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[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN BIRGE: Happy Thanksgiving. I'm John Birge from American Public Media. This is Giving Thanks.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Gratitude is simply the recognition that a lot of the things that you have in your life came to you without your having earned them. Your birth, your health, a family to raise you, a world to sustain you. So I think it's very appropriate that we begin with gratitude.

JOHN BIRGE: So on this day of gratitude, we'll enjoy a Thanksgiving visit from Rabbi Harold Kushner, bestselling author of Living a Life That Matters. Celebrating life also matters a great deal to our other special guest. He's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell.

GALWAY KINNELL: My life is adrift in my body. It shines in my heart and hands, in my teeth. And the golden rod shines with its life too. And the grass, look. The great field wavers and flakes. A lark bursts up all dew.

JOHN BURGE: Galway Kinnell's poems make a perfect Thanksgiving blessing. Also ahead, thankful music by Brahms and John Rutter and an unforgettable journey of the spirit at Chartres Cathedral from Charles Laughton. With music and stories for Thanksgiving, it's Giving Thanks, a celebration of fall food and gratitude.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Rabbi Harold Kushner is best known as the author of the best selling-book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And it's a real treat to have him here for Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Thank you. And happy Thanksgiving to you and to all of our listeners out there. It's a wonderful time of year.

JOHN BIRGE: You wrote a lot about giving thanks in your book, The Lord is My Shepherd. And in one section, you say, gratitude is the fundamental religious emotion. Why is that?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: What I mean by that is that gratitude is, perhaps, the only religious response we can ask of people who are not religious. There is no faith involved. There is no theological commitment. There is no biblical origin. It's simply the recognition that a lot of the things that you have in your life came to you without your having earned them. Your birth, your health, a family to raise you, a world to sustain you. And that you will be a much happier person if you remember to be grateful for them than you would if you just assumed you deserved them and keep focusing on what you don't have.

So I think it's, first of all, self-interest. You'll be happier. And secondly, very appropriate that we begin with gratitude, that we can ask everybody, even people who have legitimate complaints, focus on what you're grateful for, focus on what you have. And this is a time to be thankful and remember it.

JOHN BIRGE: And that is one of the things that I've always loved about Thanksgiving myself, is that it's completely ecumenical. And you've even said, you don't need to believe in God to feel gratitude.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: It's more than that, John. It's more than ecumenical. It is a very wonderful season for Jews because it's something we can share with our non-Jewish neighbors and because there's something profoundly Jewish about it. It's gratitude and it's food. What could be more Jewish than that?

Its origins are probably the Jewish holiday of the Feast of Tabernacles, which was the harvest festival back in biblical times. In the hot climate of the Middle East where the crops ripen earlier, when the harvest was in, they would give thanks for what they had.

JOHN BIRGE: This is way before pilgrims and pumpkin pies.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Well, I don't know if they did it because they knew their scripture, which they certainly did, or if they did it because the response of gratitude is simply built into human beings.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: More conversation with Rabbi Harold Kushner coming up. I'm Jon Birge. You're listening to Giving Thanks. We've set an extra place at the table for Thanksgiving this year for one of America's most distinguished writers and poets. His name is Galway Kinnell. Welcome and happy Thanksgiving.

GALWAY KINNELL: Thank you.

JOHN BIRGE: Billy Collins said, gratitude for being alive is at the heart of poetry. How does gratitude work in your poems?

GALWAY KINNELL: Gratitude is very much in at the center of poetry. I agree with Billy. And a great deal of poetry is acts of gratitude for what we experience and for the existence of consciousness. The marvels that we feel are functions of our consciousness.

JOHN BIRGE: You've talked about the poem as a paradigm of what the human being wants to say to the cosmos. I love that idea. And there's a poem that I'd like you to read that speaks to that a little bit, also speaks to this time of year. It starts in autumn, but I think it's also about the connectedness of time and our connectedness with nature. And it's called The Apple Tree. Can you say a little about this before you read it?

