November 2005

Quest Archives

Contents

• Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving BY JENNIFER YOUNGSUN RYU
• Out From Walden BY REV. PATRICK T. O'NEILL
• Planned Giving Program BY ALICIA McNARY FORSEY
• Online Courses
• I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder BY MARY FEAGAN
• Who Gets to Be Right? BY JANE RZEPKA
• REsources For Living BY LYNN UNGAR
• Palouse Thanksgiving BY LYNN UNGAR

Quest Archives
Quest Submission Guidelines

Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving

BY JENNIFER YOUNGSUN RYU, CANDIDATE FOR THE MINISTRY

My brother and I still tease our mom about the Turkey Loaf. The Turkey Loaf was a lonely clump of assorted turkey parts pressed into a loaf shape and sold in the frozen meat aisle. My family immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s, when I was about 6 years old, so we weren't quite sure how to celebrate this foreign holiday. Our childhood Thanksgiving meals included the turkey loaf, rice, and kimchi, that infamous Korean pickled cabbage dish.

It's funny to me now, and kind of sweet, as I look back at those days through the long and rosy lens of time. But if you had met me then, you would have seen one grumpy child. My Korean mother tried to make an American Thanksgiving for us. But it never looked like the pictures I saw in my elementary school. There, I saw photos of happy extended families gathered around a golden brown turkey, beautifully dressed on a huge platter at the center of the table. Side dishes overflowing with potatoes and cranberries surrounded the great bird.

I looked around our small Formica table and instead of three generations, I just saw just three other people. At the center of our table, no great bird, but the turkey loaf, still in its aluminum pan. My father led us in prayer. I knew I should be thankful for all I had. I knew I was blessed to have a family to love me, a house to warm me, and food to nourish me, but I could think only of my own disappointment.

No, I could not let Thanksgiving in.

I was the only non-white student in my elementary school in Toledo, Ohio. Kids made fun of the way I looked. I felt so out of place. I missed my grandmother and cousins, who were in Korea. If we were still there, we would be celebrating the harvest season of Chusuk. Colorful rice cakes would be stacked into pyramids on wooden platters. Multitudes of cousins, aunts and uncles would flow in and out all day long. And there would be an endless parade of children to play with.

As my father closed his prayer with "Amen," I clenched my little hands around my sadness and refused to let Thanksgiving in.

I know that many, many of you are joyful on Thanksgiving and you welcome it with a gracious heart. I wonder, though, if others of you are feeling a little less than grateful today. Sometimes it feels like this holiday insists that we ought to feel a certain way. That our hearts should blossom with thankfulness. But what if thankfulness seems distant and unattainable?

This holiday, someone's life feels heavy with burden and worry, stress and pressure. This holiday, someone is negotiating first families and second families and ex-in-laws who don't want to be in the same room together.

This holiday, someone is remembering the last Thanksgiving they spent with their spouse, who has since died.

This holiday, someone is feeling deep grief about the oppression of the native people of America and will mark this day as a National Day of Mourning.

This holiday, someone will spend their day alone.

This holiday, someone is missing their child who is spending this Thanksgiving in Iraq.

Even when sorrows such as these visit their lives, many people are still able to sing songs of praise and thanks.

However, if you open your heart and only songs of sadness come out, go ahead and sing that song. Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies invites us to let the heart be open to pain when he writes, "let it be stretched by it…because an open heart never grows bitter, or if it does, it cannot remain so."

Author James Carse, in his Meditations on Prayer, tells us that speaking from the heart is to ask and to receive at the same time. Asking and receiving are inseparable. Because whenever you speak to anyone (including God) from your truest, most unguarded place, the very act of asking involves receiving the other into your heart.

Last month, a friend of mine was groaning in dread for the approaching holidays. She is single and her entire family lives on the East Coast. And even though she has many friends, during the days of fa-la-la and ho-ho-ho she tends to get depressed and lonely. This year, she decided to direct her energies outward and became involved with the Volunteer Center, a local agency that matches volunteers with communities in need.

She realized that most of her sadness was self-pity rather than grief. Self-pity separates us from the rest of humanity. Grief, on the other hand, unites us with our community and binds us in a universal experience of the profound loss of love.

As a second-grader staring at the Turkey Loaf, I was definitely feeling self-pity. My heart was consumed by thoughts that life was unfair only to me, and that every other child's face was being warmed by the glow of a real turkey. All I could see was that which was lacking, that which was missing. I saw limits. I saw flaws. And from that vantage, the world looked small and unfriendly.

