The Gift Must Always Move
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
12/14/03

 

 

Reading         A meditation from UU minister David Blanchard.

 

The best story I ever heard about gift giving has nothing to do with Christmas, and everything to do with Christmas.  It’s about an African boy who wanted to give a gift to his teacher, who was going home to England.  The child had no money and his options were few.  The day before the teacher was to leave, the child brought her a huge seashell.  The teacher asked the boy where he could have found such a shell.  He told her there was only one spot where such extraordinary shells could be found, and when he named the place, a certain bay many miles away, the teacher was speechless.

 

“Why…why, it’s gorgeous…wonderful, but you shouldn’t have gone all that way to get a gift for me.” His eyes brightening, the boy answered, “Long walk part of gift.”

 

“Long walk part of gift.”  Most of the meaningful gifts we give to each other require some version of that “long walk.”  The long walk we sign on for with children, who need our patience, our wisdom, our honesty, and our trust more than we might first have imagined when their lives began. The long walk we share with our spouse, which takes us through uncharted, unexpected territories of sickness and health, richer and poorer, better and worse.  The long walk we take with our friends when they are grieving the loss of someone they love, when they are ill, when they are discouraged.  The long walk of feeling a sense of unity with those whom prosperity has left behind.  The long walk of reconciliation with all that separates us from a deep sense of life’s great purpose and meaning.  “Long walk part of gift.”

 

When Christmas has been tidied up and packed away for another year, the gifts acknowledged, many already forgotten, the New Year stretches in front of us.  What will get us through those months, with all that they may hold, will not be the things in the boxes.  We must look to the hands of those who bought and wrapped and carried those gifts.  With their gifts, they are telling us something too wonderful, perhaps too embarrassing, for words.  They are telling us that, for us, they will take the long walk.

So when you open the box and find the chainsaw, the long underwear, the fruitcake, the potholder, or the seashell from a distant ocean, remember that it’s not just “the thought” that counts.  Remember too, “Long walk part of gift.”

 

Sermon

When I was twelve and living in Ohio, I was a paper carrier for the Akron Beacon Journal.  My route only had about 60 customers, but as we lived in a sparsely populated area, it covered about a mile and a half.  When I told my parents that I wanted to deliver papers, they were supportive.  They were also very clear:  “Mark,” they said, “you can have a paper route but you need to know that it will be your route…not ours.  Don’t expect us to help you.”

 

I thought this was fair.  After all, I was the one who would be making the money.  Because my parents were clear from the start, I never whined to them or asked for help when it rained, or when we had a snowstorm and I had to travel on foot rather than on my bike, sometimes pulling a sled loaded with papers behind me.  I never complained to them when I had to rise before dawn on Sundays, the only one stirring so early in our split-level house on Scenic Way Drive.  I knew it was my responsibility alone to get the papers delivered.

 

I didn’t have the paper route for long…after five months I decided that I didn’t want to be an independent business man after all…I just wanted to be a kid.  Looking back, I know I made the right decision.

 

But I bring up the paper route this morning because it came to mind after I read the story about “long walk part of gift.”

 

Although the Akron Beacon Journal was an evening paper during the week, holiday editions were to be delivered early in the morning.  So, on Christmas Eve, I set my alarm clock so that I would be sure to get the paper to my customers on time.  The irony of setting an alarm clock for Christmas was not lost on me…even at the age of twelve. As long as I could remember, one of my siblings or I would be wide awake on Christmas day, long before our parents were and, in our excitement, we could be sure to wake each other up.  As I set the alarm that night, however, I realized that I was taking another step closer to adulthood.  Only grown-ups would need to set an alarm for Christmas!

 

The next morning, when I stumbled out of bed, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I walked into the living room, and plugged in the lights of the tree.  I remember feeling melancholy…even a little sorry for myself…realizing that I didn’t have the same excitement about Christmas that year.  The luster had worn off quite a bit now that I had become just another working stiff.  I walked into the kitchen and quickly ate my Christmas breakfast of Lucky Charms.  The only sound besides my crunching cereal and slurping milk was the furnace switching on.

 

Just as I was slipping into my coat and preparing to leave the house, I heard someone stirring.  I stuck my head into the hall and saw my mother was up…and dressed…and pulling her coat on.  “What are you doing?” I whispered not wanting to wake anyone else up. “I’m going to help you deliver the papers today,” she whispered back.  I swear I could hear the angels sing.

 

Now I don’t want to schmaltz this story up too much.  You might be thinking that of course my parents should have helped me on Christmas.  They would have been Scrooges not to.  But even if I should have expected help that morning, the fact was I didn’t.  My mother’s decision to help was a complete surprise…and a wonderful gift.  Easily the best one I received that day.  She drove me to all of the houses on my route and I remember us talking and laughing as we went.  I described to her the people in each house and the special places they wanted their paper placed: on the porch, in the back door, in a box on the side stoop…proudly sharing with her the many details of my life as a paperboy.

 

Each time I jumped out of the car and left a paper for a customer, I could read the banner headline: “Merry Christmas!” it read.  Merry Christmas, indeed.  It was a special time for a mother and son, and I treasure the memory of our morning together even today. I can still see her in the driver’s seat, giving me the gift of her presence and her time.  Looking back, I have to believe that she received as much that morning as I did.

