverty still prevail. Inequality is a grim reality.

Yes, our men are fighting on a foreign field. But the cause for which they sacrifice is still unconvincing. We must dis-enthrall ourselves. When one believes in his cause, particularly when it is held by a minority, he has an obligation to persist in that for which we should be truly thankful – the right of dissent, the process of searching for truth – examining all claims, even those asserted by those with the greatest power.

Addendum: From John Masefield

Might not the birth of every man be hailed
As a divine appearance, come to lead
Men to the living brotherhood they need?
Each brings a person hitherto unknown,
For want of whom man travails and has ailed.
Might not this reverence for life prepare
A state more worth, wherein each citizen
Should have, for faith, the world of fellowmen,
For charity, a paradise on earth,
For hope the beauty of the singing there?

An Actress and a Better World

November 25, 1965
Plainfield

An Actress and a Better World

Recently, actress Dorothy Malone recovered from illness so serious that her heart stopped beating two or three times during several hours of surgery necessary to remove massive blood clots from her lungs. For five days following the operation, she was unconscious; and death was more of a probability than life.

Her convalescence was painful and prolonged, but she commented recently, “All the colors of the world look bright to me now.”

Life is like that, isn’t it? Thirst creates the sweetest water. We rarely appreciate living when things go smoothly; when pain is absent and danger remote. But when we have survived a difficult ordeal of body or mind, then it is that we experience a renewed awareness of that for which we should be thankful:

The blue dark, green light sea
The fair sky and the storm cloud
The rhythm of sun and rain
The alternates of frost and thaw
The pulse of seedtime and harvest
The chatter of children and the murmur of the aged
The sense of achievement when there is strength to strive for goals
The contentment known when we can rest from the work of a hard, long and useful day.
The blessing of parents; the homecoming of children.

Even when we have not been closely brushed by the hand of death or the touch of disaster, may it be that we will be more aware of the priceless gift of life.

May there stir within us thankfulness for human love, creation, growth care.

For it is because the gift of life is so great – that sorrow is keen when we lose someone.

It is because of the potential of life is so productive that tragedy strikes deeply.

It is because the possibilities of life are so rare that disaster is hard and bitter.

Each of us would create our own variations on the theme of thanksgiving. But create in us a sense of life’s magic so that “the colors will look brighter” to us all.

In these annual moments of harvest home, moments with tentacles deep in primeval human culture and emotion, may the colors look brighter as we pause and give thanks for the life that is ours;

thanks for the world in which we live;

and beyond all the transient differences of philosophy and theology, thanks for this universe, our home – our home from which we can never be separated, whether as tissue, mineral, ashes, vapor or dust, for these are all part of us; and we part of them; and our kinship to totality is basic and beyond annihilation.

The Providential Seed Corn – and the Puzzle of Thankfulness

November 24, 1965
Plainfield

Also,
November 20, 1977
Lakeland

The Providential Seed Corn – and the Puzzle of Thankfulness

In November – December 1620, before deciding to settle Plymouth, the Pilgrims reconnoitered other parts of Cape Cod. In his unorthodox book of the Pilgrim adventure, SAINTS AND STRANGERS, George Willison has a fascinating chapter, “Babes in the Wilderness.” Monday, the 13th of November, 1620, was a day when the women went ashore to wash the heaps of clothes and bedding soiled in the long voyage. Sentries guarded them while excited children ran up and down the beach. Some men repaired the longboat; others dug clams on the tidal flats to make a succulent feast.

Two days later, sixteen men led by Captain Myles Standish, set off to explore the best possible place of settlement. Soon they glimpsed five or six Indians, whom the Pilgrims called “Savages,” but the Indians darted off into the woods. The Pilgrims pursued; and if the native Americans had hostile intentions, nothing could have been easier than an ambush. But there was no trap.

Near what is now Truro, on Cape Cod, Captain Standish and his company came on several clearings which the Indians had used as cornfields. They noticed sand piles covered with grass rugs, which although the first pile they investigated was a grave, others proved to be underground enclosures for corn stored in large baskets – three or four bushel capacity. This of course was the Indian seed corn being stored for next year’s crop. The Pilgrims simply helped themselves to other people’s property without permission and with no compensation. Willison writes, “This was just plain larceny of course, but the Pilgrims were inclined to regard it as another special providence of God. And in a sense it was, for without this seed corn the would have had no crops the next year and all would have starved to death. As it was, they just barely managed to squeeze through.” (p. 150)

When one thinks about it, this is a variation on a thanksgiving theme, is it not?

