Thanking the Pandemic Preachers

by Dr. Kristina “Tina” Campbell

In many recovery communities, you hear the phrase “walk the talk,” illuminating the importance of impersonating, rather than pontificating, the guts of the ethical backbone of the program.  In religious circles, the same message is expressed: “Preach the Gospel always.  Use words only when necessary.” 

In my day-to-day life, there have been many profound preachers during the seemingly endless months of COVID isolation. 

Colleen is the woman at Fry’s who stands on her feet for hours on the unforgiving concrete floors to carefully check out our groceries. She never complains when I ask for paper bags, even though it requires her to bend over to fetch them. Colleen is well beyond retirement age and yet continues to be of essential service providing food to the huddled masses, embodying the words, “whoever comes to me will not be hungry.” 

A beloved friend goes to a Veterans Lodge where dead deer heads peer blankly from the walls, and she quietly donates blood. She doesn’t have a good word to say about organized religion, but faithfully shows up at the neighborhood Presbyterian Church Tuesdays at ten to silently sort through giant bags of donated clothes that will end up on the backs of frightened refugees stuck at the border.  Maybe she somehow heard the communion words of blood being shed and bodies being clothed. She doesn’t say. She just shows up. 

Every morning at 5 a.m. someone flings my newspaper to various locations on my driveway and in my plants. During the isolation of the pandemic, the paper became my morning coffee companion. Oddly, I especially enjoy reading the obituaries, because I like to see what brought joy to the life of the dearly departed. Behold, an angel has been sent before me, and she is flinging the news. 

The Post Office stayed open during the pandemic, and countless carriers delivered the mail. Sometimes there were cards and letters delivered that offered a sense of connection, encouragement, or support. On Fridays, my postal delivery people allow me to sneak under their chained barrier while they are still stuffing boxes, because they know I am eager to retrieve my People magazine. These faithful workers are kin to the Biblical bearers of glad tidings. 

COVID has been a long haul at my hospital. I observe the Starbucks stand where weary parents, paper-gowned medical staff and observant security staff line up to order the outrageously over-priced weirdly named drinks. Throughout COVID, underpaid staff kept this place of rare delight open, offering a small diversion from the intensity of illness and death. They are the magi offering their gifts. 

At this time of Thanksgiving, let us lift up these silent preachers who are walking the daily walk. Let us proclaim our gratitude to them for the contribution they make to our lives. A simple “thank you” can mean so much, and its absence can leave a wound. 

THANK YOU TO ALL OF THOSE WHO SILENTLY AND FAITHFULLY PROCLAIM THAT, EVEN IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC, THERE IS GOOD NEWS.  PLEASE ACCEPT OUR HEARTFELT GRATITUDE. THANK YOU. 

Giving Thanks in the Midst of Turmoil

by Abigail Conley

Having lived in a few different iterations of church, my song knowledge is skewed. The older hymns considered essential by many WASPs elude me; a slice of time in evangelical praise songs are well known. One of those songs remains a favorite, “Blessed Be Your Name.” The first version seems to be released by Matt Redman. These are the opening lyrics:

Blessed be your name
In the land that is plentiful
Where the streams of abundance flow
Blessed be your name

And blessed be your name
When I’m found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be your name

The song continues, going back and forth between the good and the bad, still claiming, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” It is a beautiful, ongoing confession that God remains present, even attentive in the worst times.

This week, I received an end of the year email from my accountant. Normally, they provide end of year tax reminders and advice. This year, the email was a professional version of, “We have no idea what’s going to happen.” Choose something and we can have much the same conversation.

It is our strange calling to still proclaim and trust in God’s goodness. We are not alone. God’s people did this through the destruction of temples, through exile, through persecution. God’s people trusted in God’s faithfulness through plague, famine, and war. With this cloud of witnesses, we still give thanks.

And so I give thanks.

I give thanks for the 7-year-old who invited me to her school’s Thanksgiving program. Unprompted by parents, I received thanks and hugs afterward.

I give thanks for the teacher who skillfully taught kids, more than a hundred second graders, songs like “Tommy, the Thanksgiving Turkey.” It’s sung to the tune of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” if you’re wondering. The ones with speaking parts excitedly came to the microphone, too.

