Gratitude for Abundance

October 20, 2024

Opening Words from Service Associate Colleen Good

Today’s service is about gratitude and abundance – which I can’t say for sure, but I think Oprah Winfrey may have been one of the instrumental and original influencers in highlighting the concept and preaching to the masses (in her secular fashion – on daytime tv) of the power of gratitude.

I loved Oprah – and while I don’t know if I can attribute my daily practice and general outlook of gratitude and belief in abundance to her solely – I know gratitude has made my life so much richer and abundant than it would have been without it. When thinking about UCM, I have so much to be grateful for – I am thankful for :

  • That window and that tree – the colourful leaves, bare branches, growing buds and green spring foliage that I’ve watched over many seasons in my life at UCM.
  • The music played by Abigail and other guest musicians; the melodies and harmonies of our UCM choir and especially for the times when our congregation joins in, singing and smiling and swaying together even when we/I can’t quite reach that high note together.
  • The art that is displayed around the Great Hall that makes me think of our connection to beauty and how we all see and express our place and life experiences in our own unique ways.
  • Worship services that offer times of reflection; words of inspiration and challenge; and reminders of the importance of UCM’s unique space.

We are committed to walking through life together – thinking about our little corner of the world but also on the influence and impact we have on the larger world.

I am most grateful that Unitarian Universalism calls me to remain open to learning from our diversity of paths and beliefs; listening with heart and openness to having my perspectives on what it means to live a good life; live a connected, courageous, compassionate and curious life be influenced by other worldviews, by others without othering. UU helps me stay grounded, stay hopeful and stay connected. For all of this and more I am thankful for UCM.

Sermon from Rev. Rita Capezzi

Almost 20 years ago, my family housed for a year two teenaged siblings whose mother had been deported. The circumstances were challenging, with a lot of emotional pain. We had to learn how to live together with the challenges and the pain, along with the unfamiliarity and the uncertainty. How long would this last, a situation both terrible with loss and weighty with love? It was complex, with adults trying to care for teens who had their own parents and longed for them. It was complicated, with teens who had always been the youngest ones in their family trying to be big sister and brother to our own younger ones. It was bewildering, with children navigating the meaning for their lives of having new family members who did not arrive as babies and would not stay for long.

My spouse and I had not trained as foster parents, and we were making it up as we went along.

One thing this situation wasn’t was a financial burden. Two more people to feed, growing people no less, active and athletic. More heat and electric expended, with another full floor of the house pumping morning, noon, and night. So much water!—Extra loads of laundry and lots more showers. Two more birthdays. Two more sets of Christmas gifts. Many more trips in the car to school and sporting events, seemingly always in opposite directions. And of all the feelings I felt, I never felt, never once felt, that we did not have enough money for all of this “extra.”

Our source of income was exactly the same that year as it had been the year before. Exactly the same as the year before when I had worked up a budget and fretted over how I would cover all the payments and put away the savings and manage the debt service. I had developed spreadsheets and projections and calculations to keep us on track. I had saved receipts and organized expenses into needs and wants, essentials and extras. I always felt like I was chasing money, trying to find enough, trying to find more, always feeling the looming dread of scarcity, never enough no matter how much. What was it that was so different the year the teenagers lived with us?

Before I get there, let’s think some more about this idea, this fear of scarcity. Modern capitalistic economics operates by a notion of scarcity. Money is scarce, and so it must be hoarded. Time is scarce, and so all moments need to be grasped and tightly held. We are invited to be in competition with one another: “He who dies with the most toys wins,” after all. Keeping up with the Jones. Even keeping very private about what you have or what you don’t have locates us firmly in this money-as-scarce sense of economy. If I make less, I will look weak. If I make more, I will look greedy. If I talk about what I have, I might make someone else feel bad about what they don’t have.

Yet in Western societies like the US and Canada, our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.

So very many two member families with two automobiles, or more. So many of us live a stone’s throw from our neighbors, and we all have our own lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, weed whackers, gardening tools, watering hoses. We live within a few miles of family or close friends, and we each have our own crockpots, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and food processors. We possess stacks of napkins and plates and glasses. And when I say “we,” believe me, I am saying “I.” And of course, the industries-wide planned obsolescence of our appliances, laptop computers, and cell phone keeps us both hungry for the latest and needfully returning for more. Hungry, returning for more that’s the way a cellphone, rather than a book, works. The duplication and multiplication show us we all participate in this over abundant accumulation, and we call it many names—independence, security, status, “making it,” living the dream. We call it happiness, except that too soon the feeling fades, and we buy more to fill the void of feeling saturating our overstuffed spaces and lives.