As I grew older, I began to believe that whether I felt it or not, a fundamental truth about life is its abundance. I learned to turn my heart toward the inexhaustible beauty of nature, toward the unfailing love of my family, toward the abiding love of what I call God.

I learned to be grateful for my in-between identity as a Korean-born American and even for that silly turkey loaf. And after many years, my mother did learn how to bake a perfect golden-brown turkey.

May you always be able to find the gratitude which enables you to receive blessings from the eternal spirit of life.

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

Out From Walden

BY REV. PATRICK T. O'NEILL, DELIVERED AT THE SERVICE OF THE LIVING TRADITION, AT THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UUA, FORT WORTH, TEXAS, JUNE 24, 2005

It has been the nature of our Church and its ministry from time immemorial to wrestle with a kind of schizoid tendency to shift back and forth between full-blown retreat from the world on the one hand—offering itself as sanctuary and refuge from the world—and full-blown engagement and confrontation with the world on the other hand. The Church as comforter of our afflictions, haven in our struggles, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Church as afflicter of our comfort and poker of our conscience; as righteous prophet demanding our efforts to mend what is broken in the world; to heal what is wounded in our communities; to hold gently the sorrows and to address lovingly the pain of those perennially left out on the margins of society.

Perhaps no one figure in our history more personally incarnates the push and pull of our Unitarian Universalist dance between retreat and engagement with the world than our beloved idealist, Henry David Thoreau. In his intentional withdrawal from society into the woods of Walden Pond for two years, Thoreau appeals to one very deep historic strain of UU sensibility, while his great essay "Civil Disobedience" and his willingness to be jailed as an anti-war and abolitionist tax protester makes him a hero in another chamber of the Unitarian Universalist heart.

This evening, as we ponder the sum and substance of our Living Tradition, it is to Thoreau's life and writings that we might profitably turn for one source of inspiration and illumination. In his relatively short life—Thoreau died at age 45, remember—he penned a personal journal of some two million words explaining both the idealistic principles that he went into the woods to discover and to ponder, but also, lest we forget, the demands of a highly developed moral conscience that eventually called him out of the woods to actively engage in abolitionist confrontation with his
society.

When he moved into his rough-hewn cabin on Walden Pond on the outskirts of Concord on the Fourth of July, 1845, Thoreau wrote his immortal apologia for retreating into the sanctuary of natural surroundings far from the madding crowd:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

When Thoreau came out from Walden two years later in 1847, he wrote:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spend any more time for that one.

It was not until seven years after he left the woods that Thoreau finally published Walden to great acclaim. But in the years in between his leaving the woods and publishing his famous account of why he went there, it was his essay "Civil Disobedience" which gained his reputation. After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1851, much of Henry's time and thought went to the work of abolitionism, involvement in Underground Railroad activity, and lecturing on "Slavery in Massachusetts." When the rabid abolitionist John Brown visited Concord in 1857, Thoreau was among the Transcendentalist circle that first welcomed him and helped promote Brown's "radical chic" notoriety in the face of the federal government's continued cooption by the system, of both North and South, that maintained Slavery as an institution.

While he never lost his vocation as a naturalist and botanist, neither did Thoreau ever lose his prophetic idealism for the great justice issues of his day. His spirituality, nurtured in periods of pensive solitude and in his daily ramblings in the countryside, was what eventually formed Henry's fierce moral conscience, a conscience always unafraid to speak truth to power, to take a stand for principle, to name the evils that afflicted his day. What a powerful icon he remains, what a shining example for what we in the Free Church might aspire to in our own time!

Alas, it has been suggested by some that, over the last twenty or thirty years now, liberal religion itself has been in something of a Waldenesque retreat from effective activist engagement in the crucial moral struggles of our time. More and more of our churches moved out from our great urban centers and relocated themselves quite literally into the exurban woods and fields, the better to serve the majority of a membership that consequently remains overwhelmingly white, middle-to-upper class, and educationally elite. It has been suggested by some that we in the liberal church tradition have been too long enamored of the ideal of Thoreauvian retreat from the mix and mess of the world, and that we have been too little mindful of Thoreau's later example of conscientiously speaking up, speaking out, acting up, and acting out on behalf of the causes of righteousness in our culture.

