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Now Thank We All Our God

11/01/15 by

Rev. Josh Pawelek

“Now thank we all our God.”[1] Let me tell you the story of the Rev. Martin Rinkart who wrote the original German words to this hymn in 1636. I’m basing my telling of this story on a 2011 sermon[2] by the Rev. Ian Poulton, a priest in the Church of Ireland. I haven’t tried to verify the facts as Poulton presents them, but I do see that the same story is told in a variety of places. Even if the story has been exaggerated over time, even if what I share is only partially true, it still ought to make us pause and wonder what it means to have a grateful heart.

Martin Rinkart was born in 1586 in Leipzig, about 90 miles southwest of Berlin. At age 15 he began studying theology at the University of Leipzig. He became a Lutheran pastor in his early twenties. Poulton says he was regarded as a better musician than a pastor, but he persisted in the Lutheran ministry and held a variety of positions in the region early in his career. In 1617, at age 31, he became pastor at a church in the small city of Eilenburg to the northeast of Leipzig. If you know anything about this era in European history, you might know that 1618 saw the commencement of the Thirty Years’ War, a complicated and brutal war which ended in 1648. Rinkart died in 1649, having served for the duration of the war at the Eilenberg church. That is, he did ministry in a war zone for 31 years.

Here I am quoting Poulton directly: “The war was beyond the understanding of most ordinary people, all they knew was that army after army laid the countryside bare, having no regard for the welfare of civilian populations. Famine and disease became widespread; farms, livestock and crops had been destroyed and weak and hungry people had no resistance against illness. The war was to reduce the male population of Germany by almost half, in total almost a third of the people in the German states lost their lives, mostly through hunger and illness.

By 1636, Martin Rinkart was the only pastor left in Eilenburg. The walled city had become a place filled with refugees, who brought with them further infection to add to that already present, and who placed further strain upon the town’s desperately short food supplies.

The refugees brought plague with them and in 1637 8,000 people in the town were to die from it. The illness had no regard for wealth or age, the town councilors and many of the town’s children were among the victims…. In May 1837, he buried his own wife. He was to bury more than 4,000 people during the plague, which was followed by a severe famine that saw people fighting in the street over a dead crow or cat.”[3]

The most memorial services I’ve ever conducted in a year is eight—and that makes for an exhausting year. For a period from 1636 to 1637 Rinkart was apparently conducting an average of ten or eleven funerals daily. He was witnessing excruciating devastation, a total breakdown of the social order, not to mention the deaths of his wife, children, friends, colleagues, parishioners. I won’t call it unimaginable, because we can imagine it. We may not know about the Thirty Years’ War, but we have knowledge of other wars, of genocides, of the Holocaust, of slavery, of refugees streaming as I speak out of war zones in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan into Europe—many of them heading for the “promised land,” Germany. Even if we or our families have not been touched directly by these things, even if we cannot know what it feels like to live through them, we can imagine them. But what might be unimaginable, at least to some, is that in the midst of this devastation and horror, in the midst of relentless death, Martin Rinkart sat in his study, read his Bible, and wrote the words, “Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices; who from our mothers’ arms, has blessed us on our way with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.”[4] How was such gratitude possible given everything he was witnessing?

You might hear this story and get caught on questions about Rinkart’s theology. That’s always a risk with Unitarian Universalists. You might think or say, “Really? After all he went through, after what must have been terrible personal pain, he was thankful to God? Didn’t he understand God as all-powerful, wasn’t that his theology, in which case didn’t he hold God at least partially responsible for the devastation? Wasn’t he angry at God for allowing such suffering? Why didn’t he reject God, say ‘there is no God?’ Why didn’t his faith waver? Was he numb? Was he afraid?” If these are your questions, I urge you not to get caught on them. We don’t know what Rinkart’s spiritual struggle might have been, what his inner disappointment with and rage at God might have been. It doesn’t serve us well to get caught on his theology. I don’t believe in Rinkart’s God; I don’t expect you to either. But I want to share in his extraordinary gratitude. I want it in my life. I hope you do too.

