My talk today was inspired by a programme run by the UUSC (that's the American version of our Unitarian Service Committee) in conjunction with the Unitarian Universalist Association. The programme's called "Guest at Your Table," and what I'm lifting from it today is the concept that our Thanksgiving, on this special weekend and any time can have infinitely more meaning if we extend it into hospitality towards a stranger.

Then I'll go a little further and suggest that the basis for hospitality is the realization that there are no strangers - we really are sisters and brothers, part of one family. We say that sort of thing quite often, don't we, but I'm not sure how much we really believe it - at best it's an abstract idea, and perhaps hard to make real. Try this and see how it feels: turn to someone sitting near you and say, "Good morning, my sister" or "Good morning, my brother" - or, because this is a rainbow congregation, if you're not sure, you can say, "Good morning, my sibling"! Go on, try it . . . I wonder how that felt.

I love this weekend, Thanksgiving! It seems to me one of those distinctively Canadian holidays which we can feel is specially ours. In England, and many other countries, there's a church celebration called Harvest Festival, but it's not usually associated with any particular family gathering or festive meal, unless you happen to be a farming family. In the U.S., Thanksgiving isn't celebrated till the end of November, when the harvest is long past, and it's much more of a historical and patriotic celebration, but here in Canada it's mostly about the simple abundance of nature and how very fortunate we are.

The Canadian Encyclopaedia tells us that the first North American Thanksgiving of all was celebrated by Martin Frobisher in the eastern Arctic in 1578, way before the landing of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. The celebration was brought to Nova Scotia in the 1750s and the citizens of Halifax apparently marked the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 with a day of Thanksgiving. It was Loyalists who brought the celebration to other parts of the country, and in 1879 Parliament declared Nov 6 as a day of Thanksgiving.

Being Canadian, we were diverse in the times that we celebrated, even then, and both later and earlier dates were observed, the most popular for a long time being the third Monday in Oct. It wasn't until January 31, 1957 that Parliament proclaimed the observance of Thanksgiving on the second Monday in Oct. E.C. Drury, the former "Farmer-Premier" of Ontario lamented later that "the farmers' own holiday has been stolen by the towns" to give them a long weekend when the weather was better.

In First Nations tradition, too, there is a special day set aside to give thanks for the Harvest. The celebration includes prayers, songs, storytelling and, naturally, feasting. Nothing is so much a part of the Native American tradition as sharing of food. No matter what you have - a little or a lot- it gets shared with everyone, acknowledging that all good gifts are from the Creator. The main foods for the harvest feast include corn -- and there's cornbread as well -- and squash, as well as deer and buffalo meat. All of these are considered special, sacred foods.

There seems to be a human need to express gratitude, even when there's doubt or disbelief about the entity we might want to thank! Some of you have heard the little story I love from Nick Cardell, a long-time UU minister who's now retired. Many years ago, he took his son, then about six years old, camping in the mountains. Early one morning, Nick and his son went out for a walk by the lakeshore. Everything was very quiet; the sun was just coming up. In the stillness, Nick heard his little boy say, "Thank you." "That's all right, son," he said; "I'm enjoying it too." "I wasn't talking to you, Dad," said his son. "Oh," said Nick, startled. "Who were you talking to?" "Do you have to say thank you to someone?" asked the boy. "I was just saying thank you because it's so good."

I hope there have been many times in your life, and will be many more, when you have felt absolutely compelled to say thank you, or praise be, or whatever comes spilling out of your heart when the world seems absolutely wonderful to you. The experiences which lead us to say thank you are marvellous, and our response can't be contradicted by any logic or by the fact that we don't know to whom, if anyone, we're addressing our thanks.

Our need to give thanks may, for some of us, reflect a sense that we can relate to the Power we may call God or Life or Nature, or the Highest Good, or for which we may have no name at all, in a personal way, but certainly even the theists among us don't expect that such a Being will feel better for our appreciation, do we? And most of us probably resist the idea that gratitude is demanded of us, that we ought to be grateful. We've had enough of that, thank you very much!

And yet, there's that need to express our gratitude for the life that enfolds us, for the joy that we find in living, even if we're experiencing hard times and it's only in brief moments that our hearts leap up in thankfulness. The thanks which are torn from our hearts as we watch a glorious sunrise, or enjoy great happiness with an intimate friend, or see a child recover from illness, or a garden become beautiful, or spiritual growth take place in a person or a group -- those thanks affirm the values of beauty and relationship and health and af-firm our commitment to those values. As we give thanks, to whatever we see as the source of good things, to the highest in the universe, the divine, we take more of that divinity into ourselves. Our thanks bring us closer to goodness.

There's a traditional prayer of thanksgiving in the Anglican Church which I've paraphrased for our Unitarian sensibilities; here it is in its paraphrased form and some of you may still recognize its cadences:

Source of all goodness and power, transcending our abilities and knowledge, we give hearty thanks, for all the goodness and loving-kindness which we have received, from nature and from one another. We are grateful for all the delights of this life, and above all for the glimpses of truth and the assurances of well-being with which we are endowed. We ask that we may be continually aware of our many blessings, so that our hearts may be sincerely thankful, and that we may affirm the goodness of life not only with words but in our lives, by devoting ourselves to the cause of right and walking together in justice and beauty all our days, for the sake of a more loving and joyful world. So may it be.