It is said by some critics that liberal religion has seemed to lose much of its volume, if not its voice altogether, if not its way altogether, in abandoning its righteous indignation in the face of social and moral causes that once would have lit up our pulpits in moral outrage. The charge has been leveled that liberal religion has gone all but mute on behalf of causes that once (at least we like to think) would have pulled our people out of the pews, put their feet in motion, and put their hands to work reclaiming the proper contours of that ancient city on the hill—the one we once imagined, that dreamt-of society where racism, economic injustice, and warmongering are named for the blights that they are upon the human soul.

Dare we hope to find again, in this newest generation of ministers, preachers who burn with unapologetic indignation on behalf of equal opportunity, equal education, equal health care, decent housing for everyone, the equal right of every person to marry whomever they love, and the right of every woman to be the sole decider of what happens to her body? Dare we look to you newest ministers of our Living Tradition for preaching and teaching that will pour concrete foundations under the moral arguments for a just society, for a world at peace?

For these are moral human issues before ever they are social policies, no matter what party is in power, no matter who happens to be sitting in the White House or sitting in Congress or sitting on the Supreme Court. Our ministry has no moral right not to speak to these issues, no matter whom we might offend or make uncomfortable in our pews! Whether such preaching grows our membership or not, whether it is effective institutional strategy for our Association or not, these are the issues that will always determine the health and integrity of liberal religion, or what's a pulpit for?

What's a pulpit for?

Tonight, as we speak, for example, from our privileged place in the midst of an almost obscenely wealthy nation, it is simply shameful, a moral travesty, that upwards of thirty million children under the age of fifteen in America have no medical insurance.

We should rush home from this General Assembly and carve the words, "Leave No Child Behind" into every pulpit in the UUA, until we take that sacred phrase back from those who now use it as a sarcastic euphemism and give it back to Marion Wright Edelman who knows how to live it and mean it! If we're looking to reclaim our pulpit fire, here's one place to start!

To you new colleagues who are the focus for this service, who tonight are officially invested at the beginning of your ministries, oh, how we welcome you! And how we need you to take up your work with passion and the determination to make your mark! For, Brothers and Sisters, I come to announce to you some rather alarming news tonight: in case you haven't yet noticed, Walden is burning! The woods, our beloved woods, are on fire! Our Eden, our idyllic retreat, our sylvan sanctuary from the mundane cares of the world, Eden is ablaze tonight!

Every one of you who dons the stole of ministerial office tonight is hereby called to action. All idyllic weekend passes are hereby cancelled, and you are to report immediately to these pulpits, or to the community agencies that you serve, to your chaplaincies, to the classrooms where you teach, to the communities where your voice is respected, where your leadership is counted upon. Walden, our beloved liberal religious haven from the world, Walden is on fire! And it is time for more Unitarian Universalists to catch fire too.

I cannot urge you enough, if you take up the ministry at this point in our history, my colleagues, be aware: do not take on this mantle merely to save your own soul. Rather, we need you to become ministers, as the poet urges, to spend your souls, spend them lavishly and wantonly in service to the world. I entreat you, do not use your trusted office to take refuge while the world around you is going to hell. Do not employ your preaching talents to give comfort to the already too comfortable.

We do not need in our pulpits at this point in our history any more retreatants. Or dilettante scholars. Or idle poets. I implore you, do not seek here amid these thousand-plus congregations for ministries of quietude, or for more churches in the woods, where you can take shelter in theological reverie while the social policies of our country are increasingly determined to protect the already privileged and to ignore the already deprived. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep—but you, we, all of us who wear the stole—have promises to keep! The liberal ministry of our time needs ministers with fire in the belly, fire in the eye, and fire in the heart. So ignite, my new colleagues, I beseech you! Catch fire! Or better for your souls and for ours that you should never put on the stole at all.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that he kept a dog-eared copy of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in his car, and he memorized long passages from it to pass his time in jail. "I read Thoreau's words," he said, "to center my spirit and to re-find my purpose, and then my courage is restored and my vision is again made clear." Would that we learn to do the same with but a portion of his courage and his effectiveness!

We have a prayer for you this night, you duly fellowshipped colleagues taking up your ancient calling, a calling that will cost you everything you have, a profession that will humble you, that will break your hearts even as it gives meaning and purpose to your lives. We have a prayer for you as you assume your earned place in the line of Channing and Murray and Ballou and Brown, the line of Parker and Priestley, the line of Joseph Tuckerman, the line of the Iowa Sisterhood, the line of Safford and Gordon and Blackwell, of Helvie and Padgham, the line of Lewis McGee, of Fahs and Holmes and Skinner and Davies, the line of Jim Adams, the line of David Osborn and a thousand other ministers before you, most of them unfamous and uncelebrated, all the saints whose good lives once gave sheen and luster to this heritage and whose spirits fill this hall tonight to applaud with us as you walk across this stage. Our prayer is in the hymn, "Rank by Rank" which ushered you in this evening, as it has ushered in new ministers to this service for year upon year—what they dreamed be yours to do!