It’s easy to feel grateful when our lives are going well. But can we still be thankful, can we still know and trust how truly blessed we are, when our lives are not going well, when things are falling apart, when the dream we had for our lives comes crashing down around us? Let’s get caught on that question. What does it mean to feel grateful even in the midst of despair?

One of the reasons I feel this is an important question for us is because there’s a connection between gratitude and one’s overall health and well-being. Spiritual teachers, theologians and philosophers have named this connection for millennia. So many prayers in so many religious traditions begin or end with the words, “thank you.” And, over the last fifteen years, psychological researchers have verified these connections through clinical studies. I’ll share one frequently-cited 2003 study conducted by psychologists, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough. I’m quoting here from a paper on gratitude and well-being in a Harvard Medical School publication. Emmons and McCullough asked study participants “to write a few sentences each week, focusing on particular topics. One group wrote about things they were grateful for that had occurred during the week. A second group wrote about daily irritations or things that had displeased them, and the third wrote about events that had affected them (with no emphasis on them being positive or negative). After 10 weeks, those who wrote about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. Surprisingly, they also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation.”[5]

There are many studies that show similar results. Some yield clearer results than others; some suggest not that gratitude is itself the key to well-being, but that people who report a consistent feeling of gratitude also exhibit a variety of behavior and personality traits that lead to greater well-being; and a few studies diverge and show little or no connection between gratitude and well-being.[6] The one result I have not found in my somewhat-more-than-cursory review of this science of thankfulness is a connection between gratitude and a decline in overall health and well-being. That is, no study has shown that gratitude is bad for you!

So, if gratitude is good for us, it makes sense that a practice of being grateful, of naming to oneself and others those things for which we are grateful, of cultivating a gracious spirit, of saying ‘thank you,’ will have a positive effect on our lives. And these might be the easiest of all spiritual practices. You don’t have to learn to quiet the mind in meditation. You don’t have to first puzzle through that pesky question of whether there is a God or not. You don’t have to be in a specific place at a specific time. You don’t need to pay a lot of money to study with a master. You just need a little time, perhaps daily, to name, either to yourself or others, those people and things for which you are grateful.

I confess I feel a bit redundant speaking to you about gratitude on Sunday morning. There are millions upon millions of articles, books, blogs, videos, TED Talks, inspirational speakers, Facebook posts, tweets and various memes about gratitude. This is not secret knowledge. This is not a mystery waiting to be revealed to the earnest seeker. Nancy Parker suggested I view a TED Talk by the Austrian-American, Buddhist-influenced Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast entitled, “Want to Be Happy? Be Grateful”[7] I like his notion of what the practice of gratefulness might look like. He actually co-founded an online community called Gratefulness[8] which curates resources on living a grateful life. He counsels us to Stop, Look, Go” or “Stop, Listen, Go.” It’s very simple. Stop whatever you’re doing. Breathe. Come into the present moment. Then look or listen. What are you grateful for in this moment? He says, “Some of the most meaningful things to acknowledge are those we commonly take for granted. Examples include: our senses, a roof over one’s head, clouds, the ability to learn and grow, a pet, food, a friend.”[9] And then go, by which he means identify these things for which we are grateful not as ‘givens’ but as ‘gifts.’ And what do you say when you receive a gift? Thank you.

