First Reading:
“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.”
― Noam Chomsky
in an interview with the Observer, 2003
Second Reading:
512 from Singing the Living Tradition
We Give Thanks This Day
For the expanding grandeur of Creation,
worlds known and unknown,
galaxies beyond galaxies, filling us
with awe and challenging our
imaginations:
We give thanks this day
For this fragile planet earth, its
times and tides, its sunsets and seasons:
We give thanks this day.
For the joy of human life, its wonders
and surprises, its hopes and achievements:
We give thanks this day.
For our human community, our
common past and future hope, our
oneness transcending all separation,
our capacity to work for peace and
justice in the midst of hostility and
oppression:
We give thanks this day.
For high hopes and noble causes, for
faith without fanaticism, for under-
standing of views not shared:
We give thanks this day.
For all who have labored and suffered
for a fairer world, who have
lives so that others might live in
dignity and freedom:
We give thanks this day.
For human liberty and sacred rites,
for opportunities to change and
grow, to affirm and choose:
We give thanks this day. We pray
that we may live not by our fears
but by our hopes, not by our
words but by our deeds.
O. Eugene Pickett
Sermon: A UU Perspective: The Value of Gratitude
A UU Perspective: The Value of Gratitude
How do you come to terms with your privilege? On Thanksgiving, how does one keep perspective on the gross injustices and the seeming randomness of our many fortunes and blessings? And how does gratitude connect to Unitarian Universalist beliefs? This sermon is about my relationship with gratitude and privilege as well as gratitude’s role in UUism.
When I was a kid, my family had the tradition of holding hands and saying grace before dinner. I was raised UU, but my parents were raised Presbyterian, and grace was pretty secular. Everyone had the chance to say what they were thankful for, usually along the lines of “I’m thankful for my family, my friends, this delicious food, that I got to go on a field trip. However, when I ate at my friends’ houses or with my granddad, grace was a bit different. My granddad was a minister and led grace. We had to bow our heads while he talked about God and love and world affairs. I’d ask my parents later why we had to look down. They said something along the lines of “to show respect and focus on God.” This bothered me; if God was above us, I’d much rather look up and speak directly to him/her/it. And my Granddad wasn’t being mean and not sharing grace, but rather it was part of his job and he’d been practicing a long time, so we wanted to show him respect too. I had to be polite but I never had to say Amen.
Even though the format for saying grace differs, it is still a practice of gratitude and an opportunity to see beyond ourselves. We can publicly declare how lucky we are and not take our circumstances for granted. Thinking about what we are thankful for also provides a chance to place our privilege next to seemingly incomprehensible violence and inequality. For example, I was 10 years old in 2001 when the war in Afghanistan began. I remember seeing on TV the eerie green flashes of light when the US was dropping bombs and I didn’t understand how some people could be celebrating--how could they call it ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’? Or why should we kill people just because some Americans were killed, do American’s lives matter more? Why does God bless America? I thought Christians said “we are all God’s children.” It is simple to say how fortunate that we live here, but I would much rather think about the reasons behind poverty or war and the implications of our actions, like where our taxes go.
With this in mind, I want to frame gratitude as a means of bringing people together, of minimizing the distances, and recognizing our interconnectedness, even if it is just in our thoughts. There’s the saying “finish your dinner--think of the starving children in Africa, China, India, etc.” It isn’t that the starving kids in those countries suddenly feel better because an American kid went to bed with a full stomach. Nor should this saying make a kid feel guilty--they aren’t depriving the starving kid of food. If anything, it ends up reminding children of the injustice in the world--why do we have food and those other kids don’t?
Practicing gratitude and thinking of others’ lives helps children and adults alike gain empathy. Postcolonial and feminist theorist Chandra Mohanty, makes an excellent connection between our framework of seeing the world and our ability to envision justice. She explains:
If we pay attention to and think from the space of some of the most disenfranchised communities of women in the world, we are most likely to envision a just and democratic society capable of treating all its citizens fairly. Conversely, if we begin our analysis from, and limit it to, the space of privileged communities, our visions of justice are more likely to be exclusionary because privilege nurtures blindness to those without the same privileges (Mohanty, 231).
