HUU Sermon Archives

If It Rains on Everyone, And Your Prayers will Not Be Answered, Why Give Thanks?

By Frank Albrecht
July 30, 2006

When I was sixty seven, a friend asked me to say grace the next day at Thanksgiving dinner. I said I didn't know any graces. "Then write one," she said. I sat down and wrote a Thanksgiving prayer in 38-a bit long for a grace but we had to make do with it.

That's how I became a poet. I've been writing ever since. "Thanksgiving Prayer" starts like this:

Seen or unseen,
The sun rises.
Dawn is a gift.
It is unnecessary.
It might not be.
Yet always the sun rises.
It gives itself to the day,
And to each creature
Who thanks it, or does not.

The sun shines the same on the grateful and the ungrateful. Life does the same. Life doesn't give a damn who is thankful and who isn't. It rains on everybody. And prayer don't get answered. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

So why give thanks? Why give anything? It doesn't matter. You can succeed anyway. Or you can fail anyway. Do what you like. You can even be moral, if you want. That's a little weird, being moral for no good reason, but it takes all kinds.

But if we're not guided by virtue or gratitude, what can guide us? Greed is no good. After you get everything you were greedy for, you're still greedy. Then what?

Here's guidance I like it a lot. I've always thought it was the best thing I could do:. Don't get old! Just don't go there.

Skip every other birthday. Pretend the AARP has no relevance to your life. Act insulted when offered senior citizen's discounts. Or puzzled, puzzled is good. Like when strangers in the airport offer to help you with your bags. "Goodness," you can say, "why would you think I might need help?" Denial is a river in Africa. Go sailing on it. .

But you do have to be careful about not getting old. It can cause problems...

Years ago, when I lived in France, there was a famous sportsman, a rich mountain climber, sailboat racer, champion amateur tennis player, big game hunter, a connoisseur of women and wine. He was a happy man, he had everything he wanted. Except he didn't want to get old. He didn't agree with Robert Browning's advice

Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
The last of life,
For which the first was made.

This sportsman feared he would spend the last of life regretting that he was spending the last of life being an old person. He didn't want to get much past his peak, physically and mentally. He was French-and the French really are logical. So he did the logical thing. On his 40th birthday he shot himself in the head.

If you don't get older, it means you're dead. That is a problem. I've thought about it a lot. I decided on a prayer: Lord, please let me get old-very very old, that's what I really want, very very very old-but not yet. Take your time. I mean, is there a rush?

Here's a poem on the theme of being old.

I. When You Get Older

When you get older
Nose hair grows faster.
Or you notice it slower.
Hard to say which.

No doubt about toenails-
They're thicker and tougher
Till one day you find yourself
Leafing through limited circulation catalogues
Looking for a really very small chain saw
To cut them with.

This afternoon I twice went upstairs
To get or do something,
And once I got up there forgot what it was.
So I did something else that needed doing up there,
Or got something that did need to be got,
And went back downstairs-
Soon to remember my original purpose
And have to go up again and do it or get it.
But I've solved this problem.
I put it into my exercise program-"climb stairs"

Was I always like this?
I think I was but I'm not sure.
I can't remember.

Here's a companion poem to that one.

II. Mess

Does everyone who reaches a certain age
Look around his space and think,
Suppose I had stroke and died,
Right this minute?
Family or friends
Will have to come in here
To find a will or phone numbers,
Or pack things up,
Plan a yard sale,
All that stuff you have to do.
I did it for my father, he did it for his,
And on back to Adam.

But when they come in for the necessary chores
They will find several rooms inhabited
By aggressively unruly piles of
Books, magazines, newspaper clippings, photocopies, photographs,
Pages of indecipherable notes,
Unlabeled cassette tapes,
CDs in piles, Zip disks and floppies scattered
Like cards in 52 pickup.

I can hear one of my daughters saying,
"Poor Dad, he put up a good front, but really…
 He was faking it. Look at this mess!"

Here I must beg for empathic understanding.
My nose hair may be an impenetrable forest.
My toenails, resembling titanium in strength,
Might find better use
As construction material
For terrorist-proof skyscrapers.
My memory may wobble
Off and on like an electrical
Loose connection.
But mess is different.
Mess is in the eye of the beholder

My piles of words and images on paper
And other media are non-linear
Entanglements of concepts.
This is science!

