Unlikely Places
A Homily by Aaron McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, November 23, 2008
One day, a very long time ago, a car hit a teenage
boy while he was riding his bike. It
was a bad accident. He had a lot of
broken bones and was paralyzed from the waist down, which meant that he
couldn’t move his legs at all – not to stand or run or anything.
Because his body was so banged up he had to live in
the hospital for a long time. So while
all his friends went to school every day and goofed off together on the
weekends, he had to stay by himself in the hospital. People did come to visit, but sooner or later it was time to go
home and so the boy spent a lot of time alone.
The doctors said he would never walk again, so as
soon as the boy was strong enough he started learning how to use a wheel
chair. At night, after all the other
patients were asleep, the teenager would cruise around the empty hallways in
his wheelchair, seeing how fast he could go.
It was kinda fun, but he was still lonely.
But one night the boy came flying around a corner
and almost ran over one of the new nurses on the floor. He dove out of the way just in time. The nurse’s name was Steve, and it was one
of his first nights working. He worked
from about midnight until morning, mostly by himself because hardly anyone was
up and about in the middle of the night.
The nurse and the patient went back to the boy’s
room, getting to know one another, and it turned out they had a lot in
common. After a while, the boy would
wait up until at least midnight so he could say hi to Steve when he came on
duty every night. They were becoming
friends.
One night Steve the nurse came into the boy’s room
with a special surprise and a gleam in his eyes. Without saying a word he climbed up on a chair and attached a
small Styrofoam cup from the ceiling by a long string of bouncy rubber
bands. There was a little bull’s eye
drawn on the cup with red magic marker, and the whole thing bounced wildly
whenever anything touched it.
The boy was very confused, but his eyes lit up with
excitement when Steve pulled a sword out of a big bag! Well, it wasn’t really a sword – it was a
fencing foil – just like this one. It
had a bendy blade and a rubber tip so it couldn’t hurt anyone. Fencing is a sport where people play fight
with foils like these. They wear tons
of special safety equipment and are very careful not to hurt one another. Sound fun?
Steve showed the boy how to hold the curved handle
and some beginning moves and then challenged the boy to hit the Styrofoam
cup-target hanging by rubber bands from the ceiling! The boy tried and tried, but the cup kept bouncing so much that
it was very hard to hit. Soon the boy
was all tired out and ready for sleep.
But the boy kept practicing, all the time. Finally he had something to do besides
watching soap operas on the hospital TV!
He sat in his wheelchair for hours practicing and even when he ate in
the cafeteria he was still practicing in his head.
And almost every night Steve the nurse would stop by
and see how things were going. The boy
got better and better at hitting the target, and his body got stronger all the
time. The boy began to realize that
even if he never walked again there were lots of things he could do – like
fencing. Plus, the boy liked showing
Steve how much better he was getting, and Steve the nurse was very proud.
But then Steve the nurse stopped coming around. At first the boy thought he was on vacation
or something, but it turned out he had been transferred to a different
hospital. The boy was sad, but Steve
had left the foil with him – and that was good.
In time the boy got better, and finally there came
the day when he got up out of that chair and started to walk. Steve the nurse never got to see that day,
although I am sure he would have loved to – and the boy never got to thank
Steve for everything he had done. He
never got to say thank you.
This is often how it is with gratitude, and I’m not
talking about gratitude as courtesy, like “thanks for passing the potatoes” –
but gratitude with a capital “G.” For
some reason it is a lot easier to say thank you for little things, while the
big things – the things people bring to our lives that change everything –
often go unexpressed.
So many thank-yous slip by like water running
through our cupped hands – and then they’re gone.
And yet easy as it is to forget, and hard as it is
to slow down enough to even notice the gifts, the blessings that grow like
flowers in even the most difficult passages of our lives – there are few things
in life more worthy of our attention.
My colleague the Rev. Rob Hardies argues that gratitude is, in fact,
“essential to the religious life.” He
says, “I believe this so strongly now that I’m willing to say that if we are
not a grateful people, we have no business calling ourselves religious people,
or spiritual, or even emotionally mature people. Gratitude is that fundamental.”[1]
And like anything so critical to our lives, to our
emotional, spiritual and social health – we have to pay attention, always on
the lookout for opportunities to not only feel grateful but to express
gratitude for little things and big things and everything in the between. In
the end, saying thank you is not about verbally repaying some kind of debt, but
is a gift in and of itself.
One couple I spoke with this week told me that
before they go to bed every night they take a minute and write down something
they are thankful for. That’s all. So simple.
In this way they keep themselves on the lookout for life’s blessings. Life is sometimes good and sometimes not,
but even in the worst of times, even in the unlikeliest of places – in hospital
rooms and abandoned buildings; in chance meetings and unexpected comfort –
there are always blessings to be found and opportunities to be grateful – even
in pain and rubble. “Life will bring
whatever it brings – but we can always choose how we respond. And we can choose to respond with
gratitude.”[2] And you know – sometimes, we might even
succeed.
It just takes commitment and practice, just like
anything else worth doing in life. We
can begin by getting in the habit of feeling gratitude and then by getting in
the habit of expressing it. In this way Thanksgiving can go from being an
annual holiday to a daily practice, a way of life.
Try not to let too many thank-yous slip through your
fingers because they can be awfully hard to get back again. Here’s one of mine: I am the boy in today’s
story. I am the boy who never got to
thanks Steve the nurse for giving me hope, friendship and my first fencing
foil. I don’t know what has become of
Steve, so I can’t thank him personally the way I’d like. Instead I will do my best to say thank you
by trying to be a little more like Steve the nurse with everyone I meet.
Thank you, Steve.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Amen.