About all of this consumption and scarcity, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, in her article “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” a cautionary tale for us: “Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil.” We accumulate manufactured things of metal and plastic—all created through extraction from the earth, all created at the expense of the earth, and much feeding an addiction to what can never truly nurture or nourish our minds, bodies, and spirits. Kimmerer goes on to say that:

“Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle, genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy.”

Earth is torn open for the metals creating automobile frames and microchips. Earth is scrapped and sucked at for the carbons of long dead life to create plastic sheeting and Happy Meal toys. Earth is shaved and uprooted for toilet paper and wrapping paper and newspaper and the paper from which I read this morning. The air and the water are awash with pollutants, and we dig more holes to put the wastes in, or float those wastes out on ocean currents where no human person has to look at them. We create landscapes of trash that support, in some countries I have visited and maybe you have, too, whole communities of the most impoverished and oppressed of our siblings. Our human actions have wrought a wasteland, and still we want more. Still, we live within a mindset that nothing is ever enough. What might be a remedy, for the mess and for the want?

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of the serviceberry offers a remedy for us, a way to move from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset, a way to see cooperation and reciprocity in life, rather than brutal competition. She offers a way to see us al —all the humans and the earth and the beings—as in relationship rather than in competition. Nature is not a “dog eat dog” world. It is not one individual unleashed against another. That is a human mindset that we have learned. We can unlearn it. We can see that everything relies on everything else, that the web itself, the Earth and all upon and within her, is an organism of mutuality. When we thrive with each other rather than against each other, we all thrive. For Kimmerer, the serviceberry is the microcosm that tells the whole story. “Serviceberry,” she tells us, “is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed and that the shad are running upstream—or at least it was back in the day, when rivers were clear and free enough to support their spawning.”

The plant acts as all nature acts, providing myriad goods and services to humans and to the plants, the animals, even the soil in which it grows.

Kimmerer tells us that “In Potawatomi,” serviceberry “is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries.” For her, “the most important part of the word Bozakmin is ‘min,’ the root for ‘berry.’” “Min,” berry, she teaches us, is also “the root word for ‘gift.’” Kimmerer invites us to see common berries as Earth’s gifts to us and thus to change, through the words we use, our relationship to the berries, and more. She writes, “In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can’t help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hand, and breathe out my gratitude.”

Why is it so important to think in terms of “gifts” rather than things or commodities? For Kimmerer, it is because we live more deeply into gratitude. “Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.” In a gift economy, our needs begin to condition our wants. Our hunger, our sense of scarcity fades when we live in gratitude for the gift of life and the gifts of living in relationship. A gift economy rather than a scarcity economy, as Kimmerer says, has “the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.”

By living from the perspective of a gift economy, Kimmerer says, “we might back away from the grinding market economy that reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning, which can never be commoditized.” In such a system, money can restore the balance of needs and wants, quenching the craving for the commodity food empty of nurture and nourishment. The gift economy, in Kimmerer’s words, is “a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else,” “where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared.”

So, what was it that was so different the year the teenagers lived with us? We met the needs of our family without poisoning the needs of another family. We gave our money, our time, our space as gifts, and we were gifted in return with kindness and patience.

If the lessons had not been so hard, I might not have learned that we had not provided charity that year, but rather we exchanged gifts, we gained relationship, relationship that has now lasted years, through physical distance, the birth of many children, and much change. The next year, when the teens returned to family origins, it was financially hard again. The lessons of gratitude and reciprocity had re-appeared. It took time to deeply change our ways. Re-using more, slowing down accumulation, sharing more. We’ve learned to leverage the wealth the current system affords us from our privilege, and continue to give back, our hands full with serviceberries that we might be better relatives, healing ourselves and healing the world. We continue to learn and will continue, for the forces are mighty that would pull us back into the maw of scarcity-thinking.

May we together make a commitment to be the sweet serviceberries, the best of berries, to each other and to this community. May we give with gratitude to what supports our mutual thriving, in a balance that values all gifts. And may we raise thanks and praise for the gift of all that is our life, each of our lives mysteriously given by the evolutionary processes of the universe, intricate and beautiful processes of chemistry and biology and physics and consciousness culminating in the shining, sweet berries that each of you are. May you rejoice in your sweetness and give your sweetness freely as a gift, a gift we all need, connected for the mutual good of ourselves and our neighbors, all our relatives. May it ever be so.

Emergence Magazine, an initiative of Kalliopeia Foundation© 2021 Emergence Magazine The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer (emergencemagazine.org)

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