Can taking other people’s property, just because one needs it, be called the “providence of God?” The question may seem irreverent, because haloes have been shining over Pilgrim memories for quite a while, but supposed it happened to you today? Suppose some ragged invaders of a different skin color helped themselves to your stores of food at the beginning of Winter? And it was food you could not possibly replace? The Pilgrims were people of the Book – the Bible, we are told. What happened to the commandment “Thou shalt not steal?” Judgment at this distance of 345 years is unnecessary and futile.

But we might well think back with gratitude on the forbearance of the Americans to these invaders. Slaughtering the Pilgrim Company would not have been difficult. Continued harassment would have caused an utter failure of the Company, particularly that first dreadful Winter. Furthermore, the continued history of relations between colonizers, and later our nation with the Indians reflects little glory and much shame upon us for the broken treaties, the imposed degradation and nearly complete extinction of the American Indian cultures by the invaders from Europe.

So in moments such as these, we would feel some sense of repentance; we would not only admire the Pilgrim fathers, but also the Indian brothers, for without the forbearance and peaceful attitudes of these so-called “savages,” the Plimoth Plantation would have been no more enduring than that ill-fated colony of Englishmen on Roanoke Island in Virginia.

Such gratitude may be a variation on a theme, but an aspect we should recognize more than we do.

And so they survived.

Attached:
November 21, 1954
Bridgeport

The Religion of the Third Feast

When the settlers at Plymouth gathered the following year to give thanks, to feast and to enjoy the friendship of their Indian neighbors, an American tradition began. Because we are Americans, we are emotionally conditioned to think of Thanksgiving as a celebration born on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, [345] years ago. That’s a long time ago. The tradition of a government of free men under self-imposed laws that was born in the cabin of the Mayflower at the beginning of that great adventure was a heritage that grew and culminated in the American Revolution with goals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; was a tradition that then exerted a cleansing moral force on some of the infections of tyrannies that had hung on: slavery, voting franchise for everyone regardless of wealth or poverty or sex, free public education, and new in our time the legal removal by the Supreme Court of the stain of discrimination because of skin color. There are many ways that the Pilgrim tradition has enriched us, freed us, and put pressure on us to discipline ourselves.

But the Thanksgiving tradition is older than the Pilgrim’s feast in 1621. Thanksgiving is an ancient ceremony with roots in the very beginnings of our ancient Hebrew religious culture.

The reading from the old scripture of Leviticus (23/ 33/38) tells the story of the Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths). This scripture is the written record of ceremonies even more ancient. The Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkat (Succoth) was the celebration of the final harvest home of the fruits and olives. It was a time of rejoicing. In early times the whole Israelite population lived for a week in the open, sheltered by temporary tents of palm branches. As time went on their descendants observed the ceremony in various ways. When the temple was built in Jerusalem, Sukkat became a time of pilgrimage to that most holy place where sacrifice was offered. In many Jewish homes, even to this day, the rooms are decorated to take on the appearance of booths. Our harvest feast of Thanksgiving is in one sense the Americanized version of the old Hebrew feast of Tabernacles.

This Feast was the third of the great religious festivals when Pilgrims marched to Jerusalem. Christianity has many parallels. The first feast, Passover, became Easter for Christians. The second, the Feast of Weeks, is somewhat less known in America, but in most Christian countries is observed as Pentecost, or Whitsunday.

Thus the meaning of Thanksgiving stirs our feelings because not only does it appeal to our patriotism, and to our pride in the faith, courage and resourcefulness of the Pilgrims, but also because Thanksgiving stirs our religious feelings at depth. (More than that one of the days when human affection is ...)

In addition, the intensity of our emotions is reinforced because this Autumn ceremony of thankfulness for harvest home is not alone the product of our Hebrew and Pilgrim heritage.

The Pilgrims may have been as much inspired by the Indians as their Hebrew heritage. A. Hyatt Verrill, explorer, scholar of Indian cultures, author of many books, who died in New Haven just a few days ago, made a very interesting claim in his book, THE REAL AMERICANS. Mr. Verrill noted that the “Indians’ seasonal dances and ceremonies (were) numerous and of many kinds ... in the Eastern states the Algonquin tribes such as Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, Mohicans, Massachusetts ... and others hold a great autumnal or crop ceremonial feast. (Hundreds of years before the Pilgrims landed) The Indians gathered to give thanks to the Great Spirit and lesser deities for abundant crops, good hunting and fishing. Dances were held ... Drums of a special form were thumped .. A new fire symbolic of a fresh start in life was kindled and there was a great feast with venison roasting ears, wild turkeys, squash pumpkins, pudding.” Mr. Verrill believed that it was from this great Indian ceremony that we derive our Thanksgiving.