May your fire bring us out, dear colleagues, lead us out from the safe Waldens where liberal religion has been too long in hiding, too long asleep, too long comfortable and complacent! Lead us out! Lead us!

Remember, and never let anyone forget, that you are not ordained to become just some under-glorified business manager of a local religious franchise, measuring your ministry's worth in numbers or in bottom lines. And your churches' role and function is never merely to serve as just another perennially under-funded non-profit agency in town. The Church's reason for being is to make real the Beloved Community on earth, nothing less. And your office, in all its varied forms, exists to embody the work of that ideal, nothing less.

The covenant, the covenant, the covenant, UU theologian James Luther Adams insisted, is the great glowing coal at the heart of our Free Church tradition. Preach the covenant, binding us one with another and with our God.

Preach the covenant then, first and last, binding us as one with the world beyond our walls, in all its woundedness and imperfection.

Preach the covenant, binding us, yes! to Channing's faith and to Murray 's dream, to Theodore's fire, and to Olympia 's courage; binding us, binding us always, to Jim Reeb's immortal heart.

Preach to us the covenant bravely and fearlessly, my new colleagues, and in your preaching know that you will be forever blessed in the sight of that which causes the sparrow to fly and the lilies of the field to bloom. Preach the covenant, binding us with the Sacred Center of life: whose love is finally our only doctrine, whose quest for truth remains our precious sacrament, and whose service is evermore our fervent and lasting prayer.

This sermon inspired a lot of conversation amongst people who heard it at General Assembly. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our sermon discussion bulletin board.

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

Planned Giving Program

BY ALICIA McNARY FORSEY, MEMBER OF THE CLF BOARD

The board of directors of the Church of the Larger Fellowship has adopted a Planned Giving Program. Directors understand that building an endowment is the best way to ensure that the Church of the Larger Fellowship will be able to serve future generations of Unitarian Universalists.

The joys of making a planned gift are many:

• You will find ways to earn good income on your investments.
• You may find ways to save tax dollars.
• You can become more intentional about the use of your resources, and receive heartfelt thanks for your generosity while you are around to receive it!
• Here are a few of the ways you can make a planned gift:
• Bequests by will, outright gift, or in trust
• Pooled Income Fund
• Charitable Annuity Trusts
• Charitable Remainder Unitrusts
• Life Estates

The Church of the Larger Fellowship works in collaboration with the Unitarian Universalist Association in most cases. If you would like detailed information about the program, please contact Alicia McNary Forsey. She can answer most of your questions, and can be reached via e-mail at aforsey@clfuu.org.

If you have already remembered the Church of the Larger Fellowship in your will or other estate plan, please let Alicia know.

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

Online Courses

The CLF is proud to announce an exciting line-up of online courses. Using our education site, www.uurgl.com/learn, class participants will be able to read material, answer questions, read and respond to posts from classmates and generally learn and explore with UUs around the world.

Starting November 1st:
Reading the Bible Through UU Eyes, taught by CLF ministerial intern Paul Sprecher, runs eight weeks.

The Bible is frequently used to support particular political or religious agendas these days. Is it really true that the Bible denounces homosexuality? How about the claim that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments? Does the Bible say that UUs will all be left behind when the Rapture comes? This course will introduce the Bible as an important historical, literary, and sacred document. It will provide an overview of the Bible as a whole from a UU
perspective.

Starting January 23rd:
deMystifying Meditation, taught by Rev. Wayne Walder, runs eight weeks.

This is an exciting and challenging adult curriculum designed to teach jargon-free meditation to people of different religious backgrounds and understandings. Unitarian Universalism is noted for its liberal approach to religion in the contemporary world, so we felt it was time to develop a UU meditation practice. If you are a beginner or an intermediate student of meditation, come and enjoy this sensual discovery of the spiritual self through lyric, music and contemporary language. It will teach us how to meditate as well as helping us understand spirituality in the context of our faith's relationship to the secular culture. There will be a $40 fee for this class.

Please take a look at our website (www.clfuu.org) under the Religious Education menu to sign up or to read about other upcoming classes.

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder

I am a millions-of-years-old wonder.

I am an international – no, cosmic – treasure.

