Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Readings
The first reading was the poem “Since You’ve come” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. This poem was selected for the Pushcart Prize in 1989. You can listen to the poet reading this copyrighted poem here: https://voca.arizona.edu/track/id/64026
The second reading was an excerpt from the long poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” by Maya Angelou.
Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn’t frighten me at all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn’t frighten me at all
Mean old Mother Goose
Lions on the loose
They don’t frighten me at all
Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn’t frighten me at all.
I go boo
Make them shoo
I make fun
Way they run
I won’t cry
So they fly
I just smile
They go wild
Life doesn’t frighten me at all….
Sermon
The thanksgiving holiday is coming on Thursday. Which got me thinking: Why should I be thankful?
If you follow the news, you can find many reasons to not be thankful. Internationally, our planet is in the middle of several major conflicts: here in the United States, we mostly hear about the Gaza/Israel war and the war in Ukraine, but if you dig deeper into the international news, you can find the war in Sudan where an estimated 150,000 people have died since April 2023, many of them in alleged genocide. Here in our own country, we have far too many national leaders who appear to be more interested in scoring partisan points than in actually governing. Then there’s the ongoing environmental crisis, ranging from climate change to invasive species to microplastics in our brains. And turning to the sports pages isn’t going to help all that much — the Celtics are losing as often as they’re winning, and (for those of you like me who only care about baseball) I’d rather not remember how the Red Sox yet again blew their post-season chances. Oh, and for those of you who follow cricket, we also don’t want to talk about England’s terrible batting in the Ashes Test with Australia.
If you follow the news, you’re probably going to say: It’s just another horrible year. Everything is going wrong. Oh, sure, there are a few good things — the Patriots are having a great season (except I don’t follow football), the drought has ended in Massachusetts, and there’s a very fragile ceasefire in the Gaza/Israel war — and yet this last piece of good news shows that even the good news isn’t very good.
But it’s not just the news that’s causing us to feel that we have nothing to be thankful for. Social media is also making us feel that way. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe published an article titled “With luxury always in our faces, it’s no wonder we’re feeling poor,” which reported on the ways social media makes us feel like we’re always falling behind. The article opened with a portrait of a 27 year old teacher named Chris Tringali who’s still living with his parents so he can save money to buy his own home. The article quoted Tringali as saying: “You go on social media and every weekend someone is getting married, someone is in Italy, or someone is in Europe, having all these milestones…. Meanwhile, I’m doomscrolling through all these big life moments for all these other people and I’m still living at home.”
Tringali sounds like a great guy with a pretty amazing life — he has already paid off his student loans; he has parents who are willing and able to let him live at home; and as a teacher, he’s got the kind of job where he’s actually making the world a better place. Yet through social media he is forced to compare himself to people who appear to be leading a more lavish lifestyle than he is. The Globe article goes on to quote cognitive scientist Tali Sharot, the head of the Affective Brain Lab at MIT, who said that “the constant flood of high-end content ‘makes you believe that you are less than others.’”
In other words, if you follow the news, you’re going to believe that we have little to be thankful for (aside from the Patriots who are having a winning season). In other words, if you spend any time at all on social media, you’re going to believe that you have little to be thankful for and furthermore that you are less worthy than those perfect people with lavish lifestyles who appear on your social media feed. And please don’t tell me to stop following the news; please don’t tell me to stop using social media. In a democracy, we actually do need to follow the news; and many of my friends and relatives only communicate via social media any more.
So what can we do? I do not recommend spiraling into depression and withdrawing into some dark place inside ourselves. I’ve actually known people who have done that, and you probably have, too that; it is not a good solution to this problem, and if you’re feeling that way, please come talk to me and we’ll figure out how to get some professional help so you can climb up out of that rut.
Without spiraling into depression, the rest of us can feel pretty strongly that the news is all bad, and that we are not as good as anyone on social media. While these are genuine feelings, we don’t have to be stuck with them. And I’m going to suggest an easy daily practice that has helped me get out of that feeling that the news is all bad and I’m a lesser being. This daily practice is quite simple: all you have to do is to give thanks for something. This practice probably gives the best results if you do it every day. But even if you do it once in a blue moon, it still can offer real relief.
You don’t have to wait for something stupendous to happen before you give thanks. In fact, this practice works best if you give thanks for simple everyday things. I’ll give you an example. For lunch the other day, I took some leftovers and made myself a vegetable-salmon sir fry over rice. This was just an ordinary lunch; it was not photogenic, and not the kind of hyper-attractive meal that you photograph and post on your social media feed. But it tasted good, it was healthful, and it was satisfying. So after I ate lunch, I paused for a moment and said to myself, “I’m thankful for a lunch that made me feel good, that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and that tasted pretty good.”
I’ll give you another example of being thankful for something that I would never put on my social media feed. I have a friend in California who’s in recovery from alcoholism, and who has been sober for quite a few years now. Now that we no longer live in California, I don’t see this person very often, but when I do see them, I’m thankful for their dedication to the twelve-step program that helps keep them sober. I’m giving you this example of thankfulness for a couple of reasons. First, thankfulness doesn’t have to remain focused on oneself; of course we can be thankful for the good health and well-being of friends and family. Second, thankfulness doesn’t have to be all about rainbows and sunsets and mystical magical poetical happenings (although those are nice, too); thankfulness can be simple, down-to-earth, prosaic, and practical.
When you start giving thanks for ordinary, everyday things and events, you begin to realize that actually life presents us with a great deal to be thankful for. The poet Ross Gay wrote a long poem titled “Catalog for Unabashed Gratitude” which is a long poetic list of simple things he’s thankful for: a robin outside his window; spreading rotting compost which (although it stank) would help fertilize a community garden; a friend who didn’t smoke meth with his mother; bees in a bee hive; a friend who survived suicide; for the love of family; the men he saw helping an elderly woman after she fell on the city street; winning a pick-up basketball game; and many more ordinary things for which he’s thankful. At the end of this long poem, Ross Gay apologizes for being so long-winded, and he concludes by saying:
“…Soon [this poem] will be over,
which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.”