GALWAY KINNELL: Well, it certainly is a poem of gratitude and how life goes by in a flash and, yet, an enormous reality has been going by for ages at the same time. "The Apple Tree. I remember this tree, its white flowers all unfallen. It's the fall. The unfallen apples hold their brightness a little longer into the blue air. Hold the dream they can be brighter.

We create without turning, without looking back, without ever really knowing, we create. Having tasted the first flower of the first spring we go on. We don't turn again until we touch the last flower of the last spring. And that day, fondling each grain one more time, like the overturned hourglass, we die of the return streaming of everything we have lived.

When the fallen apple rolls into the grass, the apple worm stops, then goes all the way through and looks out at the creation unopposed, the world made entirely of lovers. Or else, there was no such thing as memory. Or else, there are only the empty branches, only the blossoms upon them, only the apples that still grow full, that still fail, and a brightness that still invent past their own decay. The dream they can be brighter. That still, that still the one who holds still and looks out, alone of all of us. That one may die mostly of happiness."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: A poem called The Apple Tree, read by the poet Galway Kinnell. You'll hear more from Galway Kinnell in a bit. A little later. Charles Laughton conjures Kerouac.

CHARLES LAUGHTON: Mourning the definite feeling of autumn coming. I chop wood with my hat on and would feel lazy and wonderful indoors. Night made hot cocoa and sang by the wood fire. And in keeping with my friend Jaffe's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp, we left, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack, I turned and knelt on the trail and said, thank you, shack. Because I knew that shack and the mountain would understand what that meant.

JOHN BIRGE: A grateful understanding of the artist's creative spirit coming up. To find out more, visit the Giving Thanks website. You can hear today's show again and listen to the archive of the past 10 years, including Thanksgiving visits with John Updike, Rita Dove, and Billy Collins. Go to americanpublicmedia.org and click on Giving Thanks. I'm John Birge. With music and stories for Thanksgiving, this is Giving Thanks, a celebration of fall, food, and gratitude from American Public Media.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The Lord is My Shepherd. That's the name of this music by Abraham Kaplan. It's also the title of a book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who finds Thanksgiving in the 23rd Psalm.

You talk about this a lot in your book, The Lord is My Shepherd, which is a line by line delving into the 23rd Psalm. And the line that comes to mind for Thanksgiving is "my cup runneth over." There is a lot of power in those just four words and, I guess, just two words in the Hebrew, right?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Two words in Hebrew, [SPEAKING HEBREW], my cup runs over. But you know what's interesting about that, John, the author of the 23rd Psalm comes to this overflowing sense of gratitude after he's been through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. In the early part of the Psalm, when his life is going wonderfully with green pastures, and still waters, and everything you could want, maybe it doesn't occur to him to be grateful.

After he has gone through that crisis and he discovers that God is not necessarily the guarantor of happy endings, God is the one who finds you in the Valley and makes sure you don't get stuck there and leads you out, that's when it occurs to him to be grateful.

JOHN BIRGE: I'm reminded of something that Annie Lamont said. There are two kinds of prayers. Help me, help me, help me and thank you, thank you, thank you.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: And I'm a big fan of the second. I don't like the first. Well, help me, I guess, is a legitimate one. But there's the third kind of prayer. And to her credit, she doesn't list it there because I think it's illegitimate. That is, God, please, give me the following. And John, I'm sorry. That's not God. That's Santa Claus.

JOHN BIRGE: Well, you talk a lot in The Lord is My Shepherd about thanks giving, and that it's thanks giving, not thanks taking, even though there's so much in our language and in our attitude, just in day to day life that we're taking a vacation. We're taking a class. We're taking a trip. But that, really, life, ultimately, is about giving, about giving yourself over to these things and that gratitude is a part of that flow.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: I think so. There is a profound psychological truth. It's not a religious demand. It's a psychological insight that it's more blessed to give than to receive. There is something empowering about being able to give away, not only because it makes you feel superior to the person you're giving to. That's really not very noble. But the idea that you can afford to give something away.

