From You I Receive
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 13, 2009
One of the more delightful Christmas gifts I ever gave myself was one I stumbled upon some 8 or 9 years ago, while in the midst of trying to figure out what to get for whom, and making myself slightly crazy, and more than a little exasperated, in the process. It was a book by John Grisham called Skipping Christmas. I think I grabbed it because the title just happened to capture my mood at that moment. Skipping Christmas, huh; not a bad idea!
Grisham, as you probably know, is something of a pop novelist; a former lawyer (or maybe he still is one) who discovered he had a great gift for story telling, and used that gift to turn out works like The Pelican Brief, The Chamber, The Runaway Jury, The Firm, and the like. I call them "airplane books." I buy one when I'm going to be spending most of a day on planes and in airports. They're like fast food for your mind - filling up a lot of hours without requiring a lot of thought; which is all I want when I'm relying on air travel to get me from one place to another.
There are no lawyers to be found anywhere in Grisham's Skipping Christmas. The principal characters are a tax accountant named Luther Krank and his wife, Nora. This short novella - it's less than 200 pages, and makes me wonder if Grisham didn't write it on an airplane. The book has been out for awhile now, and I'll give it a reprise here.
Unlike the existentialist, theater-of-the-absurd play, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with which I led off last Sunday, this is just a plain old laugh-out-loud, feel good book; and makes no pretension of being anything else. We don't have to operate on the Samuel Beckett level every Sunday, and little lightheartedness is good for the soul. One of the things we're about here, after all, is doing things good for the soul. The story, then:
Luther and Nora Krank live in an unnamed Northeastern town or suburb. One year they decide to avoid all the usual Holiday madness - including gift giving and receiving - by having nothing at all to do with Christmas. Their only child, a daughter, is off in the Peace Corps in South America, and they have no other family except for themselves for the holidays. Luther, as noted, is a tax accountant.
At some point as summer gives way to fall, and already thinking ahead to the Holidays, Luther crunches some numbers to see how much he and Nora had spent on Christmas the previous year, and discovers that for half of that amount they could take a ten day Caribbean Cruise, departing on Christmas Day. This is exactly what they plan to do and in so deciding they also take a pledge: No Christmas, no presents, no house decorations, no parties or house gatherings hosted, no cards sent out, no baking and cooking, no going to office parties. Instead, they'll just spend quite evenings at home, and eat sparingly so as to lose a few pounds before hitting the sunny beaches.
The first two-thirds of the book are about how the Krank's decision affects everyone around them. With just a few exceptions Luther and Nora become neighborhood pariahs. They become the talk of the town in ways that no one would ever want to be the talk of the town. To give but one example, which is illustrated on the book's cover jacket, Luther refuses to put a gigantic, inflated, lighted, Frosty-the-snowman on his roof, in the way that everyone else on the block does. This is in completely in keeping with his refusal to decorate his house in any kind of way. Luther's great refusal, consequently, causes his block to lose the annual town-wide competition for best decorated neighborhood - something they'd usually won in previous years. Shortly thereafter Luther and Nora start finding protest signs on their front lawn urging them to "Free Frosty the Snowman." It gets even better, and funnier, and crazier, from there.
So, as I say, in the first two-thirds of this novelette Grisham manages to hold up to ridicule just about every kind of way in which reasonably comfortable, affluent-type, middle-class Americans have managed to over-aggrandize, trivialize, shamelessly exploit, or otherwise demean the Christmas and broader Holiday Season. And since the author is able to do all this without getting all preachy or self-righteous about it, all you can do is laugh along - which in a lot of ways constitutes laughing at yourself for getting caught up in much of the same stuff that Grisham is making so much sport of. I found myself - as I guess has been the case with most readers - rooting for Luther and Nora. You're on their side: C'mon guys, just hang in there for a few more days until you finally make it to the boat and the sun and the sand; and get what you really want and need for yourselves. You'll get your reward or your payback for all the grief you've been getting.
