Thanksgiving and Mourning
“Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise when we lose whom we love… By the event of our uncontrolled grief, wail, and rap, we are also simultaneously praising with all our hearts the life we have been awarded to live, the life that gave us the health and opportunity of having lived fully enough to love deep enough to feel the loss we now grieve. To not grieve is a violence to the Divine and our own hearts and especially to the dead. If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.” — Martin Prechtel, from The Smell of Rain on Dust
Share the Love — A Homily of Thanksgiving and Mourning
According to Martin Prechtel, a storyteller and spiritual guide of mixed First Nations and European descent, love is a coin with two sides — praise and grief. When we attempt to ignore the deep interrelationship between these two sides, we become unbalanced, we become unable to fully experience either. Ignoring praise we become melancholy and depressed, capable of neither deep and restorative grief, nor of heartbroken sadness. Similarly, when we ignore grief, we become plastic pollyannas: spouting positivity with no depth of joy behind it, no gratitude, only a grasping at ephemeral pleasures and niceties. Neither of these conditions does justice to our humanity, to our aliveness, to our capacity to love and to feel.
It is through this wisdom that I have come to understand that ‘joys and sorrows’ is a much deeper thing, a more profound thing, a wiser thing that I had, at first, supposed. But still, you can feel our sociocultural, western avoidance of grief in how we typically present it. We want to share our joys to amplify them and share our sorrows to dissipate them. This sounds right, of course, but, like much conventional wisdom, it is dead wrong. It is the near enemy of the practice it struggles to become. In sharing, the true calling of that act is to deepen both our joys and our sorrows, to become more practiced and more skillful at both praise and at grief.
We wish to become deeper practitioners of praise and joy, gratitude and thanksgiving — to develop mastery of our ability to realize, every single day, that living and being alive are not entitlements, they are gifts and they are best experienced when treated as such.
We wish to become deeper practitioners of grief and sorrow, heartbrokenness and mourning — to develop mastery of our ability to realize, every single day, that every mature human being is part living tissue and part scar tissue, that the only ones among us not walking around with broken hearts are perhaps the youngest children — and not even all of them.
As with all wisdom the micro is a reflection of the macro, so as within is as without. And so we come to this holiday of Thanksgiving — at its best a day that reminds us to live in gratitude, at its worst a celebration of genocide. And so we circle back to praise and grief -
Praise means to hold up that which is of value — and so we lift up our gratitude, our acknowledgement that we are recipients of the truly awesome and amazing gift of being human, of being alive, of Being. Close your eyes for a minute, feel the energy of your breath, of your mind, of your heart, as they pulse with the energy of being alive. Let your awareness move from your toes to your fingers, feel that every part of you is alive and surging with the energy of the universe. This is a blessing and a gift, this is a gift from the Universe to your awareness, to you.
Grief is the space that is left when something of value is lost: a dream, a person, a community, a way of life… those things are like missing teeth when we lose them. We can’t stop noticing, with varying frequency, that thing that used to be there, that part of the Universe that was also part of us, that isn’t there anymore. Sometimes that feeling, that awareness, creeps up on us and we can’t even name, or put a finger on, what’s missing. So we just have to learn to surrender to the grief, to the acknowledgment that we are broken by it.
Such it is with genocide. Whether your nearer ancestors were the targets of genocide or its perpetrators, whether you lost them to death or to ignominy — they are lost, and you will feel that loss in your life, whether or not you ever master the art of being heartbroken. Failure to master this art will leave you haunted and shamed, mastery will make you a human being on the path to becoming a proper elder.
So how do we come to terms with being the descendents of genocide? How do we teach it to our children? How do we stop it from happening again, to anyone? How do we break the cycle of violence?
The answer is both simple and profound.
When we say that our nearer ancestors were either targets or perpetrators, we can also choose to remember that our farther ancestors were the same. This is what common ancestor ultimately means, and this might be the roots of the Universalism that we seek. Common ancestor, common destiny. So genocide, as a human phenomenon, is ultimately a battle of sibling vs. sibling. This sounds like an oversimplification, but it is not. It places the emphasis precisely where it needs to be, on this question: What is it that could make siblings believe that they are not siblings? And the only answer worth a damn, the billion dollar answer to the riddle no one wants to solve is this: dehumanization.
Now on a 1 to 10 scale of dehumanization, genocide is clearly somewhere near 10. But dehumanization is a slippery slope, and I have seen in this very room evidence of the softer kinds of dehumanization, ones or twos or threes… I think you know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve said some things or thought some things about the people in your community who want that monument at the county square to stay right where it is. Maybe it’s hard to look at them and see them as siblings, it probably is, and it is understandable. I’m not inviting you to self-flagellation, I’m inviting you to deepen your faith. I’m inviting you to grieve the sibling relationship that you have lost with the people in this world who you’ve decided are ‘other’. Now, I know that you’re justifiably proud of the many people that THEY other, and you don’t. That is progress, but it isn’t enough, not by a long shot.
Jesus taught that we shall be judged by how the least is treated — well Amen to that. Jesus was a tremendous prophet. And how are we doing on that scale? If we did a quick tally today and looked at our siblings suffering in Gaza or Ukraine — if that is the benchmark of how human beings are doing on this planet, and it is, then we’ve got more things to grieve — so we’d better get good at it.
Now Jesus taught something else too… something other prophets have echoed, from Gandhi to Dr. King, from bell hooks to Sonya Renee Taylor: they have all tried to tell us about the transformative power of love.
The Transformative Power of Love, I hope you’ll bear with me while I share one of my favorite passages from Dr. King’s sermon, Loving your Enemies:
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. “love your enemies.”
Now this is supposed to be a short homily, but we’ve covered some ground… so let’s review like this, I’m going to ask you to repeat after me:
We humans are siblings.
We have a common ancestor
We have a common destiny.
Dehumanization is a bad habit.
Love is a power that transforms.
Love has two sides:
praise and grief
thanksgiving and mourning
gratitude and heartbrokenness
Love is the antidote to dehumanization.
Gratitude for our siblings.
Grief for our siblings.
Gratitude for ALL our siblings.
Grief for ALL our siblings.
Gratitude for our enemies.
Grief for our enemies.
Amen.
Benediction
“Grief is an obligation to the life one has been awarded, an obligation to life to make more life.” — Martin Prechtel, from The Smell of Rain on Dust
Homily delivered at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, TX, 11–19–2023
