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In the
odd years, when we didn't go to Aunt Marion's for Thanksgiving
dinner, we went to Grandmother's house. At least, insofar
as I remember, we did. It wasn't over the river or through
the woods. And we never took a sleigh to get there. Good thing,
too, because I only remember it snowing once in 50-plus years
of Thanksgiving days. I think it was in 1949. I was young
then, because Frank Tripucka was still the Lions' quarterback.
That was in the days before Bobby Layne came riding out of
Texas to rescue the Honolulu Blue and Silver.
Grandma
always had to have a late dinner because we sometimes went
to the football game ... my father and me. Other years, we
bundled up and went downtown to see the parade ... the one
where the real Santa Claus used to ride down Woodward Avenue
before climbing up on the marquee of the J.L. Hudson Company.
Until they closed the J.L. Hudson Company. Then, just the
other day, they imploded it. Twenty-seven seconds and it was
one big pile of rubble. I guess the real Santa moved. Nobody
told me where.
Somehow
Santa, Grandma and Bobby Layne get all mixed up together in
my memory of those early Thanksgivings. Or maybe it's me who
gets all mixed up. It all runs together now. Pleasantly so.
Thanksgiving has a way of doing that to you. It makes you
want to go home again. Or it makes you think about going home
again. More gratitude gets lost in nostalgia than in any other
forest I know. From our pilgrim fathers to our present fathers,
Thanksgiving generates thoughts of home ... places we have
been ... people we have been with ... events and experiences
that have shaped us ... and mis-shaped us.
Our past
comes tumbling out in those stories. For there is not one
of us who does not understand that the was-ness of our lives
powerfully affects the is-ness of our lives. So much has gone
into our making, that we occasionally need to sort the building
blocks from the stumbling blocks that are stashed in the basements
of our souls.
Both are
present, of course. For our past is not simple. There is both
dark and light there ... good and evil there ... beauty and
horror there. And the mixture tends to bother us, to the point
that we conveniently rid ourselves of half of it. Some of
us remember only the good stuff. We remember things as being
better than they were. All the bad slipped out somewhere.
Meanwhile, others of us remember only the bad stuff. We remember
things as being worse than they were. When we weren't paying
attention, all the good slipped out somewhere. Both are oversimplifications.
And clinging too tightly to an oversimplification is one of
the better ways I know of becoming emotionally ill.
If you
look at the past and say, "It was wonderful ... there
was no darkness there," then you can't help but wonder
why the present never quite measures up. Why can't my turkey
ever taste like Mom's? Why can't our family table look like
the one Norman Rockwell used to paint? Why do we have to sit
here listening to Ritter on Thanksgiving Sunday ... when,
in years gone by, we could have listened to Thomas, Wright
or Ward?
But if
you look at the past and say, "It was terrible...there
was no light back there," then you are going to spend
a disproportionate amount of time nursing old wounds, squeezing
fresh pus from old abscesses, while downing two-for-one cocktails
of shame and remorse. Eventually you end up as one of those
people who never go outside without an upper-body sash, the
one on which you pin your collection of injustices, hurts
and grievances ... positioned on the sash by date of occurrence
or date of remembrance.
Both groups
want to go home again. But each group remembers only half
the directions. John Claypool writes: "To look exclusively
at either the good or the bad is to have partial vision. Instead,
we must come to terms with the fact that both dimensions exist,
and accept them accordingly." Claypool then goes on to
suggest that Thanksgiving, as a season, can be of particular
help to us here. For Thanksgiving involves looking back, with
a sense of gratitude for all that is behind us. The danger,
of course, is to reserve our gratitude for only those things
that are pleasantly behind us.
For a
number of years, I had reason to be concerned with a young
woman who was feeling an intense amount of pain. Very little
in her life was going well. Almost everything in her life
was going poorly. Her story would have confounded Robert Schuller.
On more than one occasion she cried out, usually to me, that
she had experienced enough hell to know that she would rather
not experience any more. But in an effort to address her problems,
she tried one quick-fix method after another. None of which
worked for very long. Occasionally she tried the slow-fix
method known as therapy. Which might have worked, had she
stayed with it. But she never did. Three or four weeks into
each program, she would get a pretty good inkling as to where
the process was going and what she would soon be facing. To
which she would say: "I'm afraid to look at it. Twice
before I tried and had to quit."