So many practices suggested out there in the blogosphere and on the self-help shelves are like this: simple, obvious and genuinely important to our health and well-being. But then I encounter a poem like W. S. Merwin’s “Thanks” which we heard earlier, and I perceive a deeper, less obvious, perhaps more urgent reason for gratitude. Recall Merwin’s words: “Back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging / after funerals we are saying thank you / after the news of the dead / whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you … / with the animals dying around us / our lost feelings we are saying thank you / with the forests falling faster than the minutes / of our lives we are saying thank you / with the words going out like cells of a brain / with the cities growing over us / we are saying thank you faster and faster / with nobody listening we are saying thank you / we are saying thank you and waving / dark though it is.”[10]

Merwin isn’t addressing the goal of health and well-being. His isn’t a survey of blessings at the Thanksgiving table. He’s speaking about resilience—how we stay strong in hard times, how we continue “dark though it is.” So much can happen that we don’t expect, can’t plan for. So much can throw us, knock us down, send us reeling, wake us up into sleepless nights and break our sense of connection to what matters. Our bodies betray us with illness and pain; we lose loved ones; sometimes we lose jobs, income, financial security; sometimes we struggle with addiction, mental illness, anxiety. Our culture feels angry and polarized, while poverty—both economic and spiritual—increases; while hunger—both economic and spiritual—increases, such that we stop trusting in abundance and assume scarcity. Wars break out; ideologues with weapons and no rules rampage across vulnerable lands; refugees stream across borders; desperate people stab strangers on the street and desperate police shoot back. The planet warms; the ice caps melt; species disappear; storms rage. Thank you? Thank you? When things break down, resilience is our capacity to repair whatever connections have been broken. Gratitude creates resilience.

Truly, in the end, we can take nothing for granted; because truly, in the end, nothing is simply a given; because truly, in the end, everything and everyone we care about, everything and everyone that matters to us, everything and everyone we love are gifts: gifts from God if you believe in that way; gifts from the universe; gifts from life’s enduring, animating spirit; or gifts out of sheer cosmic coincidence—but gifts nevertheless. Knowing this—believing this—can create resilience in us. Thank you. Thank you. Let us practice gratitude in good times, so that when hard times come, when challenges come, when illness and death come, when warming and war come, we may remain clear about the gifts we have received, about the blessings in our lives, and grow resilient in the midst of our despair. Whether he understood it in these terms or not, I have no doubt Martin Rinkart wrote “Now thank we all our God” at what was surely the lowest point of his life in order to stay resilient, and to encourage resilience in his community.

DSC_1921Friends, may we be relentlessly thankful for all the blessings of our lives, for all the gifts we receive, for the source of our lives, for the power that brought us and this world and this universe into being, for that fundamental creative energy at the heart of all there is, and for all the ways we are connected to each other, and to all life, and to each dry leaf decaying on the wet November ground, and to each blazing star gracing the heavens with its light. Thank you. Thank you. May we learn to pause and know that none of it is a given, and all of it is a gift. Thank you. Thank you. And may these simple, profound words speak in our hearts and on our tongues, again and again, even in our times of greatest despair: thank you, thank you.

Amen and blessed be.

[1] Rinkart, Martin, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: UUA and Beacon Press, 1993) #32.

[2] Poulton, Ian, “An A-Z of Hymnwriters: Martin Rinkart,” For the Fainthearted, September 14, 2011. See: http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2011/09/14/an-a-z-of-hymnwriters-martin-rinkart/.

[3] For another version of the story, see Oron, Aryeh, “Martin Rinkart (Hymn-Writer), Bach Cantatas Website, July 2008. See: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Rinckart.htm.

[4] Rinkart, Martin, “Now Thank We All Our God,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: UUA and Beacon Press, 1993) #32. Poulton says the Biblical inspiration for these words was Ecclesiasticus, Chapter 50, verse 22-24.

[5] “In Praise of Gratitude,” Harvard Mental Health Letter, Harvard Health Publications: Harvard Medical School, November 1, 2011. See: http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/in-praise-of-gratitude. Emmons’ and McCullough’s findings were originally published in Emmons, R. A. & McCullough, M.E., “Counted Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2003; 84: 377–389.