You probably noticed that phrase "that we may affirm the goodness of life not only with words but in our lives", and that's the major theme of my message this morning -- that gratitude, if it means anything significant, has a transformative effect and results in giving and sharing.

The following statement may not come as a big surprise to you: life's not easy for most people. Even in the best of times, we only need to pay the most fleeting attention to any of the media to be aware that in most parts of the world the political tranquillity and economic stability which we enjoy in Canada would seem an unimaginable paradise. Since September 11, we haven't even needed to pay fleeting attention -- the realities of life have been actively seeking us out!

Sometimes when I'm revelling in the pleasantness of my own life, enchanted by the Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod and apple-laden trees, the sumacs turning crimson, the ducks and the Canada Geese, I have to ask myself if there will be a judgment sometime on the way I enjoyed it all so greedily. What right do I have to hug to myself all this beauty and abundance? Isn't my so-called "sharing", through what we call "charitable donations", at best mere tokenism and at worst incredibly selfish, presuming that somehow it all belongs to me and not to those other people, the ones who have no chance at beauty and abundance?

Real gratitude, a true appreciation of my good fortune might involve a bit more generosity than I currently practise. Oh, I love to have people come and enjoy my place with me, but I don't want my visitors to have part-ownership. It's good to have company for a meal, as long as I've got plenty, but I don't want to have less to eat in order that someone else can be fed. I don't even want to be reminded, while I'm eating my Thanksgiving dinner, of those millions of children who go to bed hungry each night, the thousands who are starving to death as I speak. I don't want it, but I think it may be called for if my gratitude is to have meaning.

I would bet that some of you are rather like me in this respect. I strongly suspect, too, that we're not going to change overnight into saints who give up all that we have so that others may have cause for thankfulness. But perhaps we can change a bit. As some of you know, because I'm a bit more of a poet than a scientist I tend to talk to the forces of nature as if they were beings -- the gods. "Ye Gods", I find myself saying. "Thank you! Thank you! I'm grateful!" And I seem to hear them talking back, a bit wearily, saying, "So what are you going to do about it? How will you share your abundance, and who will you share it with?" Here's one suggestion for how to start: have a guest at your Thanksgiving table, someone you don't know.

Do I mean this literally, you may be asking? Am I suggesting you should invite a stranger, someone outside the close circle of family and friends who will really be at your Thanksgiving meal, to sit down with you? Well, that would be wonderful, and I encourage you to do it if you can. But I'm thinking of something that may be easier for most of us, a small, painless and yet significant way to have a guest at the table, and one which may help to enlarge our thinking in the process.

Be a child for a little while, and have an imaginary person sitting with you this afternoon or tomorrow or whenever you have your celebration. Imagine that instead of six people, you have seven, or instead of two people you have three, instead of fourteen, fifteen around the table. If you're going to be on your own, as I know some people will, this can be especially significant - you could actually set a place for the guest and picture them there with you - perhaps even engage in some inner conversation with them..

Even if it were to go no further, I think this idea of the imaginary guest would be a worthwhile exercise. But here's the most important part: it costs money to have a guest at the table, and to do this whole thing properly, you need to know how much it costs. Working this out could be useful in all kinds of ways - most of us aren't as aware as we might be of where the money goes. Let's see: the soup or appetizer (don't forget the crackers), the turkey or other main dish, the vegetables, cranberry sauce, relishes, rolls and butter, the pumpkin or apple pie, or both, the wine, the tea or fairly-traded coffee . . . even the salt, pepper, sugar and cream . . . think of them all, all the vast variety of items which make up your Thanksgiving meal, and figure out what each person's share of that is. That's the cost of food for your guest at the table.

But food is only part of it, right? If you're going to do this in a whole-hearted, responsible way, you'll want to include your guest's share of all the hospitality you provide. Do you have candles on the table? Remember how much they cost. Tablecloth, napkins - they had to be purchased and they have to be laundered. Heat for the rooms that you're using; water for cooking and doing the dishes, transportation to get to your home - think of all the things involved in your celebration and work out your guest's share. It adds up, doesn't it. Having a guest at the table costs money! But since your guest is not actually using up this money, you have it to give to a real, non-imaginary person who has no such celebration today or tomorrow, who perhaps has only one small meal, or none. What a privilege - to be able to have a guest at the table! And if you're a guest somewhere this weekend, this is how you can be a host too!

Who will be your guest? When we're considering who to invite to a holiday meal, it's usually family we think of first, or friends who're so close they're like family, right? So let me back-track just a bit, and ask us to consider who belongs in our family. Our definitions already vary - for some of us it's the small, nuclear group of parents and siblings; for others it's the extended network of aunts and cousins-twice-removed and connections by marriage or by having grown up together. Earlier on I suggested that we might try out the truism that we're one human family, but I know the barriers to doing that on a daily basis are daunting. So many people - six billion! So different from us - so foreign and other! It makes it hard to think of the Afghani man or the Guatemalan woman as our brother and sister in any but the most superficial sense, doesn't it?