In my career as a rabbi, I have dealt with a lot of wealthy people whom I solicited for charitable gifts, and there are so many people who could have bought and sold me 10 times over who simply cannot give away money because it hurts them. They feel they're giving some of themselves away and they will be a smaller person if their bank account becomes smaller by 1% or 2%. And that is so sad. There is strength to the person who can afford to be generous.

There's an old Jewish story about the rabbi who says to his class, if a man has $500 and he gives $100 away, what does he have left? The students say, now, wait a minute. This has got to be a trick question. It can't simply be, he has $400 left. The rabbi says no, he has $100 left. The $400 he doesn't give away, he could spend. He could lose. All sorts of things could happen. The only thing he has permanently is the $100 that he gave away. That can never be taken from him. The only thing you really have is what you can give away.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[CHOIR SINGING] The Lord is my Shepherd

Therefore can I lack nothing

He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth in beside the waters of comfort

He shall convert my soul

And bring me forth in the paths of righteousness

For His name's sake

For His name's sake

For His name's sake

Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil

For Thou art with me

Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me

Though shalt prepare a table for me against them that trouble me

Thou hast anointed my head in oil and my cup shall be full.

But Thy loving kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord, in the house of the Lord, in the house of the Lord forever

Forever.

JOHN BIRGE: John Rutter conducted his piece, The Lord is My Shepherd. Before that, Rabbi Harold Kushner talked about his book, The Lord is My Shepherd and the quality of Thanksgiving in the 23rd Psalm. William Safire says it was a Bible from 1539 that gave us the first English use of Thanksgiving as one word. It's in this passage. "For all the creatures of God are good and nothing to be refused if it be received with Thanksgiving." Earth Sparrow is a poem from our Thanksgiving guest, Gallway Kinnell.

You once said, if the things and creatures that live on the Earth don't possess mystery, then there isn't any to touch. This mystery requires love of the things and creatures that surround us, the capacity to go out to them so they enter us. They're transformed within us, and that our inner life finds expression through them.

And I think that happens, too, in another poem that has an autumnal setting, but also finds a meeting of inner life and outer life. And it's called Earth Sparrow.

GALWAY KINNELL: "Earth Sparrow. The trees in clouds of November, mist standing empty and the mass of Earth bare. I bent my head and leaned myself against interior gales and blizzards of unrest, bucking the squalor of November air. But checked at last and skyward with shredded arms, lifting ribbons of fingers and prayers, I caught in that beseeching of the cloud when leafless lightning splintered oak and shrouding its wreckage in the waste of the year.

To whose ultimate twig with a zoom and skip a sparrow summited and there bursting as if the dead sap kept singing. Leaned I forward, knowing nothing to lean on, green as the grasslessness. Lord of the Earth." I like that turn at the end, leaned I forward knowing nothing to lean on. Green as the grasslessness.

JOHN BIRGE: You've said it's the poet's job to figure out the connection between the self and the world. And that seems the point of connection there, where you lean forward knowing nothing to lean on, but there's a moment of grace there in that spot.

GALWAY KINNELL: Yeah.

JOHN BIRGE: And this whole idea of life going on and that, even in this bleak November lifeless place, a sparrow is bursting as if the dead sap kept singing. It's a beautiful image.

GALWAY KINNELL: Yeah, I've kind of liked this poem.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You know, it's really strange to be reading these poems because, literally, I have not looked at them for maybe 30-- maybe this one 40 years. I don't know. And to be a little bit moved by the poem. So the older I get, the more I realize that, even when we're young, we understand being old.

JOHN BIRGE: Earth Sparrow read by the poet Galway Kinnell, who turned 80 years young last year with the publication of his latest book, Strong is Your Hold. When Rabbi Harold Kushner was young, Thanksgiving was all about tradition.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Any excuse for a good meal, I think. You know the public school, the story of the pilgrims, and this sense that, of all the occasions of the American calendar, this was the one that reached out and enveloped Jews most, that we were welcomed as part of the people celebrating the goodness of America in a mode that seemed very much rooted in the Hebrew Bible.