 

Life is so precious and so easy to miss.  We often fail to realize how the little things we do for each other are often the most important.  My mother may not have imagined at the time that her decision to help me with my route would mean so much to me, but it did…and it still does. So much so that each Christmas morning, even these two dozen years later, when I retrieve the paper from my front stoop, taking in the smell of cold newsprint, reading the seasonal banner headline, I think about that trip with my mother…the long walk we took together in the family station wagon that December morning in 1979…and I always smile.  

 

My mother’s gift to me that morning continues to bring me joy…and it continues to move.  When I say “move” I don’t mean because I get choked up when I think about it.  I say that her gift continues to move because after enjoying her generosity toward me, I’m sure I will be more likely to be generous with my time when my children are growing up.  I will be more likely to be present to them in a similar situation because my mother was present to me. 

 

I know this to be true because I have experienced something similar with another family member.  He was a distant relative on my father’s side of the family who I used to see a couple of times a year when I was young.  His name was Chuck and he was a bearded, jean-jacket-wearing, Harley-riding man in his twenties who always had a twinkle in his eye when my brother and I were around.  No matter what the occasion, Chuck always took time out to play with us.  Usually we would end up chasing him or playing hide and seek.  I still can picture his lanky body running through a local park where the family was having a picnic…and my brother and I screaming after him having the time of our lives. Now Chuck, who was the boyfriend of my father’s second cousin, had little reason to pay us so much attention.  But he always did.  Chances are good that he was just passing on the gift of attention someone had once shown to him.  And even though he is no longer in the family and I have not seen him for over twenty years, I have not forgotten him…nor have I forgotten the gift of his presence and his playfulness.  Nowadays, when I find myself on the floor with the children of my friends climbing on my back, I know I am moving the gift that Chuck gave to me all those years ago.

 

I learned about this idea of gifts that move when I read that in many tribal cultures, gifts are offered not with an expectation that there will be a return gift to the giver…but a gift offered to someone else altogether.  There is an assumptive circle of giving in these cultures…a circle of giving that has no use for two-person gift exchanges, which are viewed as commerce and lead to the treatment of gifts as capital. For tribal people, gifts are not to be hoarded.  They are to be consumed and passed on to others.  Simply put, the gift must always move.  Eventually, the gift, or at least the energy behind it, may find its way back to the original giver, but that is beside the point.  In circular giving, a person gives blindly, and therefore receives with blind gratitude, too.  In circular giving, then, gifts are acts of faith. We give to someone who we know will not give back to us, and yet we give knowing that eventually we may receive from someone else.  It is as if our gift “goes around a corner before it comes back,”which teaches us to give and receive more freely. [1]

 

Susan and I recently found ourselves as participants in a circle of giving.  Around the time our daughter Leah was born in October we learned the true meaning of being showered with gifts, as we were the recipients of dozens of baby presents.   We were overwhelmed by the generosity shown to us both before and after Leah arrived.  I remember being uncomfortable with all the attention.  I didn’t think we deserved so much generosity.  Finally a wise friend helped me see the light.  She explained that the gifts had little to do with what Susan or I deserved.  “Mark,” she said, “you must learn how to be gracious and accepting of the love you get.”  Suddenly I got it. It was the same message another wise friend had tried to get me to understand over a decade ago.  She was doing her best to help me celebrate my birthday and I just wasn’t playing along.  I kept insisting that I didn’t need anything special, that no one needed to make a fuss.  At last she said, with exasperation, “Your birthday isn’t about what you need.  It’s about what others need to do for you.”  I think she was telling me to let people take that long walk for me…that there is joy in the giving that I have no right to stop.  I know now that she was telling me to get out of the way because the gift needs to move.

 

By the time Leah was born, I had stopped feeling funny about all the attention and just started to enjoy it…which is a good thing because I wouldn’t have wanted to turn down any of the generous gifts we received…especially the almost daily packages of food that arrived at our doorstep for the first few weeks we were home.  That food, as anyone who has been a new parent can tell you, was like manna from heaven!  In the end, of course, there is no way that we could possibly repay those who were so generous to us.  As it is, we are just now finishing up our thank you notes.  But I suspect that very few of the people who made dinner for us expect repayment.  In fact, most of them have told me that they cooked for us because when they had brought their babies home from the hospital, people had cooked for them.  They are simply passing on the gift.  They understand that the gift must always move. And perhaps the best part is that Susan and I have learned this too.

 

You know, when it comes right down to it, learning how to receive and keep the gift moving is the what love is all about.  Love is not something that can be hoarded.  It is something that must be given away with the blind assurance that it will one day return to us.  The love we give is also not something that we can expect in return.  Love is an act of faith…a giving to the future…a passing on of the gift of life and living.  So this holiday, when each of us is receiving our gifts and all the long walks that brought them to us, may we each remember to be gracious and accepting of not only the gifts we have been given, but also the love they represent. And may we find comfort in the fact that we have the rest of our lives to keep those gifts and that precious love moving.