That Would Suffice

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In the early 1980s when I was serving the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockland, Maine I would have occasion to go over to Augusta, the state capital, from time to time. This is about a 40 mile trip inland from coastal Rockland, and on one of those journeys I stopped by the Augusta UU Church to visit with a friend and colleague who was the minister there at the time.

As I left the church and crossed the street to where my car was parked, I noticed a woman about a half-block away walking towards me. She was close enough for me to recognize her as someone I served with on the board of directors of our local community mental health center. I decided to wait until she got to where my car was so we could have a little chit-chat.

As she got closer I noticed she had a kind of dazed look on her face, to the point that she wasn’t even aware I was standing there. When she finally got about 10 feet away, and was still not showing any sign of recognizing me, I said, “Hey Connie, what’s up?” My words had the effect of snapping her out of a trance. She stared at me with very wide eyes and practically yelled out, “Steve, what are you doing here?!”

She was a very active lay leader in her local Episcopal Church in Camden, Maine—a little town about 10 miles up the coast from Rockland. It turns out she’d come over to Augusta for a meeting of a committee she served on for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. As she was leaving town her car conked out on her. She had it towed to the local dealership, only to be told that it needed a part that would take a day or two for them to get, and they had no loaners available. Her husband was out of town on a business trip and the calls she’d made in an attempt to reach anyone else in Camden who might come over to her rescue went unanswered. This was all back in the Dark Ages, also known as the pre-cell phone era. In addition, the last bus for the day from Augusta that went over to the coast had already departed.

Feeling completely out of options, poor Connie just started wandering down the nearest street, in something of a fog about what to do next, when she almost literally walked right into me. Rather nonchalant about the whole thing myself, I said, “Well, hop in. I’ll drive you over to Camden on my way home.” “You can drive me home?” “Well sure, we don’t live that far apart. I’d be glad to take you over. Let’s go.”

For the first minute or two of our trip she sat in a kind of contemplative silence, processing all that had just happened to her, before blurting out, “Steve, now I know it’s true. There really is a God!”

I laughed so hard I nearly ran off the road. When I got over my laughing fit I said, “Connie, this is really too rich. You’re a long-time faithful devoted Episcopalian and it takes a chance meet-up with a Unitarian Universalist minister to finally convince you of the existence of God?!” We were both able to appreciate the humor and the irony in that, and less than an hour later I dropped her off in front of her house in Camden. Apparently the whole experience made such an impression on Connie that for the next few weeks she told all of her friends about it, to the point that we became part of the local folklore of mid-coast Maine.

The fact of the matter is that had I come out of that church five minutes earlier or five minutes later than I did, the two of us would have never met up. I’m sure my friend, resourceful person that she was, would have eventually figured out some way to get herself home. I just happened to catch her when she been momentarily knocked out of kilter, and was trying to get her bearings. And I’m sure as well that part of her exclamation that “There is a God” was an expression of relief and joy and thankfulness that she’d been bailed out of a tough and unexpected situation by doing nothing more than wandering down a city street.

But in addition to being profusely grateful to me—almost to the point of embarrassment on my part—she also felt the need to acknowledge the workings of some greater being or power, and to be thankful on that level as well. She needed to offer a cosmic thank you. What I took—and still take—as a purely coincidental meet-up was for her an indication of the hand of God. This hand gave her an unexpected gift and blessing, even if it was delivered by a Unitarian Universalist minister for whom the idea of a Supreme Being doesn’t quite work.

I’m not going to get into the question of which one of us was right. Like Connie, I too feel a need from time to time to offer my own kind of cosmic thank-you. As I hope is the case with each of you from time to time, I have my moments when life feels especially full for me, and when I simply need to say “thank you” for the life I have. Who or What I’m saying thank-you to doesn’t much matter to me. I prefer instead to allow myself to feel blessed by a cloud of mystery, a cloud of wonder, and sometimes a cloud of awe—over which I have little, if any, control, but whose presence I feel, nonetheless.