Here's part of an essay which came my way this week, written by David Steinberg, an American author of many books, mostly about sex, which might not immediately seem on the same topic as this. Steinberg says:

My friend Michael . . . once picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be from Guatemala. Since Michael had traveled in Guatemala, the two of them got to sharing stories about the Guatemalan people and countryside. Michael liked this man very much, found him to be a person of generous spirit, humor, and insight. As it happens, he also had been a right-wing terrorist in Guatemala -- one of those guys who visit unspeakable horrors on leftists, suspected and real, as part of Guatemala's continuing, brutal civil war.

How could it be that this man full of good cheer could also torture and kill people fighting for freedom and justice in Guatemala? Well, it happens that the leftists had themselves killed most of the people in this man's family right in front of his eyes. Who knows why? Maybe they had their own rage about injustices they had witnessed. Maybe it was part of a larger political reality. Whatever the underlying politics may have been, this man was, you might say, understandably enraged after witnessing the slaughter of his family. Of course, committing acts of terror as a way of working through understandable rage is not acceptable. Not for him; not for us. But if I had any illusions about the Otherness of right-wing Guatemalan terrorists, those illusions pretty much evaporated when Michael put a human face on this man's story.

Human faces are much harder to dismiss and demonize than abstract stereotypes. ... Much, perhaps most, of the world lives with . . . outrage . . . every single day. People who live and breathe and . . . [make love] and suffer just like we do. . . . Perhaps if we understand that Otherly people are just as human, just as intelligent, just as worthy of respect as we are, we will begin to understand more clearly, and more sympathetically, why they feel and act as they do.

Perhaps, if we understand that Otherly people are just as human as we are, we will recognize them as part of our family. Perhaps we will even invite them to be a guest at our family table.

So, again, who might our guest be? Who might we imagine at the table, and to whom might we send their share of the meal? It could be anyone in the world, and whoever you invite, there's an organization that would be glad to help forward your cost-of-the-meal to them. Here's just a couple of suggestions, one for someone overseas and one here in Canada:

How about someone at Child Haven, or someone waiting to come into Child Haven. For those of you who're not familiar with this wonderful Unitarian project, just a few facts related to the need for sharing a meal with them:

Child Haven has three homes in India and one in Nepal, run by Bonnie and Fred Cappuccino, Unitarians based in Maxville, Ontario. The homes accept children who are disabled, parentless, or from socially disadvantaged situations - and who are destitute, i.e. do not receive even one good meal a day. Girls and boys are treated equally, and without regard to race, caste, colour, religion or culture. Living is simple and meals are vegetarian, mainly rice and lentils and vegetables, with some soya milk and yoghurt from the Soya Cow machine, which is capable of making three gallons of soya milk in 30 minutes from 1.7 kg. of raw soybeans.

Would you like one of the Child Haven children, or a child who needs to be in Child Haven, to be the guest at your Thanksgiving table? We have the information to make it easy for you to host this family member.

Fourteen older citizens of Kaliyampoondi village receive the noon meal at Child Haven every day - the same as children, staff and volunteers receive - plus lots of companionship. They also receive soap and clothing four times a year. They bring a pot that is filled up, with enough left for the next meal. Some come early in the morning and sit and watch the children and all the activity before lunch. They are called old age orphans because they have no offspring to care for them.

Would you like one of the old age orphans at Child Haven, or an older citizen who needs to be there, to be the guest at your Thanksgiving table? We have the information to make it easy for you to host this family member.

Or how about someone here in Canada as your guest, even someone right here in Waterloo? Here's part of a letter I received from the Food Bank of Waterloo Region the other day:

Please, share the tradition of Thanksgiving with the hungry in our community . . . There are more than 25,000 people in our community who receive food assistance each year. Forty-eight percent of those receiving food are children under the age of 18. Why? Faced with the burden of finding affordable and safe shelter, families are often forced to use between 30 and 50 per cent of their gross income on rent, leaving few funds for the remaining necessities of life. People, many who are classified as working poor, turn to the Food Bank and its member agencies and programs for assistance in times of need. . . . Please give now. Your gift will help the Food Bank gather, sort, warehouse and distribute food to our 44 member agencies and programs. Your gift will continue to build a strong network of service throughout our community.

Would you like one of Waterloo's Food Bank clients, or someone who needs Food Bank help, to be the guest at your Thanksgiving table? We have the information to make it easy for you to host this family member. And if perchance you have yourself been a client of the Food Bank, or are one now, think what you do have that you may be able to share - perhaps more awareness than most of us have that we are all one family, with a changeable mixture of bad and good luck.

In some UU congregations, the following words are used for Chalice Lighting, or as Opening Words:
This is the mission of our faith:
To teach the fragile art of hospitality;
To revere both the critical mind and the generous heart;
To prove that adversity need not mean divisiveness;
And to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands.

I would add to those words only this blessing, of which I was reminded by happy coincidence or divine guidance on Friday:

May no person be alien to your compassion. May your larger family be the family of all humankind. And may those who are nearest and dearest to you constantly be enriched by the beauty and bounty of your love.