Some of you, doubtless, have read the book called The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. I haven’t done so -- yet – but I was stimulated to think more about the idea when I re-read an article on the subject by Rev. Jane Rzepka who is Minister for the Church of the Larger Fellowship. She explains that the questions which inspired Gladwell’s book are such puzzles as these: What turns a fashion into a fad? What makes a few cases of measles suddenly run through a whole grade-school classroom? How does an unknown book suddenly become a bestseller?

Gladwell says there’s a pattern to it: these phenomena build steadily and slowly to a certain point, and then .... then they take off in a hurry. The name he gives to that one dramatic moment, the moment when everything changes, is the tipping point. ....... The tipping point for cell phones ...... was [apparently] reached in 1998. I guess the tipping point for email and the internet occurred a bit earlier, but my estimate is certainly coloured by my consciousness of when I personally "tipped over," past my resistance to the new technology.

We all see things, don’t we, through the lenses of our own experience? An accumulation of factors that might push me over the edge into despair or determination, or gratitude or bitterness, might leave you quite unmoved until more had happened. What’s more, one tipping point contributes to another being reached. Last Sunday, in the discussion after my talk on "Remembering the Reformation," someone asked if any of us knew why the Reformation had happened just when it did. Most of us thought that there were probably many reasons, from the new technology of the printing press to the existence of certain strong and sometimes charismatic personalities, and it was the coming together of these factors, rather than any one of them by itself, that tipped the religious balance towards reform and change.

Jane Rzepka suggests that tipping points are reached often in our everyday lives, particularly in matters of thought and attitude – in what she calls the world of applied religion. She quotes a poem by Shelley, which likens human tipping points to the phenomenon of an avalanche in snowy mountain areas:

The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass/ Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered ....
Flake after flake, in Heaven-defying minds/ As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo ‘round/ Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now.

That resonates for me – the notion that as thought upon thought accumulates, all at once an avalanche of insight – some great truth – is triggered, though not the final or absolute truth, any more than an avalanche is ever the final one.

As Jane says, this concept suggests all kinds of possibilities; she conjures up a favourite fantasy:

[Imagine that you live in a small, conservative town [with no Unitarian congregation]. You are a Unitarian Universalist ...... Another UU moves into town from [Vancouver or Ottawa], who has experience in starting a small congregation. Each of you talks it up with your neighbours and discovers two or three like-minded souls. Before you know it you’re holding worship services with a small group of people that slowly and steadily grows. And boom – the group sky-rockets and soon the whole town’s Unitarian Universalist. OK, I got carried away [she says], but I’m enjoying the thought.

Then she suggests what’s perhaps a more likely scenario:

Imagine that you aren’t feeling so good about yourself. An overheard comment sneaks into your awareness, though, about how much folks enjoy the [cookies you bake] and your [witty] jokes, and your software programs. You read a sermon about being "accepted by the universe". Walking down the street, you see a pretty nice reflection of your face in a window and the clouds lift – you’re at a spiritual tipping point, the avalanche is triggered – and hey! You’re OK. Better than OK. A feeling of well-being wraps you up and takes you home.

Tipping points, says Jane, are everywhere, in the world and in the spirit – in technology, in religion, within our own souls ....... Tipping points. Transformation.

A few days ago, a member of the Community Editorial Board – not our own John Green but one of his colleagues in that endeavour, Edmond Tell, wrote a piece for the Record headed "Thanksgiving can become a lifestyle." At least one person in this congregation read and appreciated the article and mentioned it to me, but some of you probably didn’t see it. In the article, Edmond Tell wrote of one of his own tipping points, about ten years ago, when his son suffered a serious head injury in a traffic accident. It wasn’t so much the injury itself, or even the immediate aftermath of watching him struggle through a coma and the long recovery period which followed, and the enormous relief that his son was going to be all right. It was the much more gradual piling up of experiences which, like that prelude to the avalanche in Jane Rzepka’s image, finally caused a breakthrough of insight and meaning. Edmond Tell refers to a pivotal moment which I think could also be called a tipping point, because it built on everything that had gone before. He read a small book, familiar to some of you, by Benjamin Hoff, called The Tao of Pooh. (It relates Taoist philosophy in terms of the Winnie-the-Pooh characters.) Having come through the heart-rending experience of his son’s injury into the marvellous relief of his recovery, Tell was wonderfully ready to consider and take into himself these words, which tipped him into a new way of being: "Do you want to be really happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you’ve got."

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? – almost too simple. We’ve heard many times, probably beginning in our childhood, that we ought to be grateful for what we have. "Count your blessings" and so on. And it’s not that we don’t agree, in our heads; it’s just that when bad things happen – as they do, as our children our learning, even to good people – it’s awfully hard to hang onto the thought that you’re really lucky. Someone who’s had her car broken into and her purse stolen, as has happened several times to various people here in the recent past, is not likely to be able to say, "How lucky I am to have a car anyway, and that my credit cards can be replaced," and so on. Maybe a saint could say that, but most of us aren’t saints. And maybe we could say it later, but not right away. When disaster occurs, even a small disaster by our affluent and fortunate Canadian standards, the event is likely to tip us into a bad mood, at least, if not into a reactive depression or into hostility against the people who caused it or the world in general.

So where is the truth in Edmond Tell’s idea that we can begin to be happy by being appreciative of who you are and what you’ve got? I think it’s in the habit of appreciation – not just remembering in odd moments, good or bad, that we have a lot to be thankful for but what some have called "the practice of gratitude." I’ve noticed that although, as I just suggested, few people can immediately respond to unpleasant happenings with a sunny recital of their blessings, there are people whose usual response is more positive and less thrown-for-a-loop than average. Some of this is simply due to innate differences of temperament and varying degrees of resilience, but as with most natural differences between people, training can make up for a lot.