And the food and the gratitude, the fact that Jewish prayer has very little asking for things and almost invariably starts thanking God for what we have, rather than calling his attention to what we lack. So as a Jew and as an American, I was always particularly comfortable with the Thanksgiving season.

JOHN BIRGE: Large family gatherings?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Large to medium. Yeah, my mother was a typical Jewish mother and just invite as many people as possible and feed them as generously as possible. And this was before we had football on television afterwards, so you didn't have to watch the game and fall asleep on the couch afterwards. But you spent the day with family.

JOHN BIRGE: So you just fell asleep on the couch then, without the game?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Well, somehow, if you're not sitting and watching the football game, you don't fall asleep. You're engaged in conversation with people.

JOHN BIRGE: Are there holiday traditions from then, a blessing, a dish, or something that carry on to the present day for you as a father, as a grandfather now?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Well, my wife has a sense that if there's no turkey, there's no Thanksgiving. I don't quite share that. I'd be perfectly happy with broiled fish or something. But what we do is just go around the table and everybody has to come up with something that happened to them in the past year that they have reason to be grateful for. And even people who've not had particularly good years will just say, well, I'm glad that I'm still here, and I'm glad that you've made a place for me, and I'm glad that we're able to go on. And other people, if they rack their memories a lot, will find something to mention that they might not have been thinking of, and it does add to their ability to celebrate.

JOHN BIRGE: We'll add more from Harold Kushner to our Thanksgiving celebration coming up. At the Giving Thanks website, you can check the playlist, listen to this program again, or explore the archive of past shows, including Thanksgiving visits with Annie Lamont, Anna Quindlen, and Calvin Trillin. And if you want to email questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Go to americanpublicmedia.prg and click on Giving Thanks. More in a minute. You're listening to Giving Thanks, a celebration of fall, food, and gratitude from American Public Media.

SPEAKER 1: And you're listening to this special holiday program from Minnesota Public Radio news. Good afternoon. If you have travel plans, be aware there's a good chance of snow in the Northeast. Accumulations up to 2 inches in that part of Minnesota. In the Twin Cities, cloudy and 37 this hour.

SPEAKER 2: Support for this program comes from your Twin Cities Saturn Retailers, introducing the 2009 Aura XR four cylinder, a mid-sized sports sedan with an EPA estimated 33 miles per gallon highway. Thesaturnway.com.

SPEAKER 3: Programming is supported by Pentair, a Minnesota based diversified company with 15,000 employees. Pentair's products are designed to help create safe, clean water worldwide and protect electronic and electric equipment and the people using it. Pentair.com.

SPEAKER 1: Stay tuned for an update on your local forecast at the top of the hour, some news headlines, and then it's Talk of the Nation for this Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 27th. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: We've saved a place at our Thanksgiving table for a wonderful writer, Rabbi Harold Kushner. He's the author of several books, including Living a Life That Matters: Overcoming Life's Difficulties and When Bad Things Happen To Good People. It's so good to have you here. Happy Thanksgiving.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Thanks, and a happy Thanksgiving to you and all of your listeners. And thank you for having a place for me.

JOHN BIRGE: You wrote When Bad Things Happen To Good People after your son died. Your son, Aaron, was 14 at the time. What happened on the first Thanksgiving holiday after his death?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Very interesting question. The anniversary of his death came just before Thanksgiving. He died in mid November. It was the day after his birthday, in fact. And that first Thanksgiving, of course, was a total washout. We were still in mourning. A year later, I think we had gained just enough perspective that what we felt was not only the loss, but the very real sense of what we had and what we had in a way that could never be taken away from us.

When Aaron was terminally ill, I knew I would one day try and write a book about his life and death, and what it meant to us, and what it taught me. But the book I would have written that first year would be just nothing but self-pity. Oh, it was so hard, and it was so unfair, and we love him so much, and we miss him. I needed to get a certain amount of distance from that.