I give thanks for the woman who said, “If they need socks and underwear, they should get socks and underwear. It shouldn’t count as a present,” as we went over the wish list of the family our church sponsoring.

I give thanks for the people checking in with the elderly, the recently moved, the single adults, making sure they have a place to eat Thanksgiving dinner.

I give thanks for the people who say, “Yes,” against all odds.

I give thanks, because it is Thanksgiving. The holiday is secular, but for people of faith, the call is holy.

Because even as the turmoil threatens to turn to chaos, still we say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

For the Lord will surely be faithful.  

Making Peace With Thanksgiving

by Rev. Dr. William M. Lyons

There is nothing sinful about gathering as a family or with friends to eat a meal steeped in tradition and memories. God isn’t against football. Remember that there are people in the world who don’t have life as good as we do, and to do something nice for them, seems like a pretty good idea – dare I even say religious. Why, then, did I feel so guilty every fourth Thursday in November?

As a child I felt suspicious of the Pilgrims. There was something fundamentally unfair about strangers arriving in a new land and taking it away from the people who lived there first. A teacher’s, “Well, we’re here now so don’t worry about it,” only confirmed I was on to something. As much as I liked the day with my family, I knew families who wouldn’t be together because of the war (Viet Nam back then). When we got back to school I could tell from their silence when the rest of us compared pie counts and turkey sizes, I had friends who couldn’t have the feast my family enjoyed.

Growing up taught me a new word for my uneasiness: privilege. It didn’t help. Nor did it help to discover that the only truth in the first Thanksgiving story was that there were Pilgrims, there were Indians, and there was a celebration.  As far as we know the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims never repeated their celebration. No one much thought about what happened that autumn in 1621 for 200 years. The details most of us learned in elementary school about what our teachers called ‘the first Thanksgiving’ were little more than the creation of Jane G. Austin in her 1889 historical novel Standish of Standish. Thanksgiving observances and rituals had been part of American Indian culture for thousands of years. Spanish colonists held a thanksgiving mass in St. Augustine, FL in 1565, and celebrated thanksgiving with Manso Indians near present day El Paso TX in 1598. French Huguenots observed a thanksgiving celebration in 1564 in what is now Jacksonville FL. English colonists had celebrated thanksgiving in New England in 1607, 1610, and 1619.  

While the story of the Pilgrim’s Thanksgiving has remained relatively consistent since then, the roles of the Pilgrims and the Indians have been re-written time and again to reflect the crisis or the mood or the prejudices of the country. The Indians were hardly mentioned during the western expansion. The Pilgrims of World War 2 were hardy war-winners whose victory came from God. According to Look Magazine, the Pilgrims of the 1960s were “dissidents” and “commune builders.” How is a someone supposed to make peace with a holiday that seems always to be reinventing itself? And when I discovered that the Wampanoag people today observe a day of mourning on the day we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the pain they experienced at the hands of the doctrine of discovery, well… I needed to make peace with this holiday!  

From the doctrine of the trinity to debates about the jurisdiction of the church in matters of marriage, Puritans held deep convictions about how to practice their faith, convictions out of step with the Church of England. In any religious movement there are always zealots. Puritan zealots were called Separatists. For them there was no compromise, and no value to reform-from-within. When the Scrooby Puritan Separatist congregation emigrated illegally to the Netherlands they thought religious freedom would complete their sense of well-being. But the society that afforded them freedom of religious expression also afforded others that same freedom. They worried about the moral influences of what they considered a corrupt and permissive culture. The Scrooby congregants were not skilled in ways that permitted them to participate successfully in their new economy. Poverty and deep concerns about providing for themselves in their old age took center stage. 37 of them, along with 65 adventurers recruited by the voyage’s financiers, decided to pursue a what they hoped would be a better life in the new world.

Those passengers and crew were unprepared to endure the winter of 1620 aboard a ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor. By harvest 1621, half of the passengers had died, including 14 of the 18 married women. Of the 53 passengers remaining nearly half were children and teens, and the adults were mostly widowers, only 3 of whom were over age 40.