Like most readers, I would imagine, I breezed through all this figuring that at some point my chain would get jerked - or, in this case, heartstrings pulled - which, of course, is what happens. You know there's going to be a punch line; and this is what it is: Two days before Christmas Luther and Nora get an excited call from the Peace Corps daughter saying she been able to work out a last minute arrangement with her Peace Corps superiors to come home for Christmas. What's more she's bringing along her new, South American boyfriend, Enrique, because she wants to show him all the great and wonderful ways her family celebrates Christmas, in all the great and wonderful ways she remembered it as a girl growing up in their home. Standing there in their completely "de-Christmasized" house the Kranks have themselves one big OMG moment.
If you haven't done so already, you can read the book to learn of all the frantic scrambling around they do to make everything right for the dear daughter---and boyfriend, including getting Frosty the Snowman up on the roof, which comes to include Luther falling off the roof and nearly breaking his leg.
Then the break out the violins part comes when Luther takes the cruise tickets along with what they'd been planning to spend to a woman in the neighborhood, named Bev, who's just been diagnosed with cancer; and who, while still well enough to travel, is probably experiencing her last Christmas. She and her husband, Walt, get to take the Krank's cruise; as everybody goes, "Awwwww....gosh...gee whiz... that Grisham guy has a big heart after all."
Okay, it's corny and hokey and even a tad maudlin, as it goes for the easy laugh as well as the quick tear. But, while John Grisham is no Charles Dickens, the feel-good ending here is only few degrees removed, and a very few degrees at that, from Dickens' A Christmas Carol or from Frank Capra's tale of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey in the Holiday classic film It's a Wonderful Life.
Well, if there's any sort of message to be gleaned here I'd say it's this: However or whatever you do, or do not, celebrate in this Season; and however much you embrace it on the one hand or shun it on the other - sooner or later, and in one way or another, it has a way of getting you. How, then, to receive it?
For me, the key word in that question is "receive." The question I try to keep before me as this time of year comes round, is how do I best keep myself in a receptive mode in the midst of the craziness I've come to recognize as just part of the whole Holiday package. Moving beyond the personal, I would pose the same question especially for those for whom - for any number of reasons - this time of year is difficult or challenging or even painful: How do I keep myself open for whatever gifts - especially gifts of the spirit - that this season may offer to me. For a gift, after all, is only a gift when it has a grateful and gracious receiver.
I have two pieces of personal scripture to offer in this regard this morning. Personal scripture, for me, has little to do with whatever has been canonized in an "official" religious tradition - although it could include some of that. Personal scripture, as I've come to embrace it, are those, usually brief, pieces of writing that have stayed with me over the years and to which I return from time to time to be nurtured again by their message. The authors of the two passages I share here are the late Rev. Clarke Dewey Wells, a Unitarian Universalist minister; and the writer Annie Dillard.
Clarke Wells' piece is one I've often invoked - in one setting or another - at this time of year. It's titled "The Nicest Gifts I Ever Got" and is part of a collection of meditations Rev. Wells published many years ago called Sunshine and Rain at Once. With some slight editing, it reads like this:
"During this season of gift giving, a good exercise is to make a list of the best gifts we ever received. That will tell us what's important for ourselves and for those who receive gifts from us.
'While I remember a Daniel Boone had and a magician set with special affection, the nicest gifts I ever received are in quite another category: the carillonneur at Rockefeller Chapel who let me strike one of the largest tuned bells in the world during his playing of Ein Feste Burg; my mother giving me a complete set of Shakespeare for my 14th birthday; coach Al Terry saying "Little Well, grab your helmet, and permitting me as a freshman into my first varsity football game; a beautiful lady on a ship when I was still an acned teenager who kissed me and told me I was handsome; Dr. Henry Nelson Wieman telling me he had thought for several hours about a question I had raised and responding with a written answer the next day in front of the whole class; night after night my father playing catch with me in the backyard until it got so dark we couldn't see the ball; a Unitarian minister in Kalamazoo who put his arm around me after my father died and kept it there a long time; a friend who flew several hundred miles to visit me when I was sick; a buddy who went to see three movies with me on the same day.
"The nicest gifts people have given me - the best gifts I've received - have been enabling, confirming gifts, bestowing understanding and self-esteem, help in times of trouble and delight for ordinary days."
Clarke concludes with this bit of advice and invitation: "May I suggest that you, too, draw up your list of the best gifts you ever received. I think it will give you some perspective to the kind of gifts we really want to give to others, and receive from others, at anytime of year."
