First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Deuteronomy 26:5-11
In the odd years, when we didn’t go to Aunt Marion’s for Thanksgiving dinner, we went to Grandmother’s house. At least, insofar as I remember, we did. It wasn’t over the river or through the woods. And we never took a sleigh to get there. Good thing, too, because I only remember it snowing once in 50-plus years of Thanksgiving days. I think it was in 1949. I was young then, because Frank Tripucka was still the Lions’ quarterback. That was in the days before Bobby Layne came riding out of Texas to rescue the Honolulu Blue and Silver.
Grandma always had to have a late dinner because we sometimes went to the football game…. my father and me. Other years, we bundled up and went downtown to see the parade….the one where the real Santa Claus used to ride down Woodward Avenue before climbing up on the marquee of the J.L. Hudson Company. Until they closed the J.L. Hudson Company. Then, just the other day, they imploded it. Twenty-seven seconds and it was one big pile of rubble. I guess the real Santa moved. Nobody told me where.
Somehow Santa, Grandma and Bobby Layne get all mixed up together in my memory of those early Thanksgivings. Or maybe it’s me who gets all mixed up. It all runs together now. Pleasantly so. Thanksgiving has a way of doing that to you. It makes you want to go home again. Or it makes you think about going home again. More gratitude gets lost in nostalgia than in any other forest I know. From our pilgrim fathers to our present fathers, Thanksgiving generates thoughts of home….places we have been….people we have been with….events and experiences that have shaped us….and mis-shaped us.
Our past comes tumbling out in those stories. For there is not one of us who does not understand that the was-ness of our lives powerfully affects the is-ness of our lives. So much has gone into our making, that we occasionally need to sort the building blocks from the stumbling blocks that are stashed in the basements of our souls.
Both are present, of course. For our past is not simple. There is both dark and light there….good and evil there….beauty and horror there. And the mixture tends to bother us, to the point that we conveniently rid ourselves of half of it. Some of us remember only the good stuff. We remember things as being better than they were. All the bad slipped out somewhere. Meanwhile, others of us remember only the bad stuff. We remember things as being worse than they were. When we weren’t paying attention, all the good slipped out somewhere. Both are oversimplifications. And clinging too tightly to an oversimplification is one of the better ways I know of becoming emotionally ill.
If you look at the past and say, “It was wonderful….there was no darkness there,” then you can’t help but wonder why the present never quite measures up. Why can’t my turkey ever taste like Mom’s? Why can’t our family table look like the one Norman Rockwell used to paint? Why do we have to sit here listening to Ritter on Thanksgiving Sunday….when, in years gone by, we could have listened to Thomas, Wright or Ward?
But if you look at the past and say, “It was terrible…there was no light back there,” then you are going to spend a disproportionate amount of time nursing old wounds, squeezing fresh pus from old abscesses, while downing two-for-one cocktails of shame and remorse. Eventually you end up as one of those people who never go outside without an upper-body sash, the one on which you pin your collection of injustices, hurts and grievances….positioned on the sash by date of occurrence or date of remembrance.
Both groups want to go home again. But each group remembers only half the directions. John Claypool writes: “To look exclusively at either the good or the bad is to have partial vision. Instead, we must come to terms with the fact that both dimensions exist, and accept them accordingly.” Claypool then goes on to suggest that Thanksgiving, as a season, can be of particular help to us here. For Thanksgiving involves looking back, with a sense of gratitude for all that is behind us. The danger, of course, is to reserve our gratitude for only those things that are pleasantly behind us.
For a number of years, I had reason to be concerned with a young woman who was feeling an intense amount of pain. Very little in her life was going well. Almost everything in her life was going poorly. Her story would have confounded Robert Schuller. On more than one occasion she cried out, usually to me, that she had experienced enough hell to know that she would rather not experience any more. But in an effort to address her problems, she tried one quick-fix method after another. None of which worked for very long. Occasionally she tried the slow-fix method known as therapy. Which might have worked, had she stayed with it. But she never did. Three or four weeks into each program, she would get a pretty good inkling as to where the process was going and what she would soon be facing. To which she would say: “I’m afraid to look at it. Twice before I tried and had to quit.”
