by Rev. Robert Schaibly

A sermon given November 25, 2007

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Dorothy and William Bradford were dissatisfied with their church—the church into which they had been born—because they felt it was too involved with ritual and had become irrelevant to the simplicity of Jesus.  So with others, they changed churches and debated whether to try to reform the existing church or to separate and be on their own.  Ultimately they decided to leave England and live in Holland with other Calvinists, while making plans to come to the New World.

Their ship, the Mayflower, arrived after six weeks on rough seas in autumn weather.  During that time the captain kept all passengers below deck so that they could not interfere with the sailors’ work.  The Bradfords and the other passengers stayed in cramped quarters; living, eating, drinking, sleeping, and being sick altogether.  The Mayflower anchored off what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.  I am telling you the dates so that you may imagine the weather, and those among us who have been to Cape Cod know how inhospitable the territory is without a fire in the fireplace at the inn which is yet to be even imagined.  On November 15 and again in December 11, as it was snowing, William Bradford—Bradford was thirty years old and he was their leader and would be reelected governor 30 times!—Bradford went with some other men on a small boat to explore the coastline for a place to come ashore.

The great American historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison, writes about what happened back at the ship while Bradford was gone.  “On returning to the Mayflower at Cape Cod harbor, Bradford learned that his ‘dearest consort, accidentally falling overboard, was drowned in the harbor.’  It may be that he suspected, as do we, that Dorothy Bradford took her own life after gazing for six weeks at the barren sand dunes of Cape Cod.”  She jumped overboard.  She was not yet thirty years old, sensitive and intelligent.  She is thought to be the first Anglo-Saxon to commit suicide in the New World. 

The first Thanksgiving was held at Plymouth Plantation and Native American Indians were invited as guests and much effort went into preparing food and entertaining.  Yet for William Bradford, the chosen leader of the Pilgrims, the presence at the Thanksgiving table once the guests had gone, once the uproar had died, was the presence of the deeply loved Dorothy Bradford. 

I treasure this part of the story because there is no spin, no gloss.  It’s real, and that makes it all the more precious.  To recall Dorothy Bradford is to acknowledge that we, too, have on occasion lost hope and known despair; it is a mistake to act on one’s despair because you cannot know for certain how it will all turn out.  We never faced so bleak a prospect as Cape Cod seen in December from the deck of a small ship after a long voyage, but we understand in part Dorothy Bradford who died in the year 1620. 

Every year the holiday season reminds me of those not present whose lives touched mine, particularly those who sat around the dining room table.  Sometimes my heart aches a little bit because their absence precludes my ever reaching them, never fully comprehending their lives, and most honestly, never expressing the love I feel.  But Thanksgiving is by far the easiest holiday for me to celebrate spiritually because I am so very glad I knew them once that the gratitude flows without coaching!

Thirty years ago, just a few days before Christmas, my dad died of a heart attack.  The first Thanksgiving after his death I could visualize him at the head of the table with happy memories—yes, happy.  I don’t remember him ever ordering wine with a restaurant meal, but there was wine at Thanksgiving and in the rush of the day it never got chilled.  This never fazed Father, who in his practicality, and with some of us groaning as politely as we could, always solved this oversight by putting ice cubes in the wineglasses.  Once an engineer, always an engineer.  Martha Stewart never ate at our table, and you know, if she had, it would have been just the same! 

My mother wanted most to be a homemaker, and she did this somewhat competitively; her pies and cakes at the county fair won ribbons.  She was a Scout mother and a room mother at school.  She hosted Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day year after year.  Last week we visited my brother in Washington, DC, where I used her silverware; he has it now.  I got water goblets and although they are technically my property, I think they will always be “my mother’s.”  Just seeing “her silver” at my brother’s floods my mind with the memories of those who once used it, and mom’s own hard work, rising early in the morning to create the fragrance throughout the house that announced something wonderful being made for all of us to share together across the generations.

The dead whom we love live on in memory, in our minds.  The poet Conrad Aiken captures it for us:

Music I heard with you was more than music,

And bread I broke with you was more than bread;

Now that I am without you all is desolate;

All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,

And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.

These things do not remember you, beloved,

And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,

And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;

And in my heart they will remember always,

They knew you once, o beautiful and wise.

And of course there can be some unhappiness at remembering, too.  The holidays can lend themselves to the abuse of alcohol, creating misery for all around that person.  If you suffered that way, you cannot look away.  The Zen master says you must look more deeply.  An example of that comes from a Broadway play, I Never Sang for My Father.  It is a middle-aged man unhappy with his elderly father whose communication had always been perfunctory.  In the course of the play the character of the dead grandfather is revealed: a man who was alcoholic, who deserted his family, and left it destitute.  All his life the father was obsessed not to be the way the grandfather had been, and hence he had been a teetotaler, a workaholic, a saver, and everything his father had not been.  Looking deeply and seeing all this brings understanding and the ultimate goal of all understanding—compassion.  If your heritage of holiday memories is badly tainted, look deeply and see if compassion can be found.  Then, resolve not to follow that script; there are many ways to spend holidays that the sentimental artist Norman Rockwell never thought to draw or paint! 