Each time I search for something
I had carefully put
In a special place so I could find it easily,
I discover amazing things I didn't
Remember having.
Reiterated experiences of looking for this
While finding that,
Form themselves into loops of lookings-for,
Creating new links among the piles
Until finally a tipping point is reached
And this densely interconnected web
Spontaneously self-organizes
Into emergent next-level meaningfulness.

Exactly as I intended.

So have on, daughter!
If this be senility, make the most of it!

So where are we? We've determined that getting old is a good thing, even thought it doesn't feel good. And that giving thanks or feeling grateful is useless. My Thanksgiving poem continues.

I have read that a careful Navaho
Carries on his body
A pouch containing
Corn pollen and other sacred things.
For a thousand years this man
Rises at dawn, faces East,
Takes a pinch of golden powder,
Offers it to bless the day.
He spreads from his fingers
The seed of life,
Giving it back.

Others lie abed
Never blessing, never thanking.
These walk neither in beauty
Nor in harmony.
Nevertheless they also are accepted,
They receive the gift.
Though they never bless,
And fail to be thankful,
They may gain what they seek,
And be content.

These slug-a-beds get just as much of the good of life as we do. We are virtuous! We get up and come to church. We do good deeds. If we had any corn pollen we'd surely give it back. So that's not fair, that these lazy freeloaders on the Heavenly Express get as good as we do. Let's send a message. Repeat after me: That's not fair! That's not fair.

That's right, it isn't!. Those who sense the mysteries of spirit, and give thanks-they should get something out of it. And others who "lie abed," maybe they should be (look around carefully then semi-whisper) punished?

But we can't do that, not here in UU-land. We're liberal theologians. We've dropped original sin, faith, and other non-essentials, such as hellfire and damnation. So, for us, what goes around doesn't always come around. Consider a hard-shell Baptist minister who's cheating on his wife-and he just keeps getting away with it. Forty years he gets away with it. And we can't send him to Hell. We can't send anyone to Hell. That's what conservatives do-they damn people to Hell and eternal fire. We liberals can't do that. We're kind of helpless.

All right, hard-shell Baptist preachers are beyond our reach. But what about the free-loaders, spiritual parasites-these guys have a lot of fun, make money, get all the pretty girls-what can we do to them that's not really… (Pauses whispers again) hurtful?

Maybe when they get to Heaven the ungrateful should get smaller rooms or not such a nice view? Or keep them in a really dreary suburb? Wouldn't that even things out?

But Heaven doesn't discriminate. If you're there, you're there, you have eternal bliss.

So maybe existence really is unjust. If so, we shouldn't be liberals. We should be libertarian anarchists. I got to get mine, and to Hell with you. An' if you try to get above me on this ladder to heaven, I'll kick you in the face.

None of this would matter if we controlled the universe. And that is the liberal agenda, dating from the Enlightenment. The conservatives are right about that. We want to control the universe so we can make things come out right. If we could just arrange things those that the unthankful are never successful or happy on earth, we could all go to Heaven together, even-steven. It sort of like the Roman Catholic idea of Purgatory, except you do the suffering before you die. It's a great concept. Fairness triumphant!

But we can't control what happens here on earth. Here's a poem about that.

Grasping at the Wind

You can't see it or touch it,
But it touches you.
It reddens your face,
Blows dust in your eyes.

The trees bow down to it.
They toss to and fro.
In the forest the canopy's
Rolling in waves
Like the sea in a storm.

We would like to grasp this wind,
Own it, control it.
Are we not like unto God,
Able to split and fuse the atom,
Harness the energy of suns?
Yet we cannot control the ordinary.
Though people talk and people plan,
The wind slips from our fingers.
It blows as it will.

Control the universe? We can't even control ourselves. Suppose you feel a heart attack starting. Instead of calling 911 you say to your heart, "Don't do that!!" So it cranks down the pain and lets you alone. Or imagine telling your fat cells to empty themselves out-and they do it. Then you tell your wrinkles to buzz off. I'd look like my boyish self again. And you older ladies-uummm, you'd be hot again, like you were in your youth!

But control-we don't have it. What we have instead are two abilities which we do not share with any other creature on earth. We can find out what is true. And we can choose to give thanks.. .

That we can discover truth always blows my mind. Think about it. . Dogs, cats, turtles know what is, in so far as their sense organs can detect it. But none of them have a clew about truth. Turtles for instance;:

Turtles understand air, water,
The balancing of heat and cold,
Flight from sudden movement,
How long to go without a breath.
They know where to hide
And how to find a certain rock
To sun themselves upon.
They know what to do.