"Confirming gifts, bestowing understanding...help in times of trouble and delight for ordinary days..." These are not, for the most part, the kinds of gifts we can deliberately or specifically seek out - or deliberately or specifically ask for. What we must do instead is maintain a mood or attitude of receptivity and openness so that we can take them in when they come our way - and be blessed by them. For that is what makes of them gifts; and this what allows us to say to our givers in the deepest and truest sense of the words, "From you I receive."
Taking this idea one step further or beyond the sentiments of Rev. Wells there is a kind of "cosmic receptivity" we can attune ourselves to as well and which offers an overlay to the many gifts - gifts of material and spirit - which come to us. To be a good receiver in this more ultimate sense involves being able to see or locate yourself within the workings of some greater Reality - however you may sense and name it. For all of our liberal religious and humanistic emphasis upon the strength and power of the human mind and the human will - which I also consider gifts - the truth still remains that we did not will or think ourselves into existence. And we live and move and have our being as part of a larger drama that we did not write.
To be sure, we do have some say-so, we do exercise a fair degree of free will, as to how we will act in this drama in which we participate. But part of being a good receiver is to keep oneself open to those moments when you see that we really are participants in a larger life, of which we are the recipients. In a paradoxical way, coming to such an awareness can be much more empowering than diminishing. It is possible to be both overwhelmed and empowered all at the same time.
This gets me to that other piece of scripture. This one is from Annie Dillard's book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which was first published some 30 years ago. The book is something of a spiritual and mystical diary kept during a stretch of time during which Ms. Dillard spent living a Thoreau-like life in a cabin near a stream called Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Later she and her husband lived, for a time, close to Thoreau's old haunts in Concord, Massachusetts before returning to the South. This is the scripture I take from her writing, with, again, just a little tweaking. It was written during Ms. Dillard's Tinker Creek days:
"Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping burst of speed before I saw them; I felt flayed air slap 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 in her thinking and reflecting on such an experience, this is what comes: "It's 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, winnow, grind...I have glutted on richness...This distant (December) sky, these bare branches of trees showing their pure and secret colors - this is the real world; not the world gilded and pearled. I stand under wiped skies, naked, without intercessors. Frost winds have lifted my body's bones with all their restless sprints to an airborne raven's glide. I am buoyed by a calm and effortless longing...Thanks be to God."
"Not only does something come if you wait, but it pours over you like a waterfall, a tidal wave..." What Ms. Dillard is describing here is one of those moments that take you completely out of yourself and into the deepest parts of yourself all at the same time. This is what I meant when I said it's possible to be both overwhelmed and empowered all at the same time. That's what happened to Annie Dillard in the experience she describes.
Her response to such an experience, to this ultimate kind of receiving, is to say "Thanks be to God." That was her way of acknowledging, her way of giving voice to, the simultaneous feeling of smallness in the face of the universe as well as a largeness of soul.
While they've not been the same as the one described here, I've been blessed on occasion with similar types of experiences of that sense of smallness in the face of the universe and a largeness of soul - along with a sense of connection with some greater reality than I can know or name. I think, for her, Ms. Dillard's response to such an experience of "Thanks to be God" is the rightful one. For me, if I say or think anything at all, mine is simply "From You I Receive." I'm at all sure who the "You" even is...the Universe...Life Itself...the Great Mystery...who knows? It's the experience that is more important that the language used to describe it; but "From You I Receive" works for me.
So, we've gone from a fluffy-puffy book by John Grisham, to what is probably a UU-type sermon extract by Clarke Wells, to a piece from spiritual autobiography by Annie Dillard. If there is one common element to be found in the three of them, it is one of receptivity. Luther and Nora received a seasonal blessing in the face of, and in spite of, their resistance to the season they sought to avoid. Clarke Wells discovered a deep sense of gratitude as he recalled the "nicest gifts he ever received." Annie Dillard declared that she had received, of "glutted on richness" precisely because she could wait "without expectation or hope."
In closing, I especially liked the part in Annie Dillard's piece where refers to the sky and landscape, as seen at this time of the year, as the "real world;" one stripped of all dressing and pretension. It helps me to appreciate a winter season that I easily, I must confess, grow weary of. There is a beauty to be found in this season of giving and receiving. We sing of it in our closing hymn: "All Beautiful the March of Days."
Stephen Edington
December 13, 2009
