A Feast OF Thanksgivings
UU Church of Pensacola, Florida - 21 November 2004
There was a time when I did my research for sermons in libraries. Now a days I go to google. Those of you who don’t use the internet may feel I’m speaking a foreign language. So let me explain. Google is a a sort of robot reference librarian. You tell it what subject you want and it finds the “books” and even pages in books that deal with that subject. It operates almost at the speed of light. This week I wanted to find out what my colleagues had written on the subject of the day so I asked the google librarian to show me all pages that contained all the words Thanksgiving and Sermon and Unitarian. In less than a second she – I always think of the google librariian as a she – told me there were 8,420 pages that contained those words – and showed me descriptions of the first 50 on my computer screen. I could if I had infinite time view any of those 8420 pages and even print them out on my printer.
All of this is preliminary to saying that when I entered Thanksgiving, Sermon and Unitarian I got 8,420 “hits.”
Later, when I entered Appreciation, Sermon, Unitarian I got 9,330 hits. When I entered “Limbic Resonance” Sermon Unitarian I got only 1 Hit . I’ll explain why I entered “Limbic Resonance” in a few minutes.
In my first search I found a sermon by Rev. Mark Gallagher titled - "A generous and Appreciative Heart" Turned out to be an excellent fund raising sermon. Not what I was looking for. But I saved it for future reference.
In the second category – appreciation, Sermon, Unitarian - I came across a sermon by Rev. Edwin Charles Lynn that came closer to what I wanted to talk about this morning. It was titled “It Might Have Been Otherwise: Spiritual Gratitude.
http://www.uua.org/programs/ministry/development/bordenlynn.html
Rev. Lynn begins by telling the story of his close encounter with death when a tree fell on the back of his car during a snow storm. Had it fallen a second earlier it would have crushed him. He writes,
"In my almost-otherwise encounter with that tree, I experienced something akin to the feelings reported by people who have a near-death experience – a changed understanding of what life is all about. Yet I sustained what I call a near-life experience – a deeper understanding of how sacred life is and that it is not to be taken for granted. I came to fully appreciate how fragile we human beings are, and I felt a profound sense of gratitude.
My gratitude was more than an awareness of successes or bounty. It was a feeling that went to the core of my being. It was a sense of fundamental appreciation for my time here on earth and for the basic elements of my life – breath, health, love, joy, and inner peace. What I experienced was a deep sense of spiritual gratitude."
Now that’s something we should all resolve to "affirm and promote" on this Sunday before Thanksgiving. Spiritual Gratitude: the sense that life is a gift.
Lynn built his sermon on the poem Otherwise which you heard earlier. The poem takes on additional meaning when you discover that Jane Kenyon, the author, wrote it the day after she was told she had a terminal cancer. With that in mind listen again.
"I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise.
I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe flawless peach.
It might have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.
All morning I did the work I love…
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise."
I'm very much aware today of the message of that poem. The deaths of two of our members and the spouse of one in the last three weeks reminded me, painfully, of the fact that however many joys we experience today, someday “it will be otherwise.” Be thankful for all that gives you pleasure today. Someday “it will be otherwise.” But don’t let that make you morbid. Those of you who are young, be assured that as you grow older other things - and other people –will delight you. Still, as the bumper sticker says, “Eat desert first: life is uncertain.”
That's a second important message to keep in mind as we prepare to enjoy Thanksgiving, the most UU of holidays: cultivate spiritual gratitude.
But that’s not the point I was seeking help expressing when I searched the web. You see what I wanted to recommend to you this morning is this:
cultivate the capacity to enjoy others’ good fortune.
You can do it because the capacity is hardwired into our brains. It is part of what brain scientists call “Limbic Resonance.”
The one Unitarian Sermon that mentioned “limbic resonance was titled:
Cupid’s Folly: When Love Goes Bad”
In it Janne Eller-Isaacs, minister at our church in St. Paul, Minnesota. says,
“In the brilliant book, The General Theory of Love, Tom Lewis and his team of scientists explore the neurological circuitry of emotion and love. By focusing on the long ignored limbic system of the brain, they have found that we are profoundly affected by one another’s emotions. This is, of course, no surprise, but “limbic resonance,” as it is called, is a much more powerful force than ever suspected by the scientific community. It is at work at this very moment in this room and in our working relationships, our friendships, our families and our loves. Love does heal and now the scientists agree.”
A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis MD, Fari Amini MD and Richord Lannon MD published 2001 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, New York.
Limbic Resonance is what used to be called “empathy” and it turns out it is not some spiritual force but an ability in all higher life forms to actually feel the emotions of another life form. Anyone who has ever owned a dog knows what “limbic resonance” is. Limbic Resonance is about all the primal emotions – not just about love. Doctors s Lewis, Lannon and Amani focus on the capacity of all humans to experience love – if that capacity is not extinguished by improper child rearing or by neurological disorders.