By a year later, the first anniversary of his death coming right around the Thanksgiving season, I think it was a very helpful overlap because it stimulated us to realize how much we still had, how much of him had entered permanently into the warp and woof of our lives. And we can be grateful for that. And now, the book I sat down to write just shortly after that first anniversary was not about how much I miss him, but about how much I had learned from his life and death.

JOHN BIRGE: Well, and how much of his life you had taken up into yours going forward.

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: Yes. Aaron is probably the most important teacher I ever had. And so much of what I understand about life, I learned from him. And it came a point, I think, that first thanksgiving, that first anniversary, just about then, that I started to make the transition from missing him to possessing him permanently.

I would go on to tell people in the rest of my rabbinic career that, when something really tragic has happened to you, make it through the first year, the first holiday season, Rosh Hashanah or Christmas, the first anniversary, the first birthday, the first everything. And if you can make it through that one year, you're going to be OK.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: Rabbi Harold Kushner's new book, Overcoming Life's Disappointments, has a lot to say about Thanksgiving as well. And we'll talk with him about that a little later. Just ahead, Thanksgiving on Hardscrabble Mountain, Vermont, with poet Galway Kinnell. But first, we'll spend a little time near Diamond Mountain, Montana, where a river runs through it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mark Isham's music for A River Runs Through It. I'm John Birge and this is Giving Thanks.

Galway Kinnell is one of America's most distinguished poets, and it's a real pleasure to have him here at our Thanksgiving table this year. Welcome. Happy Thanksgiving.

GALWAY KINNELL: Thank you. Same to you.

JOHN BIRGE: Gratitude always speaks to some kind of a connectedness. You have to be thankful for someone or to something. And I'd like you to read a poem called On Hardscrabble Mountain that finds you communing with nature, with the world around you in a really beautiful way.

GALWAY KINNELL: Hardscrabble Mountain is a mountain in Sheffield, Vermont, where I bought a house many, many years ago. And I think I wrote this poem in that house. And it goes like this. "On Hardscrabble Mountain. An old, slashed spruce boughs buoying knee up off the snow. I stretched out on the mountain. Now and then, a bit of snow would slide quietly from a branch.

Once, a last deer fly came by. I could see off for about 100 miles. I waked with a start. The sun had crawled off me. I was shivering in thick blue shadows. Sap had stuck me to the spruce boughs. Far away, I could hear the wind again starting to rise. On the way down, passing the little graveyard in the woods, I gave a thought to the old skulls and bones lying there. And I'd started praying to a bear, just shutting his eyes, to a skunk dozing off, to a marmot with yellow belly, to a dog-faced hedgehog, to a dormouse with a paunch and large ears like leaves or wings."

JOHN BIRGE: I just love how the ending of that turns into a kind of blessing, praying to a bear, a skunk, a hedgehog, all those things that we're connected with in large ways or small ways.

GALWAY KINNELL: Yeah. Perhaps in a conventional or an old-fashioned poem, one might say, and I started praying to the saints and the so on. But the idea of praying to the creatures, to a bear, to a skunk, even down to a dormouse, suddenly produces a blessing over all, which has just transpired.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: Galway kinnell read his poem On Hardscrabble Mountain. If there's Thanksgiving to be found in Hardscrabble, Rabbi Harold Kushner knows just where to find it.

Your most recent book is called Overcoming Life's Disappointments, and it's about the life of Moses. What does Moses have to teach us about gratitude?

RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER: John I think the last and perhaps the greatest lesson that I learned from Moses is precisely on that point. At the end of his life, God has said to him, all those people who made your life miserable for 40 years, they're going to get into the promised land and you're not. And he realizes he has devoted himself so totally, he has abandoned his family, suffered personal losses in the service of God. And now, this is what God is doing for him and he has reason to feel aggrieved.

And somehow he manages to get over that. And the last two chapters of the five books of Moses, the last two chapters of Deuteronomy, are a hymn of praise to God and a hymn of blessing to the Jewish people. And he becomes the paradigm for me and the great teacher of how much happier and more acceptable your life is in its last stages when you have purged yourself of the regrets, and the bitterness, and what if, and I deserve better, and you can genuinely be happy for what you had.

