|
|
 |
 |
| ..."A diverse, spirit-growing, justice-seeking community" |
|
PAST SERMONS
"Point Thank You"
June 2, 2002
Rev. Robert Hardies, senior minister
New Yorkers aren't known as a grateful people. "Please" and "thank you" are two phrases rarely heard on the island of Manhattan. If they're uttered at all, its over the hushed counters of upscale department stores where women in fur buy expensive perfume. Please and thank you are currencies of commerce, not of gratitude. New Yorkers, it seems, are too busy to be grateful.
That's why I find the story of Point Thank You so remarkable. Point Thank You is the name for a street corner in Greenwich Village -- the corner of Christopher Streets and the Westside Highway -- where, in the months following the World Trade Center attack, New Yorkers of all stripes gathered to show their gratitude to rescue workers leaving the wreckage. Where tourists from Japan and Europe, Jews from Brooklyn, yuppies, the homeless, all gathered to say "thank you." To applaud. To shout "we love you." It's where an exhausted ironworker from Florida stopped every night to share a cigar with students from NYU. Where Greenwich Village Drag Queens passed out bottles of water to firemen from Iowa. Even the Fire Department dogs -- pressed into service to find human remains -- even they got treats from the crowds at Point Thank You.
This demonstration of gratitude erupted spontaneously on the day of the attack and quickly gathered momentum. Web sites emerged, volunteer coordinators sprung up. During the first few weeks after the attack hundreds gathered round the clock to pay tribute to rescue workers. At around five o'clock when people got out of work the numbers swelled even more. After a month or so, a solid core of a couple dozen volunteers rotated in shifts, maintaining a 24-hour presence at Point Thank You throughout the freezing winter.
After a while, the folks at Point Thank You became legendary in New York. The volunteers' tenacious commitment to gratitude throughout the frigid winter caused some in New York to refer to them -- affectionately -- as "those nuts down on the Westside Hightway." The volunteers claimed this epithet as their own. The Thank You Nuts, they started calling themselves. Fools for gratitude in a city that previously hadn't known what gratitude was.
The giddy exuberance of Point Thank You got me to thinking about gratitude. Because it's something I've struggled with. You see, not too long ago, I came to realize two things about gratitude. I realized, first, that gratitude was one of the foundations of the religious life. It's fundamental. And second: I realized I wasn't a very grateful person. So I spent some time considering gratitude.
Gratitude is, indeed, essential to the religious life. I believe this so strongly now that I'm willing to say that if we are not a grateful people, we have no business calling ourselves religious people, or spiritual, or even emotionally mature people. Gratitude is that fundamental. And when I say gratitude I'm not talking about saying "please" and "thank you." I'm not talking about being polite. I'm talking about something far more fundamental than good manners. I'm talking about a worldview. About getting down on our knees in awe before creation and saying "Thank you. Thank you for this precious gift." I'm talking about being grateful for the sun streaming through this beautiful sanctuary. Grateful for music and for our children and their teachers. Grateful for the noisy streets outside, for the shrieking sirens. Grateful even for humidity, as well as for the occasional breeze.
Annie Dillard, borrowing her opening line from Emerson, said it well: "Every day is a god. Each day is a god and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god. I praise each day splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading at dawn fast over the mountains." To be grateful is to worship each day of our lives as if it were a god.
This kind of gratitude is really the wellspring of religious feeling. Meister Eckhart was the one who wrote that if the only prayer we ever learn to say is "thank you," then that's sufficient. I think he's right. Thank you is the ur-prayer. The prayer that helps us recognize life for the gift that it is, and prepares us to live it appropriately. Source of all, to thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.
I am one who has much to be grateful for, and yet I don't consider myself a naturally grateful person. I guess I'm like the New Yorker in that way. Maybe we all are. Perhaps like New Yorkers, we're all too busy to be grateful. Too grumpy to appreciate the small miracles of our lives. Too wrapped up in the tiny world that our ego has constructed for us to notice that the days are Gods. Last night at 11:30 p.m when I was printing out a draft of this sermon, my printer ran out of ink. I didn't have any replacement cartridges in the house. I wasn't feeling very grateful last night.
