Thanksgiving, you know, didn't begin with the Pilgrims. On this continent, for at least 10,000 years, people have been thanking the gods for the harvest. "Come ye thankful people, come, raise a song of harvest home."

The Pilgrims' Thanksgiving came almost a year after they landed at Plymouth, came after a devastating winter, after the deaths of 46 of the original 102 who had made the Atlantic crossing. Then came the fine harvest of 1621. They celebrated, they and the 91 Indians who brought most of the food, and who had helped the Europeans survive that first year. It was a traditional English harvest festival lasting three days.

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It's not the story of the Pilgrims, nor of the miseries that would soon confront the aggrieved and exploited Indians, but the Harvest, that I'm interested in today.

A couple of millennia ago the great Galilean teacher said:

With what can we compare the Divine Commonwealth, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown is grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

The Divine Commonwealth is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.¹

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A Roman poet who lived at the same time as Jesus had something to say about this. Ovid said,

Seize the flower,
for if you pluck it not 'twill fade and fall.

And Shakespeare said about the same thing:

Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted;
Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime,
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

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There are times in human affairs when things can be done that would be at other times impossible, things that would remain dreams without possibility of accomplishment.

For every thing under heaven there is a season.

When the fruit is ripe, it is time to harvest it. Harvest is the measure of the ripeness of things.

The season of Thanksgiving recognizes this fact and proposes an attitude of gratitude.

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But it's essential to know when the moment is ripe. It will be like Treya Wilbur said it would be when she speaks of a chrysalis. In case you, like me, would not know what a chrysalis is without looking it up, I looked it up, and it is an insect-word, the word for the third stage in the development of, say, a moth, not yet a butterfly, the one when they're enclosed in that firm cocoon. She wrote:

A chrysalis stands now empty
Drying in the sun,
Constraints forgotten by the life once served.
One day, perhaps, a child will come,
Will ask its mother,
"What strange creature one day lived
In such a tiny home?"²

These are the times when our lives feel like tiny places, and times when when there is an opening to act in such a way that our selves seem to expand to worlds and it all feels right and complete.

We look back on the days of waiting and pain. We wonder how we ever inhabited so small a place.

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So often we live in the time between times, when we are no longer what we were and not yet what we shall be. But Thanksgiving and Harvest represent the recognition that something is taking hold, coming into being; no, not even that — has come into being, has taken hold. Is ripe. Ready for harvest.

Johannes Brahms, the composer, once wrote:

Deep in the human heart, in a rather unconscious way perhaps, something often whispers and moves, which with time can resonate in the form of poetry or music.³

And the poet Rilke recognized the same kind of moment:

These days it sometimes happens that I discover how much I am listening within. . . . Something resonates deep in my being which, beyond these pages [his journal], beyond my cherished songs and all plans for future action, wants to reach the man in me. It is as if I should speak now, in this moment of lucid strength, when in my intimate being something greater than I sounds its voice: my bliss.⁴

For Brahms, it was time to compose, to write it down. For Rilke, time to speak because right now when he spoke in this moment of lucid strength, something far greater than himself would sound.

So write, already.

Harvest the flower or it will rot.

There is no time for waiting anymore. There are really two things to do at a time like this.

It may be time to feast and celebrate.

But certainly, it is time to gather the harvest. Write the book. Launch the enterprise. Start the revolution.

I grew up with a hymn that went,

Come, labor on.
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
While all around him waves the golden grain?
. . . . .
Come labor on.
No time for rest till glows the western sky,
Till the long shadows o'er our pathway lie,
And a glad sound comes with the setting sun,
"Well done, well done!"

Moncure Conway and Senator Sumner used to go and see Lincoln to try to convince him that he faced such an hour. The blood and hatred flowed in the Civil War — the moment had nothing of the feeling of completion or fulfillment about it — but Conway and Sumner pleaded with the President to recognize that a golden hour had come, when he had the power no one had ever had to cleanse the nation of its greatest stain. Under the provisions of his presidential war powers he could declare emancipation. But would he seize it?

Farmers know when harvest is; always the same every year. Life's times for reaping come when they come and unannounced. We have to be attentive to see the unexpected moment of harvest even through tears.

The day of Harvest, the day of Thanksgiving, is not a day just like any other day, but you do have to be able to recognize it. Emerson said that in every wall there is a door. The door is in the wall; it is not anywhere else. It is in the wall that you face, and a moment has come that reveals a door. Go through it. Walk up to it and walk through it.