One of the most shameful, as well as least known sections of American history has been our inhuman treatment of the Indian tribes who lived on the North American continent when the Europeans began colonization. When history is looked at with some objectivity – when we forget the way we have been conditioned by the “western” movies and the lurid books – we become aware that the Indians of this continent were friendly and hospitable to the newcomers. They were far more friendly to the Europeans than the third and fourth generation Americans were to later immigrants from across the sea. The causes of so-called Indian massacres can be found in broken treaties, in natural retaliation against the brutality, ignorance and greed of the white men who came across the sea. If the Indians had not been friendly it is obvious that there could have been no settlements established.

When the Pilgrims held their great feast of thanks to God they were under the influence of Indian culture as well as Hebrew culture – and the culture of the American Indians was far more advanced than we have ever realized or admitted. The Indian tribes were deeply religious. For the most part they lived in peace with other tribes. Their family life was wholesome and taught high values to the growing children.

One of their Thanksgiving prayers has been translated thus:

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and quashes that give us life;
We give thanks for the wind which moves the air and blows away diseases;
We give thanks for the sun which has looked on us with a kindly eye;
We give thanks for the moon and stars which give us light when the sun is gone;
We give thanks to the Great Spirit, who is all goodness, and who directs all things for the good of his children.”

Furthermore, the religion of the third feast has even deeper roots than already described. Nearly all peoples, all over the world, have had harvest ceremonies and feasts. The wonder of growing things that are nourishing and pleasant to the taste has always gripped the imagination of human beings. Persons survive because of growing things. The record of history, and the events of pre-history which we can assume from tribal memories, folk songs and remnants of ancient ritual – all these confirm the intensity with which seedtime, growth and harvest have always captured the religious feelings of persons of all-time, everywhere.

As far as can be learned, not all harvest festivals were the same everywhere. Variations occurred because of such factors as the most important food crop, the climate, and the relative state of cultural advancement. However, the essential rituals in primitive harvest ceremonies were: 1) propitiatory rites, 2) observances to secure fertility, 3) the offering of first-fruits.

Most of our beliefs are survivals, refined and enlightened, of these primitive expressions. The universal elements of Thanksgiving or harvest festival still basically express the same emotions. We are false to our human heritage if we discard or ignore these basic feelings. But w are also traitor to humanity if we ignore the advances and enlightenment won for us by human beings who refined the barbarisms by unselfish acts and by radiant influence, causing more light to shine on ancient symbols and sacrifices.

Thus the religious meaning of Thanksgiving can best be apprehended by looking at the ancient and primitive ways, and then taking them to our hearts with the refinements of the best of civilization.

First the people of the pre-historic past observe the ingathering of the crops with propitiatory rites. They believed that all things were occupied by spirits. There was the corn-spirit; the tree spirit; the spirit of every vegetable. The people believed that when these were taken for food, the spirits would be angered unless they were placated. So ceremonies grew around the harvest. The corn spirit had to receive some attention or it might be angry at the persons who harvested the golden ears. The vine and tree had to be placated when the grapes and fruit were taken for human use.

Out of this primitive fear of the spirits of growing things has grown, gradually, the spirit of thankfulness to the Power people call God. This world, our home, furnishes us with food, warmth and shelter. There is a spirit of mysterious growth. It does not matter too much, I suppose, if we call that spirit God, Yahweh, Allah, Manitou, or whatever. In the city, particularly, where we are too far from the soil, we have a particular need to remember to be grateful for life and for the harvest which sustains it. Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful for harvest home – for harvest home means life for us and all we love.

The second of the worship elements that the primitives observed was the ritual to insure that the fields would be fertile another year. The rites were primitive. Many peoples included the sacrifice of a human being, the ashes of the sacrificed one being scattered on the fields so that the following year a good crop would grow. As persons gradually became conscious of the value of human life, there was refinement in ritual until animals were sacrificed, and as time went on even that custom was abolished.

But even though the sacrifice of human life no longer would be tolerated, the basic obligation of conservation and restoration of the “holy earth” is ours nevertheless. More and more we must realize that the organic elements of the soil must be restored if abundant, nourishing crops are to be continued. We live in a world where the net population is increasing at a fearful rate. If ever our world is to see a relaxing of tensions between the “have” and the “have-not” peoples, there must be an adequate food supply. Conservation of the soil, forests, water supply, restoration of the mineral elements of the soil removed by crops, all measures which will increase food supplies must be taken in our world if human life is to continue.