I saw two turtles swim side by side,
Patrolling their aqueous realm.
Languid, at ease,
Forelimb strokes in synchrony,
Their shells swayed gracefully
To the left,
To the right,
To the left again,
As if they danced to a waterly adagio
That only they could hear.

Turtles' eyes are set in the sides of their heads.
It is hard for them to see
What is in front of them,
Or under their noses.
A tortoise spies a delicious worm.
He approaches, stops,
Turns his head a little
One way or the other,
And tilts it slightly,
Allowing one eye or the other
To see the target clearly.
This turning away comes with
A moment of hesitation.
The turtle appears ambivalent,
Not sure if he really wants this worm
Right now.
He stares with the one eye,
Thinking it out.
"Come on," you want to say.
"Get on with it.
What are you waiting for?"
Then in a flash too fast to see
His head darts forward,
His long neck stretches
A third his body length,
The worm is in his jaws.

He pulls his head back, blinks,
His throat works.
He blinks again.
He swallows,
And marches on.

Turtles, innocent of thought,
Ignorant of ethics,
Nonetheless are lovely.
In their own way, perfect.

We are men and women, human beings.
We have knowledge of right and wrong,
But disagree about which is which.
We argue about it, fight,
Kill each other for it.
Knowing what to do
Comes slow to us, and hard.
Often, when we know the right,
Or say we do,
We fail to do it.

We cannot see in ourselves, perfection.

Yet somewhere there is a creature,
Or creatures, beings, entities, or a One,
To whom we are, as turtles are to us.

The Sumerians could make a right angle by constructing a triangle with sides 3and 4 and 5 long-inches, feet, cubits, whatever. They knew that that is. I can see an ape learning the same thing, maybe with a little help. But the astonishing human thing is that we can know truth in a totally different way, not as something we can see or feel, but in an abstract way. We know, and can prove, that on any flat surface, everywhere, if the square of two of the sides add up to the square of the third side, that is a right triangle. That's grasping the truth, which turtles can not do.

Maybe that's why high school pushes geometry so hard. They think it's kind of entrance exam. Only humans can learn geometry.

Besides knowing the truth, we can do one other godlike thing. We can choose. And don't have to base our choices on training or Pavlovian conditioning, but on the truth.

I was listening to E.O. Wilson the other day. Wilson is a Harvard biologist, an expert on ants, and the author of an enormous book titled Sociobiology, which is a kind of Bible for evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists. He is a great scientist and a determined enemy of anything spiritual. He claims moral feelings are "hardwired" into our nervous systems. We feel good about being moral because being moral enhanced survival in our ape-like ancestors. I believe that's true. It's what is. It's the 3,4,5 triangle. But Wilson doesn't deal with the fact that we can know truth and choose. I don't know how that happens, neurologically. But it isn't "hardwired," because what we decide depends on what really is true.

We have knowledge of right and wrong,
But disagree about which is which.
We argue about it, fight,
Kill each other for it.
Knowing what to do
Comes slow to us, and hard.

So what have I proved today? One thing for sure: turtles have it easy. Another: that giving thanks is useless. The sun and the rain and your boss really do not care.

Except this: inside you, giving thanks produces a sense of harmony with the universe. That harmony, being insync with reality, frees you for needing to control the wind, or anything else. It lifts a burden from you. My poem continues:.

We do not bless or thank to gain reward
We are not better than others who fail in these things.

Some of us might say: "This Indian thinks he's not better-then me? I, the typical metropolitan urban-suburban guy, pulling down 90 K, aiming for 6 figures in a year or so, I'm the one who's better, compared to some unwashed Indian who crawls out of his Hogan at dawn and throws some corn starch at the world. Starch, pollen, whatever. Who needs to know about that nature stuff anymore? And then you're telling me he might think he's better than me because he gives thanks and I don't thank anybody except my boss when he gives me what I want. Jeeesh! Keep your eye on the money, boy, that's what puts the rubber to the road.

This is a man who flunks geometry. He knows what is, but doesn't chose to find out what is true.

The sun and rain fall the same on everyone.. But the thankful receive it differently, so it isn't the same. If there is a Fountain of Youth, this is how we find it:

As the sun rises,
Let us feel ourselves in harmony
Let us both receive the gift and give it away.

Let us walk in beauty
Let us walk in truth
Let us walk together.

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