Last Sunday was Pledge Consecration Sunday, and I am so very grateful to all who gave so generously. Thank you! And if you are considering making or renewing your pledge, thank you! Let us continue to give of our time, talents, and financial pledges with gratitude, and imagination as to who, and whose we are, and who we are becoming!
Of late I have been wondering; how might telling our stories of Divine generosity and mystery energize our common life at Holy Family? When we have been surprised by joy, how do we give in response to this? As we approach the Advent season with hopeful anticipation, how might we pay attention to even the smallest blessings on our daily walk? This past Sunday I arrived at church in the predawn darkness and sat in silence in the nave of our beautiful parish. I offered a prayer of gratitude for all the lives who would gather that day, and all the Saints who have come before, and are to come.
In his wonderful book “The Embers and the Stars,” Erazim Kohak asks this very question of each of us, and of himself… how might we respond out of gratitude for the gifts we have been given? To speak for example of the gift of the presence of God in nature—and of the creatures who live in it, may at first glance seem challenging. Kohak writes, “Nature appears dead to us in part because we have come to think of God as “super-natural,” absent from nature and not found therein.” This is, he suggests, a product of how far our quest for theory has deviated from the reality of lived experience, how often, that is, we miss the connection between blessing, and gratitude, and the acknowledgement of the sacred in creation all around us. Kohak continues, “The most basic trait of the world that confronts a dweller in the forest clearing is that it is God’s world not ours, and that here God is never far. In lived experience, in the embers and the stars…the heavens declare God’s glory, the creatures of the forest obey God’s law, the human dweller gives thanks for this grace.”
It just happens that Kohak has found deep meaning in the worship of the Anglican communion, and the Episcopal version of it, where he finds what he refers to as “…the great mystery of abiding, its sense, its incarnation, love becoming actual in labor, faith in life and worship.” And in the metaphor of an evening in the New Hampshire woods he finds that our blessing of such experiences, in this moment, does not lead to a conclusion, but to a reflection on the living presence of God. The author Marilynne Robinson sees the sacred in the mystery of blessing the life of a cat, Kohak in the river, and the forest, and the stars, where he writes, “the fulfillment of time is not where we seek it in vain, in its endless future. It is where we find it, in its perennially present eternity.”
So, where does your sense of wonder and gratitude at the mystery of creation energize the ancient and ever unfolding stories of creation—the Gospel Good News right now, in this moment? Where and when do you bless and give thanks for the sacred in the now, enlarging and co-creating the ongoing unfolding of that narrative?
We are called to co-participate in the ongoing living out of the Gospel story by adding our stories of co-creation to that one, in conversation with the compassionate movement of the Holy Spirit. The unfolding of creation requires our participation. It asks of us that we tell what we have seen of God’s ever-in-process creation, woven into the stories of who—and whose we are, and are becoming. To embrace God’s blessing is to acknowledge ourselves—and Christ, in each of the blessings we receive. Jesus managed always to blur the boundaries between our notions of neighbor and stranger, and in so doing he set the context for hospitality, and compassion, and gratitude in community. I was reminded of this again last Saturday, as 16 men of our parish gathered and in so doing, came to know one another at deeper levels. Gratitude indeed!
And here, my long interests in neuroscience and pastoral theology are coming together in fascinating ways. Researchers using MRI and PET scan technology—imagine a kind of Hubble telescope of the brain—have learned that there are areas of the brain that “light up” in relation to emotions associated with giving out of our places of gratitude, and when we share those stories. We are learning that the adult brain is changeable—the scientific word for it is “neuroplasticity”—and that when we give, and when we engage in acts of compassion, we are re-wiring our brains. Some among us attended the Dalai Lama’s conference on compassion and neuroscience held at Emory several years ago, and it was research among Tibetan monks—whom the Harvard trained researcher Richard Davidson called the “Olympic athletes of meditation”—who first demonstrated what happens when we practice compassionate acts of giving, in gratitude.
Vicky and I recently lost our beloved dog Sadie after 18 years. We miss her, and yet, as Rabbi Edwin Friedman so wisely said, “Grief and loss that are not transformed, get transmitted.” And so, we have been seeking to transform our grief largely through gratitude for her, and giving from that place in our hearts. And within the broken spaces created by loss, we remember this affectionate, wise creature of God who appeared in our lives, lost, and in need of a home. Was there a blessing? Is it connected to gratitude? Do we know in a new way the power of acknowledged sacredness, and what Wendell Berry may have meant when he said; “The incarnate word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign, but everything that is…” Yes, yes, and yes. Amen.