[6] Reviews of recent psychological studies on gratitude are at the following websites: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010965/

http://www.professional-counselling.com/support-files/gratitude-and-psychological-well-being.pdf

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/pdfs/GratitudePDFs/2Wood-GratitudeWell-BeingReview.pdf

[7] Steindl-Rast, David, “Want to be Happy? Be Grateful.” TED Talk, June, 2013. See: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful?language=en

[8] Check out http://www.gratefulness.org/.

[9] Check out http://www.gratefulness.org/resource/basic-daily-gratefulness-practice/.

[10] Merwin, W. S., “Thanks, Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). See: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/thanks.

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Something Simpler Than I Could Ever Believe

11/20/11 by

Rev. Joshua M. Pawelek

Friends, once again, we arrive in the brown season, a season between seasons, the time before winter. As we sang, “Now light is less …. The haze of harvest drifts across the field …. The walker trudges ankle deep in leaves …. The blood slows trance-like in the altered vein; our vernal wisdom moves from ripe to sere.”[1] Words of the poet Theodore Roethke. Our vernal wisdom, our spring wisdom, our green wisdom, our buds blossoming on branches wisdom, our wisdom rooted in that annual March-April experience of rebirth and renewal—that wisdom moves now from ripe to sere. Sere, meaning dry, dried up, withered, cracked, bare, barren, threadbare, worn thin. We arrive in the brown season.

So many shades of brown: the last color of autumn before winter’s grey days and white snow; the endmost color of leaves; the color of empty fields; the color of dry grass; the color of “cornstalks finally bare”[2] and the remnants of apples in the far corners of orchards. Brown: the color of wheat gathered into sheaves and waiting; the color of pheasants gathering the fallen grain;[3] and my favorite, the color of pumpkins rotting on front steps, the light of their Halloween eyes long since extinguished, their once frightening faces now slowly, even comically, sinking into themselves. Brown: the color of soil, the color of dirt, the color of earth. After autumn’s beauty has shown forth, after its grandeur has lifted our spirits and taken our breath one final time, after its fanfare has inspired us one final time, it all gives way to dark, brown earth. No more pageantry. No more glory. Only dry brown leaves decaying on floors of New England woods, settling into dust and dirt, growing silent, growing still, growing receptive; receiving the cold; receiving the first, tentative snows; receiving the lengthening nights; settling down; becoming part and parcel of the dark, brown earth.

Yes, the sun does rise and shine in this season and we will see it as long as we hold our gaze in a southward direction. Yes, the blue sky does present itself in this season and we will see it if we are patient. But the prevailing color, especially the color of the land, the prevailing hue, the prevailing feeling is brown. Life moves now from ripe to sere.

The poet W.S. Merwin writes, “In the morning as the storm begins to blow away / the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me / that there has been something simpler than I could ever / believe / simpler than I could have begun to find words for.”[4] If I may grossly reduce these lines to a cliché, he’s talking about his experience—and I read it as a mystical, spiritual experience—of the calm after the storm. After the winds, after the rains, after the thunder and the lightening, after all the tumult—there in the breaking day, in the clear sky he encounters “something simpler than I could ever believe.” He doesn’t name this something other than to say it is “no more hidden / than the air itself that became part of me for a while / with every breath and remained with me unnoticed / something that was here unnamed unknown in the days / and the nights not separate from them.”[5]

The poet doesn’t name this something—he doesn’t know its name—but at the risk of answering a question that isn’t seeking to be fully answered, perhaps this something is Earth’s sheer beauty, or Nature’s awesome force and Her equally awesome gentleness, or the vastness of the universe, or the smallness of human beings in that vastness. Perhaps for a fleeting moment the poet grasps his connectedness to the whole of life—“the air that became a part of me for a while with every breath”[6]—or perhaps for a fleeting moment the poet grasps the sacredness of life, or the movement of a Holy Spirit, or the love of a loving God, or the designs of a Goddess overflowing with creative energy. No matter what it is, no matter what its name is, he knows it is here, it is present. That is his experience. He says, essentially, it has been here all along, though often unnoticed, unnamed and unknown, and it is “simpler than I could ever believe.” He wants to know its name. He asks, “By what name can I address it now?” Why? Because he is holding out his thanks.[7] He wants to say “thank you.” Somehow this something simpler than he could ever believe generates a feeling of gratitude in him. In a different context he might shout, “Hallelujah!”