So she
never saw it through. And whatever it was she couldn't face
in the past, ultimately consumed her in the present. Which
explains why she died.
Contrast
her story with that of a girl named Alice, about whom Keith
Miller writes in a book appropriately titled Habitation
of Dragons.
When
I was a little girl, I was put in an orphanage. It wasn't
pretty. But, then, I wasn't pretty. No one wanted me. I
can recall longing to be adopted by a family. I thought
about it day and night. I even got close a couple of times.
But something always seemed to go wrong. My social worker
said I was trying too hard. People would come to look me
over and, without meaning to, I would say or do something
to drive them away. Then, one day, I was told that a family
was coming to take me home. I was so excited that I jumped
up and down and cried. My social worker told me it might
not be permanent, but there was no way I was able to hear
that.
One
day, a few months later, I skipped home from school to the
big, old house where we lived. I saw my battered suitcase
sitting by the door. One look at the suitcase and I knew.
They didn't want me. This happened to me seven times before
I was 13 years old.
As Keith
Miller described it, the group reached out to her, trying
to do whatever they could for her. Finally she said: "Look,
don't feel sorry for me. You see, I needed my past. It's part
of what led me to God."
Putting
his finger on Alice's point is an old North Carolina hero
of mine by the name of Carlyle Marney. He, too, talked about
the need to tell the darker truths of one's own story. Except
that Marney did not stop with that grim prospect. He suggested
that if this is all one does, one may very well drown in the
dirty waters of self-deprecation. "Instead," he
said, "what is needed alongside an awareness of original
sin, is an equally-powerfully awareness of original love."
I like
that. I'm not entirely sure what it means. I suppose it means
that we need to give equal time to the good things that have
happened to us. For we have been loved and looked after throughout
our lives. From the beginning to the present ... when we have
been naked and bloody, dirty and of little apparent beauty
... we have been picked up, cleaned up, washed up and held.
For all the slights and cruelties that we have endured, there
have also been ways ... equally real and equally tangible
... that "goodness and mercy have followed us all the
days of our lives." And at this point in his argument,
Marney's words become beautiful indeed.
It is
from this point ... if we can get to this point ... that
we begin to make peace with a culture that spawned us, with
a mommy and daddy who shaped and mis-shaped us, and with
the institutions which blessed and distorted us. We can
go through home again. And we can accept whatever stuff
God had at his disposal in making us.
Thomas
Wolfe was wrong. We can go back home again. Not to stay. But
to visit ... so that we can leave on better terms than we
left before. We pass through home, the better to see it with
what the Bible calls "second sight."
Every
family tree has flawed fruit. And yet the Psalmist writes
(16:6): "Welcome, indeed, is the heritage that falls
to me." Which is not an easy admission to make. For there
is much of that heritage we'd just as soon deny ... and branches
of that tree we'd just as soon prune.
Kathleen
Norris, whose book is alternately informing us and moving
us each Tuesday morning at 9:30, writes: "When I see
teenagers in public with their families ... holding back ...
refusing to walk with Mom and Dad ... ashamed to be seen as
part of a family ... I have to admit that I acted that way
once, both with regard to my family of origin and my family
of faith." Meaning that the churches we remember weren't
perfect either ... alternately doing wonderful things for
us and terrible things to us. But that, too, can be dealt
with, so that we finally come to a point of gratitude for
what was there, without requiring "what was there"
to have been perfect.
Every
so often I meet someone, even in Birmingham, who says: "You
want to know why I don't come to church? I'll tell you why
I don't come to church. Because my parents made me go to church
when I was a little kid and I hated it." At which point
I always want to laugh. Because, as an answer, it's so pathetic.
But I stifle my laughter, figuring that it would be rude.
Then I want to say: "How old do you think you are going
to have to be in order to get over this ... get beyond this
... get through this `thing' with your parents?" But
I don't ask that either, because it would come off as intrusive.