This is not to say that we can assume what disenfranchised or marginalized people are feeling or speak for them instead of in solidarity with them. If privilege nurtures blindness to others lacking the same privileges, her words caution us from limiting both ourselves and the potential for transformative justice. Does our ability to strive towards our 6th principle, “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all” change based on how we interact with our privilege? How would communities formed be different?
That Mohanty quote brings to mind a story I heard recently. W.F. Strong on “Stories from Texas” on the local npr station spoke about how if the world population was represented by 100 people, only one person would be from Texas and wasn’t that sad that only 1 person had the privilege of being Texan. That everyone has a bit of Texas in them and wishes they were Texan. He also said that school children in Venezuela and Japan would recognize Texas even if it was drawn in the dirt, (though I doubt most American school children could find Venezuela). The privilege of being a Texan is debatable, and I mean no disrespect, but I do think that it is a bit ethnocentric and limiting of other perspectives because it assumes that being Texan (and American second) is desirable for everyone.
Now that I’ve, hopefully, made the connection between gratitude, empathy, and privilege, I’m moving on to the origins of gratitude and the role it plays in UUism.
I was paging through a book by Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Happiness. Parts make come across as hokey, but he did have some interesting views on practicing gratitude. He says “I consider expressing gratitude to be one of the very best strategies to enhance emotional well-being, right up there with fish oil, physical activity, and managing negative thoughts.” (190). This is somewhat inwardly focused, but it goes along with the thought that you need to love and respect yourself before you are in a position to care for others. He then states, “To be grateful is to acknowledge receipt of something of value--a gift, a favor, a blessing--to feel thankful for it and be inclined to give kindness in return” which for me, can serve to build solidarity and community, especially along the lines of our 6th principle (190). For the etymologists out there, he explains “Gratitude comes from the Latin gratus, meaning “grateful.” To get something gratis,from the Latin gratia, meaning “favor,” is to get it for free, without expectation of payment.” He continues, “Another word of the same origin is grace, defined in theology as the “freely given, unmerited favor and love of god” and sometimes combined redundantly with yet another closely related word in the phrase gratuitous grace, meaning grace freely given by god to particular individuals without regard to their morality or behavior” (190). In UUism, I doubt that we would say that god gives grace to some people over others--UUs who believe in God presumably don’t believe that God favors people or a group of people. This goes back to my frustration with God favoring Americans or a particular football team--if there is an intervening God, why should it show favorites?
There have been times, especially when I didn’t want to get into an in-depth conversation about UUism, that I’d tell my peers. Remember the Council of Nicea, in 325 (I never actually remembered that date, but would you believe Wikipedia doesn’t mention Unitarians in that entry?). There was a division between people who believed in the trinity and those who believed God is one. Unitarian= one God. Universalism is the belief that no one goes to hell--everyone is saved. I would then explain that not all UUs believe in God nor in heaven, but a unifying factor is that we don’t believe that if there is a god that he or she would condemn people to hell. We believe that religious figures from around the world offer value and can be learned from. We have Seven Principles, but no dogma. If I was feeling particularly feisty, I’d say that I don’t believe Jesus was God, but instead was a teacher who taught about the importance of love, forgiveness, and treating people equally. As I was checking my facts the other night, I came across a pamphlet on the UUA website that I wanted to share with you. Mark W. Harris writes:
Thomas Starr King, who is credited with defining the difference between Unitarians and Universalists: “Universalists believe that God is too good to damn people, and the Unitarians believe that people are too good to be damned by God.” The Universalists believed in a God who embraced everyone, and this eventually became central to their belief that lasting truth is found in all religions, and that dignity and worth is innate to all people regardless of sex, color, race, or class.
(http://www.uua.org/beliefs/history/151249.shtml)
If we see gratitude as connected to freely given grace, gratitude is an integral aspect of Unitarian Universalism, at least from a historical perspective. If we think about espousing our 2nd principle, “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations,” practicing gratitude is an acknowledgement of both power imbalances and an opportunity to think about how to deal with our privilege.