This brown season, this season between seasons, more than any other is spiritually akin to the calm after the storm. This brown season is so unlike blissful, joyful spring’s planting and birthing; so unlike clamoring, raucous summer’s growing and ripening; so unlike glorious, celebratory autumn’s abundance and harvest. This brown season, this bare and barren and threadbare season, this sere season, this season of the birds departing for warmer climes, this season of so much life returning to the earth, this season of decay, this empty season is so different from the tumult and the glory and the pageantry that precedes it. In this season the trees strip down to their bark; the farmland and the pastures strip down to their dirt; the red, orange and yellow leaves fade down to brown; the once proud stalks and vines and grasses lose their green, lose their moisture, dry out, bend or crack, and lie down with the fallen leaves, returning slowly to the earth. As the cold increases a new quiet pervades, a deep stillness rises, much like the calm after the storm.

In this brown season may we allow ourselves, like the trees, to strip down to our bark, to reveal our true selves, to remove all pretense, to hide nothing—no more colorful masks, no more splendid costumes—not in this season. Just our true selves, our real selves, our essential selves. No more holding our tongues when we ought to speak up, no more denials that compromise our values, no more shadings of the truth, no more unreasonable contortions for the sake of pleasing others. Just ourselves, stripped down to our bark—simpler than we could ever believe.

In this brown season may we allow ourselves, like the farmland and the pastures, to strip down to our dirt, to strip down to the ground in which we are rooted, to strip down to that which holds us, to that which nurtures and nourishes us, to that which, when the springtime comes, will cause us to grow and bear fruit; to strip down to that without which we would not be ourselves; to strip down to that without which we could not survive; to strip down to that without which we would lose all sense of meaning and purpose. Just ourselves, stripped down to our dirt, to that which holds us—simpler than we could ever believe.

In this brown season may we allow ourselves, like the majestic autumn leaves, to fade down to brown; to let the cycles of life be the cycles of life; to move and flow with Nature, not against her; to accept life as it comes and as it is, rather than force it into some shape, some pattern, some color whose time is over. Just ourselves, fading down to brown—simpler than we could ever believe.

In this brown season may we allow ourselves, like the once proud stalks and vines and grasses now losing their moisture, to lie down with the fallen leaves, so that we may remember and know and trust our oneness with the dark, brown earth; so that we may remember and know and trust our origins in the dark, brown earth; so that we may remember and know and trust that some day we too shall return to the dark, brown earth; so that we may be mindful of our ancestors, mindful of so many generations of human beings and their precursors who lived as one with the dark, brown earth and who, in their own time, returned to the dark, brown earth; so that we may be mindful of their gods and goddesses who were also one with the dark, brown earth; their divine names and their divine powers perhaps forgotten, but their spirit still infused in the dust and muck of the dark, brown earth. Just ourselves, laying down with the fallen leaves—simpler than we could ever believe.

In this brown season, as the cold increases, as a new quiet pervades, as a deep stillness rises, may we sense, feel, intuit, grasp, perceive, know, imagine, dream the presence of something simpler than we could ever believe—something simpler than any words we might find, something emerging from the time before words, emerging at once from some place within us and someplace beyond us where words aren’t necessary, something that has always been there, that has always been present, no more hidden than the air, something with us but unnoticed, something potent but unnamed, something abiding but unknown, something, as the poet says, “in the days and the nights not separate from them / not separate from them as they came and were gone,”[8] something essential, something sustaining, something nourishing, something holy, something sacred, something of the earth’s sheer beauty, or something of Nature’s awesome power and her awesome gentleness, or something of the vastness of the universe, or something of the smallness of human beings in that vastness, or something of our connectedness to the whole of life, or something of a Holy Spirit, or something of a loving God, or something of a Goddess overflowing with creative energy, or something that is felt more than spoken, something that moves up and down our spines but never quite comes to mind, something of the heart that ultimately defies naming—something simpler than we could ever believe, but right here, with us, now.