That anyone survived was due to the intervention of the Wampanoag people, specifically a Patuxet named Tisquantum. After a 14-year odyssey as a slave, a story worthy of its own telling, Tisquantum returned to his homeland only to find his people had fallen victim to a plague, the origin of which was most likely European traders. Evidence proves Tisquantum’s duplicity when dealing with Wampanoag and Pilgrims alike, but motives aside, he attended to the well-being of the Plimoth (the Pilgrim’s spelling) colonists.

Thanksgivings in Puritan tradition were solemn religious occasions. This is the only paragraph – 112 words – that we have from eyewitnesses:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.

In today’s terms what the participants recorded about that event some 400 years ago reads more like what historian Robert Tracy McKenzie calls a week of “beer and barbecue, shooting and sports.” There turned out to be twice as many Indians as many as there were Pilgrims. Nothing like a good time to attract the neighbors! The scene reads like the typical human response to prolonged pain. Enough already – let’s party! After everything they had been through the survivors seem to have needed something to celebrate. And so they made the most of the legitimate reasons at hand to feel relief and gladness and gratitude, and to lay aside the concerns of the day at least for awhile. They needed to recover their sense of well-being.

The real story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag is a story about the human quest for well-being. Christians have a word for that. The word is peace. We also have a word for how far people are willing to go to secure the welfare of others. Jesus called that peacemaking.

I have finally made my peace with Thanksgiving. No more trying to force a secular peg into a religious hole. The one-day observance we call Thanksgiving will be forever a secular holiday for me. No more outrage in God’s name about retailers opening at midnight Thursday; I choose to express my outrage in the name of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and others! Even in a secular world families’ well-being trumps corporate profits or personal savings.

My faith, like that of the Pilgrims, teaches me that gratitude is not a holiday to be celebrated but a discipline to be practiced each day at all times in every circumstance.

My faith teaches me to say I am sorry for wrongs done against others even when my ancestors did them, especially if it leads to reconciliation with others. Thanksgiving for me will forever be a day I stand in solidarity with the Indigenous People of this land as they mourn what they’ve lost, what my ancestors stole from them.

My faith teaches me that more important than the thanks I offer to God for my blessings is the thanks that someone else will offer to God because I have used my life to attend to, advocate for, and in any way I can, supply them with a greater sense of well-being.  If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16 and one of you says to them [even on Thanksgiving], “Go in peace [or Happy Thanksgiving]; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? “You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; 12 for the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God.” (2 Cor 9:11) 

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.”  Oh how that lesson has played out these past few weeks. While Thanksgiving is the occasion that brings us together, we have a more urgent need. Tonight there are people in our world who are not living in peace. So tonight I ask you to embrace a more complex celebration of Thanksgiving, one in which you strive to put words of gratitude on the lips of someone else by improving their personal well-being. In these frightening and uncertain times people are looking what our brand of Christianity is offering. We are the purveyors of well-being – hope, safety, sanctuary, meaning, dignity and love.  Let us join one another on the narrow path that is peacemaking.  Amen.

Sitting in the Simple Gratitude

by Amanda Petersen

Gratitude does not need to be complicated. In fact, practicing gratitude for the simple things actually helps one simplify their life. Acknowledging something simple, like breathing, can heighten one’s awareness of the places where things get complicated. This is especially true for one’s spiritual practices. As beautiful as a practice can be, it can become complicated very easily. Prayer lists can grow very long. The sense of ritual can take over. Certain positions or postures, times, and order can complicate to a point where heart of the practice can be lost. Coming back to the heart of a practice with gratitude is a very powerful spiritual practice. Beginning the prayer list, reading, examen, meditation, or physical practice with gratitude for the heart or why of the practice can shift the whole experience.

One of the main points I like to bring forth in meditation is the most important part of this practice: the fact that everyone there chose to come and sit. It is the act of sitting in my opinion that is the important. Whether the mind clears, or one stays with their breath or mantra, or one leaves feeling peaceful or enlightened, there is a nice benefit, yet the real power in the practice is the choice to sit. I believe that because we choose to sit, and step out of the norm or complications of life, the world is literally a different place when we leave. Beginning with gratitude, appreciation  and acknowledging the Source of one’s life changes the practice from one of doing the practice to one of being with the practice.