When I get in this frame of mind I find I’m drawn back to some words by the late Rev. Raymond Baughn, a UU minister of many years. Among the words of wisdom he offered during his ministry are these: “Giving thanks has nothing to do with who or what produced the gift. It is rather a way of perceiving our life. Even in the midst of hurt and disappointment, when we see ourselves in a universe that gives us life and touches us with love, we praise.”

That sure works for me. My prayer of thanksgiving is not one directed to a deity, but rather it is my way of perceiving life—even when life hurts, wounds, disappoints, frustrates, or angers me. Such a prayer is more of an attempt to cultivate an ongoing attitude of gratitude than it is words addressed to a Supreme Being. Such thankfulness is a way of seeing ourselves in a universe that gives us life, and in which we find love and care and inspiration. It is cultivating this kind of awareness—which, being human, is an awareness I fall in and out of—that constitutes my cosmic thank you.

To Ray Baughn’s words I would add those of the 14th century German mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart—“If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” Indeed, that would suffice. Eckhart was a Dominican priest who had to endure several charges of heresy over the course of his life for maintaining that one could experience the divine directly without intercessors, such as the Medieval Church, for instance. “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you’ that would suffice.” Like Ray Baughn, Eckhart is speaking more about an attitude or stance towards living than he is the content of what a prayer of thanksgiving should contain or to whom it might be addressed. To simply and profoundly encounter one of those special moments of blessing in our lives is to offer Eckhart’s prayer of thanksgiving, even if no words are spoken.

While I’m on the subject of Medieval Catholic mystics with a strong heretical streak, let me also hold up Julian of Norwich. She lived in England about a century prior to Eckhart’s time in Germany. Julian lived a hermit-like, contemplative life within the Church at Norwich, and wrote what is believed to be the first book written by a woman in the English language, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. Anticipating our own Universalist forebears by a few centuries, she held that God was the source and embodiment of universal love, and that there was no hell. Julian also believed that God was really a Divine She—not He—and compared Jesus Christ to a wise, merciful, and loving mother. Like Eckhart, she saw beyond the bounds of her own faith to its universal meanings.

She and Eckhart were both prolific writers by the standards of their day, and Julian of Norwich has one particular line for which she is especially noted and remembered. She said it came to her from God in one of her mystical visions, in which She (that is to say, God) said to Julian: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Lady Julian, as she was also called, lived in England during one of the more virulent outbreaks of the Black Plague, when people really did drop like flies. Bodies had to be carted off en masse, and dumped in large pits on the outside of the towns. It might seem almost blasphemous in that kind of setting to speak the words, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” and attribute them to a loving and maternal God. And yet these simple words have endured over the centuries.

Like Eckhart’s, these words also strike a universal cord. As I ponder them, I hardly think Lady Julian was saying that everything is always hunky-dory. All she had to do was look around her, as she surely must have done, to know that wasn’t the case. What I take from these words, as I read them through my religious humanist lens, is the affirmation that Life and Love are ultimately stronger and more resilient than death and despair and hatred—however much those latter things may seem to hold sway at any given time. Lady Julian’s words are also a call to those who hear them, and who truly get their message, to hold fast to that which is good, to practice kindness, and to stand on the side of love.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” We live in the push and pull between Eckhart’s Thank You and Julian’s All Shall Be Well on the one hand, and all those things that diminish and demean and cheapen life on the other. Such is the tension in which we have to live.

However it may have been given me, I’m living the only life I have, during the only time given me to live it, and on the only Earth I have in which to live it. What other choice do I have but to accept these truths and live with them and say “yes” to them? We are aware of the unfinished and unhealed parts of the world, just as we’re aware of the unfinished and unhealed parts of our own lives. But we must still give thanks.

To say “thank you” or “all shall be well,” is not to approve of all that comes your way or that gets visited upon you. Rather it is to face and take all that life gives us and then—using the will, the resources, and the power of the human spirit—to become agents of transformation for ourselves, for those with whom we are in community here, and for a world that stands in need of our care.