The perfect ending to a long poem on thankfulness: Say thank you, every day.
Ross Gay does not tell us to whom he offers his thanks. Nor do I plan to tell you to whom you should offer your thanks. You should thank whomever you want to thank. Maybe you want to thank God or Goddess, Adonai or the Dharma, Allah or the Spirit of Life, or maybe you’re thankful without feeling the need to direct your thanks to any particular subject or object. Personally, I just offer my thanks without worrying too much about to whom, or to what, I’m offering those thanks; I simply toss my thanks out to the universe.
What Ross Gay does tell us is that giving thanks is much the same thing as “loving / what every second goes away.” Every single thing in life is transitory, which means that the good things in life are also transitory. What is bad in life will eventually end or pass away; by the same token, the good things in life also must come to an end or pass away. As we give thanks for that which is good, it is already passing away. (That vegetable stir fry I made for lunch? — it has long since been eaten.) And so Ross Gay ends his “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by reminding us to give thanks every day. It doesn’t matter to whom you give thanks (if anyone); but you should do it every day.
Give thanks even as what you are thankful for is passing away. This Thursday we have an official governmental holiday in which we are called upon to give thanks. But the point here is that we shouldn’t wait until the Thanksgiving holiday to give thanks; we should give thanks every day.
Since the Thanksgiving holiday takes place this week, let’s talk a bit about that holiday. Part of the current mythology of Thanksgiving is that it has something to do with the Pilgrims and the Indians. Even though historians tell us that when Thanksgiving first became an official government holiday the Indians and Pilgrims were not mentioned, I still like to think about them at Thanksgiving time. And I sometimes like to imagine what the English settlers and the Wampanoag gave thanks for, and to whom they extended their thanks, when they gathered to celebrate together on that autumn day back in 1621.
Perhaps the Wampanoag gave thanks for surviving the pandemic in which perhaps three quarters their people had died just a couple of years previously; perhaps they Wampanoag gave thanks for these new military allies, the Pilgrims, whom they hoped would help them keep the Narragansett Indians from invading their country. Perhaps the English settlers gave thanks that they had survived that first winter in which perhaps half their people had died; perhaps they too gave thanks for these new military allies whom they hoped would help keep them safe. In other words, in my imagination, both the Wampanoag and the English gave thanks for simple survival; they gave thanks for the simple but profound fact that they were still alive.
To whom did they offer their thanks? Those of the English settlers who were Pilgrims gave thanks to the orthodox Pilgrim version of God. But not all the English settlers were part of that religious group, including some of the military leaders and some of the indentured servants, and those people might have given thanks in their hearts to some less orthodox version of God, or even to older folk deities who have been lost to time. As for the Indians, although today’s Mashpee Wampanoag have stories about their culture heroes Moshup and Granny Squannit, it’s hard to know now exactly to whom seventeenth century Wampanoag gave thanks. Maybe it was culture heroes like Moshup and Granny Squannit. Maybe it’s not important to know to whom they gave thanks; what’s important is that they gave thanks.
I also like to imagine what would have happened if there had been a 24 hour news cycle and social media in 1621, at that first mythical Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s the way it appears in my imagination. The English and the Wampanoag would have spent the meal doomscrolling through all the bad news of their day — Narragansett Indians rumored to be on war footing! Established church in England speaks out against the Separatists in Plymouth Colony! The city of Riga falls in the Polish Swedish War prompting a major humanitarian crisis! After doomscrolling the bad news, they would have turned to their social media accounts, which would have given them FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) when they saw the photographs of the lavish meals served in the comfortable aristocratic houses of England, and the lavish meals of the Narragansett Indians (remember, the Narragansetts hadn’t been decimated by the plague of 1619) lying around in their comfortable wetu, or dwelling; both the English and the Wampanoag would see all these lavish meals on 17th century social media, making them all too aware of how inadequate their own Thanksgiving dinner was. In my imagination, between the doomscrolling and social media FOMO, the Wampanoag and the English would have decided they had nothing to be thankful for, and the Thanksgiving holiday would have died before it even got started.
At least, that’s what happened according to my hyperactive imagination. But there was one key difference between the seventeenth century and our own time. Both the English and the Wampanoags had the habit of giving thanks in spite of adverse circumstances, a habit which many of us today have forgotten or neglected. They gave thanks for what they had, even in the face of catastrophes like a pandemic that killed more than three quarters of all Wampanoag, or a brutal winter that killed more than half of all English settlers. Perhaps we can learn from their example. For those of us who forget to give thanks, perhaps we can start giving thanks for something each day. For those of you who never lost the habit of giving thanks, perhaps you could be more public about your habit of thankfulness to help the rest of us. We can support each other in the habit of giving thanks at least once a day. We can give thanks for the baby that disturbs our sleep, because we have never loved anything more than that baby. We can give thanks for friends and family who alive and still with us, and we can give thanks for the memories of the friends and family who have died. We can give thanks for the astonishing beauty of the world around us; we can give thanks for the simple fact that we can draw breath. We can give thanks for the simple food we eat — without feeling the need to post it on social media.
Doomscrolling and social media show us what we lack, and that makes us fearful. Giving thanks shows us what we have, and makes us stronger. Giving thanks give us strength. We have the love of friends and family. We have the necessities of life, most of the time. We live in a world filled with beauty. And while it is true that all these things are transitory, yet even so, when we give thanks for what we have, we gain something permanent even from that which is transitory.