Beginning a spiritual practice with gratitude takes the focus off of the doing and moves us into the participation and relationship with God/Love/Divine. That is a wonderful place to dwell. It helps one come back to noticing, savoring and to the gift of Life. I encourage you to begin your spiritual practices grateful for the gift of showing up, sitting down, using time, or just breathing. See if you notice anything different in your practice.

I’d like to end with a poem by Mary Oliver from her book A Thousand Mornings:

Poem of the One World

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of
this one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a while
quite beautiful myself.

The simple act of gratitude can change the world. A thank you to Diane Owens for the inspiration of this week’s writing.

A Life of Response

by Amanda Petersen

I recently saw a brief video about a woman who, through a set of movements, opened a theater for dance in the middle of a desert town of less than 100 people. Often no one would come, so she would just dance in the empty theater. Eventually she painted in an audience and the place is beautiful. (the video is at the end of this blog). As I watched I felt a kinship with this woman. Her life was one of a response to Life.

As I get ready to celebrate 10 years of Pathways of Grace, the celebration is more of a gratitude for a life of response to God. When I began, I literally sold much of what I had, including my car, and downsized to a life that would hopefully be supported by this sense of creating a safe place for people to listen and share deeply to their own responding to the Divine. At that time, I called this Creative Journey 3.  Many of you remember calling my cozy home the “hermitage of heretics”: a place you could voice your ideas, doubts, and responses to Infinite Mystery in ways you couldn’t elsewhere.

As the years have passed, the groups and my spiritual direction/coaching practice has grown and we have this beautiful space. The fun part is that others who are responding to God are showing up and sharing their dances. I can’t tell you what a joy it is to dance with others and watch the new energy of the Spirit create something that none of us fully knows how it will end up. This celebration is a time to highlight some of the new people sharing their gifts. I look forward to your meeting them!

With this Energy comes new and deeper releasing into the movement of Infinite Mystery. As I watch this unfold, I realize Pathways of Grace, rather than “building” something, is a about responding to Love. What is created out of that is co-created rather than master-planned. This celebration, we will be sharing some of the new movements that we will be practicing.

Through the years there are times when the group doesn’t materialize, yet I dance anyway. The audience becomes the great cloud of witnesses and the Presence of Love. I will continue to dance as a response of gratitude for the gift of creating a space to dance authentically. Thank you all for joining me on this amazing journey. Ultimately, this celebration is a time of gratitude for each of you being willing to respond to Love’s call to dance.

Here is the video:

Gratitude

by Amanda Peterson

Gratitude is an important practice of anyone who wishes to walk with God. Seeing all things as gift can change one’s entire life. Expressing gratitude can literally change the world. Religious leaders, mystics and scientists all agree that those who practice gratitude attract a fuller and happier life. Those who dwell in negativity and lack attack more negative things into their lives.

Keeping a gratitude journal is a powerful practice. If you are experiencing hard times I highly encourage you to keep a gratitude journal that each day lists all that you can be grateful for. Even if it just states that the day is finally over!

There is an abundance of blessings in our lives, if we only look. Yet often there isn’t any discussion of gratitude and challenges. A grateful heart is not always a “happy” heart. That is why I believe it to be one of the most sacred spiritual practices. Gratitude lifts us into the Presence of the Holy. One can be grateful and grieve or grateful and overwhelmed and grateful and frustrated. This poem below addresses that. After you read it what are you thoughts about being gratitude and your spiritual walk? What are your reactions to the poem? Too simplistic or spot on? How does God and the comma connect with gratitude in all thing? This Thanksgiving, whether you are surrounded by an abundance of friends and family you love and/or avoid or you are alone, how can you let the day be one truly filled with gratitude?

Be Thankful

Be thankful that you don’t already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don’t know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you’re tired and weary
Because it means you’ve made a difference.

It is easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who are
also thankful for the setbacks.

GRATITUDE can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they can become your blessings.

Author Unknown