So she never saw it through. And whatever it was she couldn’t face in the past, ultimately consumed her in the present. Which explains why she died.
Contrast her story with that of a girl named Alice, about whom Keith Miller writes in a book appropriately titled Habitation of Dragons.
When I was a little girl, I was put in an orphanage. It wasn’t pretty. But, then, I wasn’t pretty. No one wanted me. I can recall longing to be adopted by a family. I thought about it day and night. I even got close a couple of times. But something always seemed to go wrong. My social worker said I was trying too hard. People would come to look me over and, without meaning to, I would say or do something to drive them away. Then, one day, I was told that a family was coming to take me home. I was so excited that I jumped up and down and cried. My social worker told me it might not be permanent, but there was no way I was able to hear that.
One day, a few months later, I skipped home from school to the big, old house where we lived. I saw my battered suitcase sitting by the door. One look at the suitcase and I knew. They didn’t want me. This happened to me seven times before I was 13 years old.
As Keith Miller described it, the group reached out to her, trying to do whatever they could for her. Finally she said: “Look, don’t feel sorry for me. You see, I needed my past. It’s part of what led me to God.”
Putting his finger on Alice’s point is an old North Carolina hero of mine by the name of Carlyle Marney. He, too, talked about the need to tell the darker truths of one’s own story. Except that Marney did not stop with that grim prospect. He suggested that if this is all one does, one may very well drown in the dirty waters of self-deprecation. “Instead,” he said, “what is needed alongside an awareness of original sin, is an equally-powerfully awareness of original love.”
I like that. I’m not entirely sure what it means. I suppose it means that we need to give equal time to the good things that have happened to us. For we have been loved and looked after throughout our lives. From the beginning to the present….when we have been naked and bloody, dirty and of little apparent beauty….we have been picked up, cleaned up, washed up and held. For all the slights and cruelties that we have endured, there have also been ways….equally real and equally tangible….that “goodness and mercy have followed us all the days of our lives.” And at this point in his argument, Marney’s words become beautiful indeed.
It is from this point….if we can get to this point….that we begin to make peace with a culture that spawned us, with a mommy and daddy who shaped and mis-shaped us, and with the institutions which blessed and distorted us. We can go through home again. And we can accept whatever stuff God had at his disposal in making us.
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. We can go back home again. Not to stay. But to visit….so that we can leave on better terms than we left before. We pass through home, the better to see it with what the Bible calls “second sight.”
Every family tree has flawed fruit. And yet the Psalmist writes (16:6): “Welcome, indeed, is the heritage that falls to me.” Which is not an easy admission to make. For there is much of that heritage we’d just as soon deny….and branches of that tree we’d just as soon prune.
Kathleen Norris, whose book is alternately informing us and moving us each Tuesday morning at 9:30, writes: “When I see teenagers in public with their families….holding back….refusing to walk with Mom and Dad….ashamed to be seen as part of a family….I have to admit that I acted that way once, both with regard to my family of origin and my family of faith.” Meaning that the churches we remember weren’t perfect either….alternately doing wonderful things for us and terrible things to us. But that, too, can be dealt with, so that we finally come to a point of gratitude for what was there, without requiring “what was there” to have been perfect.
Every so often I meet someone, even in Birmingham, who says: “You want to know why I don’t come to church? I’ll tell you why I don’t come to church. Because my parents made me go to church when I was a little kid and I hated it.” At which point I always want to laugh. Because, as an answer, it’s so pathetic. But I stifle my laughter, figuring that it would be rude. Then I want to say: “How old do you think you are going to have to be in order to get over this….get beyond this….get through this ‘thing’ with your parents?” But I don’t ask that either, because it would come off as intrusive.