I have felt sadness in this time of remembrance because so often a feeling of inadequacy characterizes our basic human relationships.  I wanted to overcome the distance between persons by comprehending another person’s world, but what particularly eludes me is the intensity with which others experience their reality.  We never tell our love fully.  Though we do love and intend only the best, to do the right thing in the right spirit, we simply do not always manage it.

My grandmother brought two family friends to every dinner, Aunt Emma and her daughter Katherine.  To me both of them seem old.  Neither of them ever learned to drive, so we often visited them in their home.  Aunt Emma is tiny and wore black with lace collar and sat in the same chair.

Katherine had a lot of books and records and their home compared to ours was quiet.  With Katherine I had several experiences.  Once all the adults and I, maybe 13 years old, simply listened to a record for half an hour and remained still while the music played.  I didn’t know such a thing could happen outside a concert hall, and it was a beautiful event.

Katherine had studied drawing and using just pencil and paper had made a sketch of a floor lamp that was right there in her home.  I was startled and I believe I looked at the lines of an object consciously for the first time because of that sketch.  I woke up to art. 

And my third memorable experience of Katherine is that she was my Sunday school teacher.  When a close family friend is your Sunday school teacher and you are absent, you get a personal inquiry about your health!  You don’t miss much Sunday school and you can see where that leads!  At Christmas she gave her students elegant ballpoint pens which were appreciated.

I took almost no notice when Emma died, being a teenager and never having felt much connection.  Katherine died when I was 20; she was at home, alone, and I felt sad that the body went undiscovered for several days.

I was so excited and pleased to be remembered in her will, having been given her books, wonderful classics, the beginning of my big collection.  She obviously cared about me, but with my small degree of maturity, I never knew enough to tell Katherine, “I really like you a lot.  I admire your ability to draw so well.  I like the power of this music.”  Looking at her empty chair, I have had tears.  As a minister I have seen the ways persons live lives they would not have chosen.  Katherine was caring for her mother, then she was living alone; it was epilepsy that kept her from learning to drive; she was described as nervous and high strung; she saw a psychiatrist long before it was all right to do so. 

Now I am in the winter and I may still neglect to say to others that I like you, that you have influence over me, and in our minds we may think we are going to live a very long time.  Perhaps it is easier if we tell one another about others we loved and lost.  Perhaps the best I can do is indicate how grateful I am for Katherine’s having lived, for my parents’ passion and love of life, for my grandmother whom I admired for being the first woman on the school board.

My father’s pain was related to his work as is the pain of many men.  It was forever uphill.  He knew and enforced the construction standards of the state and federal governments.  Everyone believes in safety and in quality, but enforcement is tiresome.  For a few years he took a turn as president of the school board; the phone rang a lot.

During your holidays this year you may be too busy to feel the presence of those now gone.  The duties of shopping for names that have been drawn, of filling envelopes with tips for those who serve us all year long, of baking what is needed for the Alliance wreath sale as well as for the children and friends, and then attending parties and church services.  I choose this moment to remind you of spiritual realities. 

Love.  You have been loved; people in your life have gone out of their way to do good things for you, to buy what you wanted, hoping to please you.  They enhanced your life.  By their act of loving you they prove that it is a fact that you are lovable.  The happy memories strengthen us.  So now we venture forth, risking showing love to others.  As if by magic, the more risk one takes upon oneself, the more being one has.

Gratitude.  It is good to be grateful for the memories without denying the human frailties of those we love.  To give thanks we acknowledge regrets as much as successes, for we are deepened by tragedy and come alive more fully to ourselves as our hardships as well as our blessings are recounted. 

And by this act of remembrance we find faith.  It is the faith—in fact, it is the proof—that life is worth living, and however bleak our prospect may appear from time to time, there is a source of courage and hope to be found in those who passed on their knowledge, their handwritten recipes, their model of good citizenship, their way of using tools, as well as their ways of showing affection.  Such people build our world, they transform us, they activate the love within us.  And then we reciprocate.  What is holy is here every day; now we must be here every day!  As Annie Dillard says, “There is no one but us.”

And most of all it is that gratitude for life and for love that gives us the confidence to reach across the centuries and take Dorothy Bradford by the hand and say, “Just hold my hand and listen: the smell of pine this Christmas will be wonderful and this summer there will be blueberries and roses.”

To do this, to move from darkness to light,

From despair to thanksgiving,

Is to feel the flow of gratitude among us and within ourselves,

It is to say to the dead parents and grandparents and friends,

“You are not gone.  The pain of your absence

we fill by recreating your presence

until we ourselves die and become one with you in essence

all the while giving thanks

all the while thanksgiving.

PRAYER

Great God, in whose mind we live and move and have our being,

Give us spiritual perception so that we look deeply and know a lighted candle is more than just a lighted candle, and we understand the cheapest tinsel Walgreen’s sells is sacred, yes, sacred.  Amen.

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Copyright 2007, Rev. Robert Schaibly. All rights reserved.