It's a choice. The great psychiatrist, Victor Frankel, has taught me one of the enduring truths. You have no control over what people do to you. You have total control over how you respond to it. Moses responds to a life that had its triumphs and its unfairness by concentrating on the triumphs, by being grateful for what he was given, and transcending, not overlooking, not pretending to forget, but transcending all the things he deserved and did not get. And in that, I think that's the lesson for all of us at this season, at any season.

JOHN BIRGE: Rabbi Harold Kushner. His latest book is Overcoming Life's Disappointments.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We're sharing our Thanksgiving harvest with a great American poet, Galway Kinnell. Galway, you once said that part of a poem's usefulness in the world is that it pays some of our huge unpaid tribute to the things and creatures that share the Earth with us. And so I wanted to have you read just one more short poem. This one's very much about paying tribute, about being grateful. And it's called In Fields of Summer.

GALWAY KINNELL: "In Fields of Summer. The sun rises, the goldenrod blooms. I drift in fields of summer. My life is adrift in my body. It shines in my heart and hands, in my teeth. It shines up at the old crane who holds out his drainpipe of a neck and creaks along in the blue. And the goldenrod shines with its life too. And the grass, look, the great field wavers and flakes. The rumble of bumblebees keeps deepening. A phoebe flutters up a lark bursts up all dew."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN BIRGE: That's a beautiful grace.

GALWAY KINNELL: That pleases me to hear that.

JOHN BIRGE: Galway Kinnell, thank you so much.

GALWAY KINNELL: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

JOHN BIRGE: Happy Thanksgiving.

GALWAY KINNELL: Thank you.

JOHN BIRGE: In the soaring spaces of Chartres Cathedral and in high altitude epiphanies of Jack Kerouac, Charles Laughton found grace and gratitude for the creative spirit that connects us all.

CHARLES LAUGHTON: I wanted to bring to your notice a piece by very modern writer indeed. He is from San Francisco. He's of the so-called Beat generation. In fact, I have heard him called a beatnik, but I think that's unjust. His name is Jack Kerouac. This is from a book of Jack Kerouac's, which is called The Dharma Bums.

Apparently, Jack Kerouac, or rather, the character in his book, had been around the bars and burlesque shows in San Francisco too much. He had a stomach full of that, so he went high, high up in the Cascade Mountains to a cabin there to get together with himself. And in the last days of his stay there, he had what amounts to a religious experience. And this is the account of it.

"Morning, the definite feeling of autumn coming. I chop wood with my hat on and would feel lazy and wonderful indoors, fogged in by icy clouds. In front of the stove, I read my Western magazines. Night made hot cocoa and sang by the wood fire. Dark, wild nights with hint of bears. Down in my garbage pit, old, soured, solidified cans of evaporated milk bitten into and torn apart by mightily behemoth paws.

And finally, the snow came. It came swirling my way, sending radiant white heralds through which I saw the angel of light peep and the wind rose. Suddenly, a green and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not 300 yards away from my door like a bolt, like a pillar. It came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling. The lake was milk white a mile below. It was just too crazy.

I went outside and, suddenly, my shadow was ringed by the rainbow as I walked on the hilltop. A lovely, haloed mystery making me want to pray. And I said, God, I love you. And I looked up to the sky. And I really meant it. I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all one way or the other.

Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities. And I've grown two months older. And there's all that humanity of bars, and burlesque shows, and gritty love all upside down in the void. God bless them. And in keeping with my friend Jaffe's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp, we left to the one in the Sierra and the others in Marin County.

As I was hiking down the mountain with my pack, I turned and knelt on the trail and said, thank you, shack. And then I added, blah, with a little grin, because I knew that shack and the mountain would understand what that meant. And I turned and went on down the trail back to this world." Now, that isn't bad for a man who's been called a beatnik, is it?