Now to be sure, there are times when we are shook out of our ungrateful existence by extraordinary events. I remember times hiking out West in Oregon when I would emerge from the wilderness and find myself on a mountain summit with views extending over a hundred miles to distant snow-capped peaks. That's a time when "thank you" emerged like a prayer. Friends and parishioners tell me that the birth of a child -- or a grandchild -- can also impart that sense of wonder and appreciation.
Last year, just before I came to All Souls for candidating week, a friend of mine in San Francisco walked out of his office for a lunch hour jog. When he stepped off the curb he was struck by a minivan that ran a red light. For weeks, he lay in a coma in a San Francisco hospital. Thank God, after months of medical care and physical therapy, and support from his family and friends, he is back home now and doing pretty well. But I'll never forget those first shocking moments when we learned of his accident and near death. Moments in which my friends and I awoke not only to the horror of our mortality, but also to the gift of our lives. Trembling, we all reached out and held one another, knowing intuitively that a loved one's embrace was a gift we could no longer take for granted. I remember how I walked the streets of San Francisco in the days after his accident and I saw every stranger as a fragile bundle of flesh and love. I felt a tender compassion for everyone I encountered. But you know how it goes: after a while that gratitude fades and return to our ungrateful lives.
Last week I preached about the Muslim definition of sin as "forgetting." Forgetting who our best selves are and settling for something less. Gratitude is certainly a part of our better selves that we often forget. So when I read last fall about the folks at Point Thank You in New York, it dawned on me that we all need something like a Point Thank You in our lives. You see, New Yorkers didn't just leave gratitude to chance after 9-11. They built a checkpoint of graciousness. A bulwark of gratitude on the city's landscape so they wouldn't forget. We need checkpoints, too. Regular reminders of that fundamental prayer, "thank you."
About a year and a half ago, I decided that I needed to find a consistent way to cultivate gratitude in my life. I realized that I wasn't going to become a more grateful person by just sitting around and wishing for it. Like most fruits of the Spirit, gratitude needs cultivation. It takes discipline. I needed a checkpoint. So I decided that I would begin each week by looking back at the week that had just passed and writing a little thank you note to the people I was grateful for. Not to be well mannered, but to consciously cultivate gratitude and to spread it around. Some of you have received such a note from me. Certainly, more of you have deserved one. Unfortunately, the practice is still imperfect. There are some weeks when I forget to write the notes. Or times when I'm too busy. Or sometimes I look back and I'm blind to the small occasions for gratitude. But I really want to say that the weeks I begin on this note of gratitude, are palpably different weeks. The spirit of gratitude stays with me through the week. The discipline makes a difference. Point Thank Yous can work.
It was through this experiment with gratitude that I discovered that I could choose how I experience the world. I could choose to approach the world with a sense of gratitude or not. When times were tough, I could always choose to see beauty, too. When times were good, I could always find something to complain about. Life could bring whatever it brought, but I could choose how I would respond. And I decided to try to respond with gratitude. Sometimes I succeed.
How about you? Who do you need to say "thank you" to? Where are the point thank yous in your life? When are you regularly reminded of the gift of life? Find time to cultivate gratitude. Create those opportunities if they don't already exist.
I really hope that our time together on Sunday mornings is a kind of point thank you. If thank you is the fundamental prayer, then whatever else we do on Sunday morning, we have to begin there. Yes! We come to church to try to make sense of our lives. We come to find community. We come to figure out how to lead good lives. But first, we just need to say Thank You. "Source of all to thee we raise this hymn of grateful praise."
I want to close by acknowledging that I'm nearing the end of my first year as your minister. And I'm feeling the need to say Thank You to all of you. I'm so grateful to be at All Souls Church. Grateful that, together, we are stewards of this church that has been so important to our denomination and to our city. Grateful to be among a loving people who minister to one another through acts of caring and compassion. Grateful to be among a generous people, who give freely of their time and money. Grateful to be among a conscientious people who grapple with how best to be in service to the world. Grateful to be among a congregation that understands that ministry is not something that just the minister does, but that its something we all do, together. And grateful, most of all, to be your pastor. To be the one who, at important times in your life, you choose to share your milestones and your struggles with. Grateful that you give me your babies to bless. Grateful that you entrust to me the honor of caring for your dying and saying goodbye to your dead. These are the most precious gifts that I receive as your minister.
For all these gifts of our first year together, and for all the gifts of the years to come, I am very grateful. So thank you.
Amen.
|
|
|