I ought to be safeguarded in a museum somewhere like Paganini's old violin. I ought to be gasped at, talked about in hushed, amazed, reverential tones. Viewers would touch me gently and feel lucky.

Daily newspaper headlines could say, "Mary Feagan Exists Again Today!" Radio and TV shows could discuss me, my ordinary events—that I saw a bluebird with my millions-of-years-old eyes and heard it sing with my highly advanced, evolutionary ears; that my graceful hands with opposable thumbs fed my sensitive mouth delicious strawberries that it tasted.

Then, without a conscious thought, my brilliant brain directed my masterful, complex digestive system to assimilate and use them for fuel to wash dishes, write poems, hold babies, laugh, and give kisses.

No one would completely understand or dare to finally say how my marvelous magical, famous, fine self exists, really.

I am just, bottom line, a millions-of-years-old wonder. You are too.

by Mary Feagan, from For All That Is Our Life , Gene and Helen Pickett, eds. Available from the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150) or from the UUA bookstore (www.uua.org/bookstore or 800-215-9076).

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

Who Gets to Be Right?

BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP

Depending on where you are from and the people your family liked to spend time with, as a child you may have spent Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons listening to groups of adults who were Lebanese cab drivers, or Yankee potato farmers, or Socialist Jews from New York City, or entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. Maybe you grew up among Fundamentalist Christians.

I didn't, exactly. But I did grow up in rural Ohio, in a Mormon ("Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints") town, and our family was the one Unitarian family. I know this isn't what your encyclopedia will tell you, but in school, and on the street, and in Camp Fire Girls, and at basketball practice, and everywhere we went, we learned that the good guys established the settlement and the Kirtland temple. And in 1832 the bad guys tarred and feathered Joseph Smith and ran him out of town. That's how religion works. Simple as that.

Where I grew up, we didn't hear a word about respect for theological pluralism. There was no such thing as interfaith dialogue, or many paths to one truth, or anything like that. My friends all knew what Joseph Smith had said and they believed every word: "Truth is Mormonism. God is the author of it." In 1958 Rev. Phil Giles said, on behalf of the Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship, "The word ‘liberal' has been used constantly as a term of opprobrium, particularly since the rise of Neo-orthodoxy." From personal experience, I know that this is true.

Needless to say, for the most part I grew up among earnest, kind, committed people and I am left with a special fondness for the people back home. But like some of you, I do know what it's like to live among people—friends and neighbors—who understand themselves to have the one true viewpoint, for whom dialogue as equals is not a value, and whose belief system is, frankly, unthinkable to me.

Some people are absolutists. They believe they are appointed carriers of a sacred gospel. Those who take their faith to the extreme feel so sure they are right that they have no compunctions about doing anything to advance their cause. We saw the phenomenon in the Jewish fundamentalist, Yigal Amir, who claimed that God ordered him to kill Prime Minister Rabin. We have seen Muslim fundamentalists who are willing to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of innumerable others in the name of their religion. Some Hindus massacre Muslims and blow up their mosques. Some Christians feel they are serving God by murdering doctors who perform abortions. We see people doing what they believe is the Lord's work in religious conflicts all over the world.

Mostly though, the day to day experience of Unitarian Universalists living in local communities with members of conservative religious traditions involves not bullets or bombs but politics, both personal and on a grander scale.

You know the platform—it's a list that stands in sharp contrast with typical Unitarian Universalist beliefs. Religious conservatives often say they know that they should obey the word of God—as spoken to them— over and above the laws of the land. They say they know abortion is always wrong. They say they know that homosexuality is an abomination in God's sight. They say they know that capital punishment is a fitting punishment. They say they know the source of authority is scripture. In the United States, they say they know we should "return to our roots as a ‘Christian nation'," and then, with stunning irony, they cite as their bedfellows Unitarian and Deist names such as Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and John Adams.

So what are we going to do? I've heard it said a hundred times, "There's no talking to these people." But even if that were true, we have to. We just have to.

We start out knowing that we, ourselves, don't always agree. Sometimes I suppose we don't even make sense. We aren't at our best every single day, and it's not so hard to lose sight of the dignity and worth of the people around us. But still we have to talk. We have to speak up.

Even at the worst. At the risk of entering a world that we'd rather avoid, we have to try to talk. In the face of unfathomable arguments, we have to try to talk. At the risk of hate-based rhetoric, we have to try to talk. Publicly, enthusiastically, confidently, hopefully. To stand firm. Wherever we are, whoever
we are.