I am a
man of moderate passions. But I hate the Chicago Bulls. Still,
I think I would like Phil Jackson. He's the guy who just took
a hike as their coach. Phil Jackson is a deeply philosophical
man, who chose for the title of his biography Sacred Hoops.
Jackson knows what it means to come to terms with a religious
heritage that was both blessing and curse. He was raised in
North Dakota by parents who were both Pentecostal preachers.
It quickly became clear to him that their way was never going
to be his way. His parents were deeply disappointed in him
(spiritually), not because of anything "wrong" he
did, but because of something "right" he couldn't
do. He couldn't speak in tongues. The gift never came to him.
So the fullness of their blessing never came to him either.
Painful
is his recollection of the day he came home from school to
find his mother gone. Apparently, her failure to be there
... or to leave a note ... was so rare as to put him into
a panic. He was certain that what the Pentecostals call "the
rapture" had happened, and that Jesus had reappeared
for the purpose of whisking his mother off to heaven ... leaving
him behind. Apparently, she had given him reason to believe
that one day, when he least expected it, such a thing might
just occur.
But now,
as a grown-up, Jackson has come to terms with all of that.
Pain has been healed. And he can respect and appreciate the
faith of his parents, without feeling that it should necessarily
be his. Coming back to his Christian roots through the back
door known as Buddhism, he has reassembled a faith that he
can call his own, comfortably and without apology.
He could
have spent the rest of his life counting his bruises. But,
in the same place he got the bruises, he also found some blessings.
So he figured he better count them too. And when he did, he
found that God was working through it all ... helping him
fashion a life out of the things that had blessed him and
the things that had bruised him (given that many of those
things were one and the same).
That's
the point to all this remembering. Not just to get it clear
... to get it right ... or to get it comfortable. The point
is to bring us to the recognition that we have survived, you
and I. Some of us have made it twenty years. Some of us forty.
Some of us sixty. And a few of us, eighty years or more. We
have made it to this day. We need not have, you know. There
were times we didn't think we would. And almost didn't. There
were times we went down the wrong road and got royally lost.
There were times we followed the devices and desires of our
own hearts and found ourselves going in circles. And there
were times then the road was clearly marked. But we sat down
beside and refused to go down it at all.
But we
are here. We didn't go under. Not because we are brilliant
(let's not give ourselves that much credit). Not because we
are buoyant. But because a strength beyond our strength has
pulled us through. Don't you see it? What we are trying to
remember is God himself. That's what Israel remembered. Israel's
theology was built upon a communal rehearsal of the mighty
acts of God. Every time the people got distressed, depressed,
defeated or down, someone would gather them around the fire
in order to count the bruises and the blessings, threaded
with the story of what God had done for his people.
A wandering
Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned
there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great,
mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly,
and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we
cried to the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our
voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression,
and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand
and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and
wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this
land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now
I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which thou,
O Lord, has given me. And you shall set it down before the
Lord your God, and worship before the Lord your God. And
you shall rejoice in all the good which the Lord your God
has given to you and to your house, you, and the Levite,
and the sojourner who is among you.
It was
the sharing of that memory, coupled with the telling of that
story, that gave people the courage to go on. For the one
thing they could discern in their past ... even though it
was seldom clear in their present ... was the leading of God.
They believed, not in spite of their past, but because of
their past. They believed that there had been times ... .often
the most unlikely times ... when they could trace a thread
of holiness through the horror. And the thread was nothing
less than the leading of God.
So remember.
For God
was in it. God is in it. God will be in it. It is God who
is bringing you through ... bringing you out ... bringing
you home. So count your many bruises. Then count your many
blessings. One by one by one. Not to impress anybody. Not
to impress yourself. But so you can see what God has done.
Which is the only real source of courage that I know.
Note:
I am indebted to Keith Miller's Habitation of Dragons,
John Claypool's Opening Blind Eyes and Kathleen Norris'
Amazing Grace. Frederick Buechner also plows some of
the same ground in his book The Longing for Home. And
I have long since lost the source of Carlyle Marney's observation,
even though I have never misplaced my affection for Carlyle
Marney.
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