The basic facts about limbic resonance are simple. Our emotional responses begin in an evoutionarily more ancient part of the brain, a part that responds to what is popularly called “body language” but it also responds to smells, sounds, touch – all the senses. It responds far faster than the more recently evolved parts of our brains. This limbic part of the brain has its own memory which develops over a lifetime – a better memory than the more recently evolved memory in the neo cortex. The limbic memory remembers the settings in which primal emotions were evoked. The most obvious example of how it works is the fight/flight response. You “feel” fear and your body responds to fear before you know what you’re afraid of. The limbic system of the brain, in milliseconds, activates the hormones that prepare the body for battle or for evacuation. We all know about that response. But each of the other emotions is also equally connected to the endocrine system through the limbic system - and it is equally moldable. We’re hardwired to fear, hate, enjoy and to love, but we can learn to dampen or redirect each emotion appropriately – not just express it the way our more primitive cousins – the great apes - do. All this is now scientifically demonstrable thanks to MRI’s, EEG’s and other high tech imaging devices.
James Thornton in his excellent review of “A Genereal Theory of Love” writes,
“Our limbic systems are sensitive antennas to the emotions of other people. We can often feel emotional hostility at a distance. On the opposite pole, people said they felt love fill the room when they were in the presence of a famous Tibetan master …“
Psychiatrists … Lewis, … Amini, and … Lannon argue that …
“American society drives both parents to work leaving children without the brain-to-brain resonance they need to become healthy adults. Some, they argue, go crazily violent along the way because of this deprivation.”
<www.thebiggestideas.com/cgi-bin/viewps.cgi?your_emotionsps.txt>
Where did we first learn love? At our mother’s breast!
Rabindranath Tagore expressed this beautifully in a poem,
“MY MOTHER’S VOICE GAVE MEANING TO THE STARS”
Now I recall my childhood
when the sun burst to my bedside with the day’s surprise;
Faith in the marvelous bloomed anew each dawn,
Flowers bursting fresh within my heart each day.
Then, looking on the world with simple joy,
On insects, birds, and beasts , and common weeds,
The grass and clouds had fllest wealth of awe;
My mother’s voice gave meaning to the stars.”
by Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941 (recast)
UU Hymnal.
We first experience limbic resonance love with our mothers. Without it we die or are stunted in our development.
But what happens when, as is usually the case, the essential “brain-to-brain resonance is cultivated? What happens when the infant’s capacity to feel love for it’s mother is nurtured and generalized to the point where the child grows to love an ever broader sample of the human family. Ah, then you have at least a good citizen and perhaps a saint.
I think that the capacity to feel another’s joy is part of limbic love. As a mother delights in her infant’s delight and the infant in her mother’s so a child seeks out his friends to share his joy and to, in a sense grow that joy by sharing it. The dog who brings back the stick his master throws is resonating to the joy his master feels and shows even before he says, “good dog.” All mammals have this capacity for “limbic resonance” the bouncing back and forth and reinforcing of the emotion they share.
The capacity to appreciate another's joy – to RE joice in their success, their accomplishment, their delight, their victory, their ecstasy - makes one truly the most graced of all persons Joy shared is joy enriched. When you hear good news isn’t your first impulse to call someone and share it? Don’t you vicariously enjoy the tales of your friends’ good fortune? If not you are handicapped in a tragic way
But of course it’s not either/or. It’s a continuum. I think I have been blessed with an unusual capacity to share other persons’ joy but, sometimes, when I hear of a stranger’s good fortune I become aware of a little voice saying, “but why didn’t that happen to me?” I’m working on it! I want to rejoice with ALL who rejoice without that niggling voice that says, “Why not me?” I hope to get there before I die – but I’ll be satisfied if I can make progress. I’m trying to extended that capacity for limbic resonance outward to ever wider circles of human kind – and beyond to all sentient life. When Jane Kenyon took her dog up the hill to enjoy the birches on the day she heard she had terminal cancer, she was giving herself – and here dog – an occasion for loving limbic resonance. Many of you who have pets and all who have children know whereof I speak. If you have neither spend some time after church interacting with one of our precious preverbal babies reinforcing their happy moments.
Rev. Forest Church’s in his book, Lifecraft calls his grandfather “the richest man who ever lived” because he gave away all he had before he died. He had spiritual generosity and that’s a great thing. But even richer is the man or woman who is able to rejoice at the good fortune of all those he knows and not begrudge that good fortune to any. That person every day has a “feast of thanksgivings” because even if he or she cannot rejoice in his or her own good fortune, she or he can do so vicariously. As there is always someone in pain so too there is always someone rejoicing. Our task is to serve the person in pain and enjoy with the one rejoicing. Insofar as you do that, you will never be spiritually hungry.
Please join me in some moments of quiet contemplation of the words here spoken.
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