Me? I'm not that good at it. But still, there's hope. The town I grew up in? If I went back today, I could attend a Unitarian Universalist church right there in town. It's not too far from the Mormon Temple.

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

REsources For Living

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP

How do you say "thank you"? I know it's "gracias" in Spanish, "merci" in French, and "danke" in German. That about does it for my supply of languages, although I'm sure many of you could tell me others. But as we come up on the American holiday of Thanksgiving, I'm starting to think about ways that we say "thank you" other than just using the words (in whatever language).

Does your family have any special ways of showing thanks—on Thanksgiving or other days? Some families say grace before dinner, saying or singing special words to say thanks for the meal and for the chance to be together. In my family we sing, "Thank you for this food, this food, this glorious, glorious food, And the animals, and the vegetables, and the minerals that made it possible."

Sometimes I wonder about who the "you" is that we're saying thanks to. Some people believe that God gives life to us and the beings around us, and deserves thanks for giving us what we need. Some people believe that it is just nature—the plants and animals of the world which make it possible for us to live. Some people would say there's not much difference between the two, and that there is a spirit in all of us: plants, animals and people, that connects us in a W eb of L ife. Whatever you believe, or even if you're just not sure, I think it's always worthwhile to say "thank you." We live best when we remember that all of the good things of our lives—food, friends, family and fun—are presents that come to us, not just things we should take for granted.

One of the best ways of saying "thank you" is to share the good stuff of our lives with others who might not have as much. If you are rich in family, friends and other people who care about you, you might want to say thank you for that gift by visiting people who might be lonely, like older folks in a rest home. If you're rich in fun things you can do, like playing soccer or standing on your head, then maybe you can give thanks by teaching someone else, like a younger sister or brother, or someone in your school who might need a friend. And if your family is fortunate enough to have plenty of food to eat, and a comfortable house to live in, and the chance to have a say in the government of your city and country, there are ways to say thanks by sharing those gifts too.

One of the best ways to share these gifts is through contributing to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). The UUSC works with people around the world to build programs in their communities that help earn money, educate children and adults and work for human rights. There are a lot of great organizations that work to help people, but the UUSC is special because it's a way that we as Unitarian Universalists can share our principles of the importance of each person, and of working for a peaceful, fair and free world. And this Thanksgiving time of year gives us a chance to join with UUs everywhere in a special way of helping the UUSC.

On Thanksgiving many UU congregations give out what are called "Guest at Your Table" boxes. But there's nothing magic about the boxes themselves—a bowl or a box from home can work just as well. The magic happens in the idea of welcoming a guest at your table throughout the holidays. But since the guests that we welcome are people that the UUSC works with who may be thousands of miles away from us, a little imagination is required. Your guest might be a girl in Indonesia whose town is being rebuilt after the tsunami or a man in Guatemala whose right to vote was protected by a UUSC elections observer or a family in Mississippi who lost their home to Hurricane Katrina. But whatever the faces of your "guests" might look like, your box or bowl is a way of setting a place for them at your table. From Thanksgiving though New Year's Day, whenever you sit down for a meal, put a little money in your special place—maybe as much as it would cost to feed another person at that meal. That growing pile of money is your way of saying thanks both for the gift of having enough to eat and for the gift of being able to share with others.

On January 2nd your family can count up the money that has gone into your box or bowl to feed your guests. Then an adult can write a check for the amount to "UUSC" and mail it to Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, 130 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA 02139. Or easier still, they can go online to www.uusc.org and click on "Support Us" and "Donate Now" to give with a credit card. Don't forget to put down CLF as your congregation—it makes us feel good to know how much our members can do when we work together!

I know that one of the things I am grateful for this Thanksgiving is all of you—my unseen friends who I am able to welcome as guests at my computer. Now if we could only work out a way to send pumpkin pie through the Internet....

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)

Palouse Thanksgiving

I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.

The pheasants shout it wi th a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.

Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly grateful."

Note: the Palouse is a fertile region of rolling hills located around the eastern border of Washington State and the western border of Idaho.

by Lynn Ungar, minister for lifespan learning and Quest editor, Church of the Larger Fellowship. Appears as "Thanksgiving" in the 1996 UUA meditation manual Blessing the Bread, published by Skinner House and available through the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150).

Quest November 2005 Contents Turkey Loaf Thanksgiving Out From Walden Planned Giving Program Online Courses I Am a Millions-of-Years-Old Wonder Who Gets to Be Right? REsources For Living Palouse Thanksgiving	Email this article to a friend (Remember to add your friend's email in the "To:" line)