For you and me, for our world, for this congregation, there is a door, there are many doors, in many walls. Sometimes they come around. Do we have the vision to see them? Do we have the spirit to approach them and open them and pass through them?

Eyes of resentment, disappointment, fear — that eye may not see the door, may miss the harvest.

The eye of gratitude, that anticipates the grace — that eye may see the door, may reap the harvest — release the unstoppable flow that thunders in from the heart of Being!

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There are these moments: The theologian Tillich called this kind of time kairos, not clock-time but moments that seem to reach into infinity, powerful, gateways into the fulfillment of dreams.

There is the day in April 1994 when, after nearly a century of struggle, the African National Congress won the first all-race election in South Africa and Nelson Mandela assumed the Presidency. There is the December day in 1955 when Rosa Parks wouldn't move to the back of the bus, and the day King told the crowd, "There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an alpine November," and called for the boycott, and was astonished when that Montgomery crowd cheered his call and the revolution began.

There is Lydia Maria Child publishing a novel depicting native Americans with respect and honour, and then publishing An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.

There is the day the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts declares:

The question before us is whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry. We conclude that it may not. The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens.

There is the day your life comes to a corner and you dare to turn it.

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Our harvests don't come quite complete: usually, we have to do some harvesting. It may not come in a state of completion, like a stroll through a supermarket, everything wrapped and ready. It's likely more like a field ripe for some kind of harvest, but we will have to harvest the crop. There comes a moment in which we have the power to do what at another time we could not do. We find that within us are powers equal to the storm and the flood and the fire. No other moment could have revealed our own magnificence so much as this moment.

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What moment beckons to you, to us?

This is the right time for . . . what?

Discern the harvest, and when it is ripe, harvest it.

William Ellery Channing:

There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.

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Sam Keen wrote:

A moment comes when there is a shift
from destruction of the old
to borning of the new.
The crisis is over.

Once I decided to go all the way
the road turned downhill toward home.

The renewal of the self has always been described by metaphors.
The process is poetic.
It is like:
a butterfly emerging from a cocoon;
coming out of a dark cave into the sunlight;
waking up after a nightmare;
an unexpected armistice ending an undeclared war;
shedding an old skin;
being born again;
having cataracts removed;
a bud emerging from the humus [HEWmus];
becoming your own father and mother;
an ember bursting into flame;
an alchemical transformation of dross into gold;
homecoming.

As the crisis ends I emerge into a new world
of possibility and action.
Time is a gift, no longer something to resent, or grasp, or dread. I re-member the past with gratitude because it brought me to this moment.
I look to the future with excitement because
it allows me an open space in which I am free to become.
I take pleasure in the present moment because it is the meeting point of all that has been and might yet be.

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Life is hard. Doesn't conform to our expectations. Administers shocks and jolts.

But Life is also a roaring engine of creativity. After while, in the wall before us, there will be a door. After the seasons of planting and watering, there will be a harvest.

And then it may be that, from out of the afflictions and oppressions, from out of the broken bodies and broken hearts, from a place far deeper than our resentments and fear — there may yet be heard an unending litany of Thanksgiving.

¹ Mark 4:26-32.

² Treya Killam Wilber, in Ken Wilber, Grace and Grit. Boston: Shambhala, 1993, p. 398.

³ Inevitable Grace, 306. Trace here for original source.

⁴ Inevitable Grace, 306. Trace here for original source.

Meditate

In the clutter of plenty,

the roar of abundance:

We enter a quieter place.

And here

we recall the prize we seek

the real and the true

restored to our sight.

And through life's tumult and daily hype

We shall hear

a sound more subtle

a voice more true

And quietly

to minds made quiet

There will come

with clarity

the promise of these days

the opening door

the great treasure

hidden

in a day, in an hour

In this silence.

Reading

From Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face. They thundered across the pond, and back, and back again: I swear I have never seen such speed, such single-mindedness, such flailing of wings. They froze the duck pond as they flew; they rang the air; they disappeared. I think of this now, and my brain vibrates to the blurred bastinado of feathered bone. "Our God shall come," it says in a psalm for Advent, "and shall not keep silence; there shall go before him a consuming fire, and a mighty tempest shall be stirred up round about him." It is the shock I remember. Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, like a tidal wave. You wait in all naturalness without expectation or hope, emptied, translucent, and that which comes rocks and topples you; it will shear, loose, launch, winnow, grind.

I stand under wiped skies directly, naked, without intercessors.