May we come close to that simple something in this brown season and be filled with gratitude for the blessings of our lives, whatever they may be. May we come close to that simple something in this brown season and hold out our thanks. May we come close to that simple something in this brown season and mouth the words, “thank you.” As “the haze of harvest drifts across the field,”[9] thank you. As “the walker trudges ankle deep in leaves,”[10] thank you. As our vernal wisdom moves from ripe to sere,”[11] thank you. As the trees strip down to their bark, thank you. As the land strips down to its dirt, thank you. As the pheasants gather in the fallen grain,[12] thank you. As apples brown in the far corners of orchards and Halloween pumpkins rot on front steps, thank you. As dry, brown leaves decay on floors of New England woods and once proud stalks and vines and grasses join them, returning to dirt and dust and muck, thank you. As the cold increases, as a new quiet pervades, as a deep stillness rises and we come close to that simple something, thank you.

Thank you for this gift of life—this unimaginable, improbable gift of life—this life that contains so much joy and pleasure, so much pain and suffering—this exquisite life, this fragile life that is also resilient; this fleeting life that is also full; this fated life that is also free. This life—this one life we know we have—may we live it well.

And thank you for this gift of time—this unimaginable, improbable gift of time—this precious time, this sweet time, this fantastic time; our far-too-brief time upon this earth.  May we spend this time well.

And thank you for all that sustains us in this life, in this time—our families, our friends, our lovers, our partners, our neighbors, our mentors, our colleagues, and all those who serve in some way; the fields, the farms, the orchards that yield a bountiful harvest, the animals whose flesh becomes meat, the reservoirs that hold and give water, the green life that yields oxygen; the poets, the singers, the dancers, the artists, the writers, the preachers, the philosophers, the teachers, the healers—all those whose life-work and vision touch our hearts and our souls and make us whole; the inner resources we find when there is nothing else, the inner strength, the patience, the endurance, the persistence, the faith, the trust, the will to meet whatever challenges we must meet. May we use these sustaining resources well.

Friends, once again, we arrive in the brown season, a season between seasons, the time before winter. On this day of arrival, no matter what forces conspire to keep us distant from the earth, callous towards the earth, fearful of the earth and all its wild things; no matter what forces conspire to instill in us a desire to keep our hands clean, let us find some way to embrace the dark, brown earth; let us find some way to touch the dark, brown earth; let us find some way to offer thanks to the dark, brown earth; let us find some way to work and play in the dark, brown earth. Let us find some way to love the dark, brown earth. And let us come close to that something simpler than we could ever believe.

Thank you dark, brown earth. Thank you.

Amen and Blessed.

[1] Roethke, Theodore, “Now Light Is Less” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the UUA, 1993) #54.

[2] Ungar, Lynn, “Thanksgiving,” Blessing the Bread (Boston: Skinner House, 1996) p. 13.

[3] Ungar, “Thanksgiving,” p. 13.

[4]Merwin, W. S., “Just Now,” in Keillor, Garrison, ed., Good Poems for Hard Times (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) p. 289.

[5] Merwin, “Just Now,” p. 289.

[6] Merwin, “Just Now,” p. 289.

[7] Merwin, “Just Now,” p. 289.

[8]Merwin, “Just Now,” p. 289.

[9] Roethke, Theodore, “Now Light Is Less,” #54.

[10] Roethke, Theodore, “Now Light Is Less,” #54.

[11] Roethke, Theodore, “Now Light Is Less,” #54.

[12] Ungar, “Thanksgiving,” p. 13.

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