(Constant struggle between competing interests)

The battle that Theodore Roosevelt fought and won for conservation in early 20th century America can be lost in our day if we forget the necessity of keeping forest reserves, game preserves, water supplies flood-control and power achievements beyond the power of greedy, short-sighted men.

[Editor’s note: the following is in the Bridgeport sermon, but apparently excised for Plainfield and Lakeland:

There are additional perils. The new noun in our language, “fall-out” refers to the fact that as a result of atomic and hydrogen experiments, many places in the world, even our own country, have experienced rainfalls of radioactive dust. So far, we are told, except for the unlucky Japanese fishing vessels, these “fall-outs” have not been [of] sufficient intensity to represent a danger to human life. A good many people, even the conservative and militant Winston Churchill, are greatly concerned that if these fission experiments continue, the fall-outs will be deadly enough to poison our soil, to make the fruit and all growing things, for which we are thankful, deadly for human beings.

We may have to make a different kind of sacrifice than the primitive peoples to [ensure] the fertility of the earth. We may have to take steps that will halt the rain of death; even if these steps mean that we may have to revise our accepted ideas about individual sovereignty and our notion that we have the right to tell the rest of the world to go hang.]

The third primitive ritual observed in the shadowy and ancient past was the offering of the first fruits to the god and gods. Not only were the fruit and vegetables brought to the altar; and the fatted calves burned in the altar flames; but in more fearsome days the very first child of a man and woman was consecrated to a fiery death in the gaping mouth of Moloch.

Early peoples felt these heartbreaking acts were necessary to appease the anger and desires of the gods they worshiped. No longer do we roast our first-born at the altar of religion. (Although the Mars still receives his tributes). We do not decorate our altars with fruit and vegetables. When churches did, of late years it was for the purpose of feeding those who were in need.

As men advanced in understanding they recognized that rather than destroying humans and vegetables on the altar as a thing pleasing to God, they increased their responsibility for the welfare of their fellow human beings. (Amos: “I hate, despise, but let, righteousness,” etc.)

Thus the Hebrews in their Feast of the Tabernacles refined and humanized the meaning of the festival. In addition to the more original elements of harvest ritual and thanks, the Feast of Tabernacles became the occasion when the Hebrews remembered with gratitude the wanderings of their ancestors who roamed the wilderness for many years, sheltered by tents. The booths (or tents) in houses or in the fields where the Israelites should dwell for 7 days in commemoration of the feast is a reminder to them that their ancestors thought enough of their unique religion and culture to want to be freed from the chains of slavery; to venture into unknown perils for the sake of freedom and for the chance to live their lives in the way they believed to be right. “Let my people go,” said Moses to Pharaoh. When Pharaoh hardened his heart, the people went anyway. They sought freedom. Their courage is one of the great parts of our heritage as well as the heritage of the Jewish people.

Philo, the Alexandrian, one of the greatest Jewish philosophers who lived [around] 200 BC, said of this harvest festival of tabernacles, “it teaches equality, the first principle and beginning of justice ... (as well as) the witnessing of the perfection of all fruits of the year, and the giving of thanks to the being who has made them perfect.”

Thus the first-fruits in our day must be a recognition that life is given to us for moral uses: that God is best served by serving the needs of our fellow-men.

We are all tempted at times to be like the boy in the nursery rhyme (with a little poetic license)

“Little Jack Horner, sat in a corner,
Eating a (Thanksgiving) pie.
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, what a great boy am I.”

But that is not the best of our heritage. From the Jewish people, and from their moral growth that added justice and righteousness to the necessary components of the harvest festival came also the idea of the synagogue. This is a time in Jewish congregations when the institution of the synagogue receives special recognition. We would do well to be glad that the Jewish people evolved this institution for it was a fore-runner of real democracy. In the synagogue all men were equal in the sight of God; no priest, no person or privilege could claim special distinction; all souls were equal as they sought to learn more of what religion is and what religion does. The church fellowship has incorporated many of the best ideas of the synagogue; democracy in church policy; the value of every person; the necessity of learning the facts of religion as well as learning to respond emotionally to religion.

So amid next Thursday’s celebration of family, food and the spiritual fragrance of happiness together, may it be that we will experience a drive to real thanksgiving – be part of conserving a world of hope for all persons; a drive to be working members of a world synagogue dedicated to learning more so that all people may obtain justice and a satisfactory life in which everyone can rejoice and give thanks in freedom to the God who is the creator of all persons everywhere in the world.