The people I’ve seen who take difficult circumstances in their stride tend to be, as far as I can observe, those who have made a practice of appreciating the good circumstances – not counting their blessings, necessarily, but noticing them, every day, many times a day – being mindful of them. As Edmond Tell says in his article, "gratitude, appreciation, is not the fleeting moment that accompanies a stroke of good luck or the end of a long quest. It’s the attitude that accompanies one from the outset." And perhaps that attitude stems from something else Tell mentions, the fact that "any of us could have been born in ..... a part of the world where hope, possibility and peace are commodities well beyond most people’s grasp." That we have been born instead into a world of plenty and long life expectancy and peace is surely worth noticing in an appreciative way. When that dawns on us in more than a theoretical way – when we realize it – understand it in our hearts as well as our heads – it can be a tipping point for us, tipping us into a new way of seeing everything that happens.

Let me give you a small example of how this happened to me – and please don’t misunderstand: I’m certainly not adept at the practice of gratitude and I’m very still easily thrown off balance, but here’s an instance of a personal tipping point. As some of you know, my political convictions, which stem from my religious convictions, tend towards the left end of the spectrum. I’m very strongly in favour of generous social welfare programmes, universal one-tier health care, steeply graduated income tax, and so on. In the past, and still to some extent today, I would get very angry about government failure to implement programmes which seem so obviously good to me, and their apparent eagerness to chip away at what we’ve achieved in Canada along those lines. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say my anger was making me unhappy, but it certainly did (and sometimes still does) interfere with my feelings towards people of different convictions. It made me less able to respect their inherent worth and dignity!

A surprising change happened one day – not in my convictions, but in my attitude to those who see things differently. It dawned on me – and I don’t think this was because of any single factor but because of recognizing in many different ways (you’d think I’d have seen this earlier) that huge numbers of people disagree with me and they’re probably no more deluded than the huge majority of the world that’s not Unitarian – it dawned on me that the natural state of human beings is not necessarily to belong to the NDP any more than to belong to the Canadian Alliance! Political parties, and religions, and almost all the ways we have of being in the world, are social constructs, not immutable values. Even what I see as the core of my convictions – the belief that we’re more human when we care for one another than when we exploit one another – even that is questionable on grounds of logic and history and experience. The world does not conform to my beliefs, and there’s no particular reason why it should!

Whew! I had been tipped over into a different space indeed, a space which relates in a serendipitous way to the other facet of this reflection, which is gratitude. Nowadays I am a little bit more likely to notice with appreciation the instances of people caring for one another than to notice with bitterness the instances of uncaring. I’ve come to see that altruism is even more surprising and wonderful than selfishness, without in the least giving up my conviction that it’s better to care, both individually and as an organized society. Yes, I still get pretty mad at people who don’t see it my way, but in my saner moments (and I really mean that) I recognize that there’s no particular reason they should see it that way – unless some kind of tipping point occurs for them, too. That’s worth praying for, isn’t it?!

Did you notice, I wonder, two small news items in the Record this past week, both about our area, and both tucked away on an inside page of an inside section? The first was about Waterloo coming second in the world in the international Communities in Bloom contest – and second to our near neighbour, Guelph. What an achievement! The second was about Kitchener winning a similar contest for neatest, tidiest community. Yes, I know that flowers and neatness are luxuries that most of the world can’t even aspire too – all the more reason for appreciating the amazing luck we have in living among beauty and cleanness. Let’s be thankful for that if we possibly can, if our lives are, right now at least, free enough from pain that we can notice the good things. Let’s also consider that it’s quite possible that we can contribute to a tipping point for someone else, and that it’s much more likely to happen through our good thoughts and actions rather than our bad, through our blessings rather than our curses.

Widespread throughout the world is a sense that some effects can, mysteriously, be achieved through rituals and symbolic acts. I invite you now to participate in an ancient and practically universal ritual of thanksgiving which involves eating food together in a ceremonial way. This is a pumpkin coffee cake – I went into Zehr’s looking for a bread or cake that would be easy to use in this way and would also be traditional to Thanksgiving – and there it was, pumpkin coffee cake! How lucky we are to be able to find such things! And before I pass the baskets around for you to share the cake, let’s hear some words to enhance our appreciation:

This food is made from things gathered and prepared by unfamiliar hands, things that have come from all over the earth.
We are grateful for the known and for the unknown.
We are grateful for the work we see being done and the unseen work whose results we enjoy. As we eat together, let us rejoice in all the sweetness the food represents: the goodness of life, the sufficiency of our earth, the network of humanity in which we are a part.
We give thanks for the sweetness of life.
Let’s also remember the bitterness which underlies so much that is sweet-tasting, the exploitation of one person by another, the work which does not bear fruit, the persistence of hunger and thirst in our world.
We commit ourselves to the sweetening of life. Let us eat and remember.

In our sharing we come closer to those whose efforts gave us this food, and to those in whose company we eat.
We are one with each other, linked with the earth from which our food comes.
May this sharing be for us a sign of our faith in humanity, our hope for the betterment of our world and our thanksgiving for all that is good.
So may it be.

And in closing I offer you words shared with me a few days ago by a wise friend, who wrote in the form of a prayer:

May I face each day with anticipation,
each task with enthusiasm,
my fears with courage,
my challenges with integrity,
my successes with satisfaction,
my failures with laughter,
my friends with gratitude,
my enemies with compassion,
and the world with reverence and thanks.
So may it be