Galen Guengerich wrote a sermon titled “The Heart of Our Faith,” which can be found on the uuworld website. His daughter was having difficulty explaining UUism to her Jewish, Muslim, and Christian friends on the playground. It made me think of all of the times I’ve explained UUism as I’ve grown up. His daughter responded, “we believe what we want to believe.” In both my experience and Guengerich’s, this answer isn’t sufficient, and for me, it opens the door for people to assert that UUism isn’t really a religion and dismiss my beliefs. Guengerich looked for a central tenet for UUism: gratitude. He asserts:
Our usual way of describing ourselves doesn’t even begin to suggest that we are a religion. In my view, religion is constituted by two distinct but related impulses: a sense of awe and a sense of obligation. The feeling of awe emerges from our experience of the grandeur of life and the mystery of the divine. This feeling becomes religious when a sense of obligation lays claim to us, and we feel a duty to the larger life that we share. In theological terms, religion begins as transcendence, which is the part about God, and then leads to discipleship, which is the part about the discipline of faith.
I realize the idea of faith as a discipline may also sound like heresy to many Unitarian Universalists. Unless our faith is mere intellectual affectation, however, the defining element of our faith must be a daily practice of some kind. What kind of practice? For Jews, the defining discipline is obedience: To be a faithful Jew is to obey the commands of God. For Christians, the defining discipline is love: To be a faithful Christian is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. For Muslims, the defining discipline is submission: To be a faithful Muslim is to submit to the will of Allah. And what of us? What should be our defining religious discipline? While obedience, love, and even submission each play a vital role in the life of faith, my current conviction is that our defining discipline should be gratitude.
In the same way that Judaism is defined by obedience, Christianity by love, and Islam by submission, I believe that Unitarian Universalism should be defined by gratitude.
Why gratitude? Two dimensions of gratitude make it fitting as our defining religious practice. One has to do with a discipline of gratitude, and the other has to do with an ethic of gratitude. The discipline of gratitude reminds us how utterly dependent we are on the people and world around us for everything that matters. From this flows an ethic of gratitude that obligates us to create a future that justifies an increasing sense of gratitude from the human family as a whole. The ethic of gratitude demands that we nurture the world that nurtures us in return. It is our duty to foster the kind of environment that we want to take in, and therefore become.
The two forms gratitude takes in our lives (a discipline and an ethic) are natural outcomes of the two elements of religious experience (awe and obligation). The experience of awe leads to the discipline of gratitude, and the experience of obligation leads to an ethic of gratitude.
There are many potential defining virtues from which to choose. Why gratitude? It has to do with the role of religion and the nature of the universe. The role of religion, in my view, is to help us find our place as human beings within this universe we call home. You may recall that the word religion does not mean to liberate or set free, but rather to bind together. Religion unites the purpose of our lives as human beings with the purpose that animates the universe. Religion unites the meaning of our lives as human beings with the meaning that pervades the universe. Religion unites the spirit of humanity with the spirit that keeps the stars shining, the planets spinning, and the flowers blooming in springtime. I believe that gratitude is the appropriate religious response to the nature of the universe. http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/11144.shtml
What do you think about the discipline and ethic of gratitude for UUism? Would you use it to help explain UUism? In terms of uniting us with the nature of the universe, Guegenrich’s words bring to mind a quote by Henry Thoreau, a Unitarian and Transcendentalist; “I am grateful what I am and have. Thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite – only a sense of existence.” (http://pullmanmemorial.org/uu-quotes/)
A friend once told me not to be paralyzed by privilege. She told me this after a class where we discussed something like the School of the Americas or US interventions in Latin American and I was having a hard time dealing with being a US citizen and its implications. This sermon today was not designed to make you feel guilty but rather acknowledge how closely gratitude, privilege, and justice are tied and they have a role in our faith. As Noam Chomsky said, “people like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility.” Let that statement motivate us to be the change, recognize our interconnectedness, and broaden our perspective.
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