I am a man of moderate passions. But I hate the Chicago Bulls. Still, I think I would like Phil Jackson. He’s the guy who just took a hike as their coach. Phil Jackson is a deeply philosophical man, who chose for the title of his biography Sacred Hoops. Jackson knows what it means to come to terms with a religious heritage that was both blessing and curse. He was raised in North Dakota by parents who were both Pentecostal preachers. It quickly became clear to him that their way was never going to be his way. His parents were deeply disappointed in him (spiritually), not because of anything “wrong” he did, but because of something “right” he couldn’t do. He couldn’t speak in tongues. The gift never came to him. So the fullness of their blessing never came to him either.
Painful is his recollection of the day he came home from school to find his mother gone. Apparently, her failure to be there….or to leave a note….was so rare as to put him into a panic. He was certain that what the Pentecostals call “the rapture” had happened, and that Jesus had reappeared for the purpose of whisking his mother off to heaven….leaving him behind. Apparently, she had given him reason to believe that one day, when he least expected it, such a thing might just occur.
But now, as a grown-up, Jackson has come to terms with all of that. Pain has been healed. And he can respect and appreciate the faith of his parents, without feeling that it should necessarily be his. Coming back to his Christian roots through the back door known as Buddhism, he has reassembled a faith that he can call his own, comfortably and without apology.
He could have spent the rest of his life counting his bruises. But, in the same place he got the bruises, he also found some blessings. So he figured he better count them too. And when he did, he found that God was working through it all….helping him fashion a life out of the things that had blessed him and the things that had bruised him (given that many of those things were one and the same).
That’s the point to all this remembering. Not just to get it clear….to get it right….or to get it comfortable. The point is to bring us to the recognition that we have survived, you and I. Some of us have made it twenty years. Some of us forty. Some of us sixty. And a few of us, eighty years or more. We have made it to this day. We need not have, you know. There were times we didn’t think we would. And almost didn’t. There were times we went down the wrong road and got royally lost. There were times we followed the devices and desires of our own hearts and found ourselves going in circles. And there were times then the road was clearly marked. But we sat down beside and refused to go down it at all.
But we are here. We didn’t go under. Not because we are brilliant (let’s not give ourselves that much credit). Not because we are buoyant. But because a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through. Don’t you see it? What we are trying to remember is God himself. That’s what Israel remembered. Israel’s theology was built upon a communal rehearsal of the mighty acts of God. Every time the people got distressed, depressed, defeated or down, someone would gather them around the fire in order to count the bruises and the blessings, threaded with the story of what God had done for his people.
A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which thou, O Lord, has given me. And you shall set it down before the Lord your God, and worship before the Lord your God. And you shall rejoice in all the good which the Lord your God has given to you and to your house, you, and the Levite, and the sojourner who is among you.
Deuteronomy 26:5-11
It was the sharing of that memory, coupled with the telling of that story, that gave people the courage to go on. For the one thing they could discern in their past….even though it was seldom clear in their present….was the leading of God. They believed, not in spite of their past, but because of their past. They believed that there had been times…..often the most unlikely times….when they could trace a thread of holiness through the horror. And the thread was nothing less than the leading of God.
So remember.
Remember it all.
Remember it as honestly as you can.
Remember, and be glad.
For God was in it. God is in it. God will be in it. It is God who is bringing you through…. bringing you out….bringing you home. So count your many bruises. Then count your many blessings. One by one by one. Not to impress anybody. Not to impress yourself. But so you can see what God has done. Which is the only real source of courage that I know.
Note: I am indebted to Keith Miller’s Habitation of Dragons, John Claypool’s Opening Blind Eyes and Kathleen Norris’ Amazing Grace. Frederick Buechner also plows some of the same ground in his book The Longing for Home. And I have long since lost the source of Carlyle Marney’s observation, even though I have never misplaced my affection for Carlyle Marney.