[APPLAUSE]

You know, quite a lot of this jazzy modern art has got something religious about it. Well, I know a man who's supposed to be the most important living sculptor. His name is Henry Moore. And Henry Moore once said to me about the painting of a very modern French abstract painter who is called Soulages. That's S-O-U-L-A-G-E-S. He said, the painting of Soulages at its best is like the thunder of the voice of God.

Henry Moore is the man that makes those statues with a holes through them. He seems to be able to follow the form of the statue through the air. In fact, I know him quite well. And I once said to him, Henry, I'm going to ask you a fool question. You must have been asked it hundreds of times before, but please don't give me the same answer. How did you come across that idea of the holes? And he said, I was cutting so deep into the heart of a stone that I discovered the sky on the other side.

Henry Moore makes some of those great big statues of reclining nude women. And if you see any of them in a book or you see any in a museum, notice something, look for something. The most beautiful part of those reclining female figures is always the back of the neck and the shoulders.

Well, Henry was born in the same part of England that I was. It's up in Yorkshire, which is a rather damp, unpleasant climate. And his father was a coal miner and his mother had rheumatism because of the damp climate. And when Henry was a boy, he used to rub his mother's neck and her back to take away the pain of the rheumatism. And his sensitive artist's hands have never forgotten the form of his mother's shoulders.

But I'm digressing. I get talking and there I go. I was only trying to make the point that all of this modern art isn't necessarily trash by a long, long chalk. Oh, yeah, I'll tell you a story. This is a story about something that happened to me. It happened to me over a period of 40 years. But don't worry, it doesn't take that long to tell.

[LAUGHTER]

It's a story about ancient and modern art and it's a true story. When I was 19 years old, I was on my first holiday in Europe and I was on my way to Switzerland. And I took a day side trip to Chartres in France, which is about 50 miles outside Paris, because I'd been told that the Cathedral of Chartres was the most beautiful cathedral in the world.

And it was very bright, sunny day. And when you went into the cathedral, it was like going into a gulf of blackness. And there was some minutes before the colors of the great stained glass windows of Chartres emerged from the darkness. There are blues that you can't imagine, scarlets, and golds, and greens, and purples, and grays.

And when I was a kid, I had Mother Goose stories read to me. And I remember lying in bed at night thinking of Aladdin's cave with its heaps of rubies, and emeralds, and amethysts, and topaz scintillating In the dark. Well, it takes a good deal to top a child's imagination of the glittering beauty of precious stones. But the stained glass windows of Chartres did that.

And there was something else too. My favorite American painter, Morris Graves, once said to me, Chartres is a staircase to heaven. Well, I was lost in wonder in front of one of the windows. I learned afterwards it was quite a famous window. It was called Our Lady of the Beautiful Stained Glass. And a little old man walked in between me and the window. At least, he looked old to me. Then he must have been in his middle 50s. He wouldn't look old to me now. And he had a little alpaca coat on and one of those French oval hats, like you see in the paintings of medieval artisans.

And I said to him in French, excuse me, sir, but would you kindly tell me if that is a 12th or 13th century window? And he looked around and he had very bright eyes and he'd one of those overlarge French mustaches. And he went on looking at me for a long time, so long that I got embarrassed. And eventually, he said, that is a very curious question for such a young man to be asking. That is a 12th century window and it's one of the most beautiful in the cathedral.

And he went on looking at me and he said, what are you doing at 3 o'clock this afternoon? Well, I had a train to catch at 1 o'clock for Switzerland, but that was very quickly forgotten and I said I was doing nothing. So at 3 o'clock, he started to show me the cathedral. He didn't only show me about the periods of art and the cathedral, but he taught me about the structure of medieval society.

In those great stained glass windows there, way back in the 12th century, many of them were contributed by the trade unions of the day, by the vintners, the furriers, the stonemasons, and so on, because there are little plaques of their trade in the windows. And then he'd taken the stand at certain places where you would get special compositions of the stone pillars and perspective of the stained glass windows.

And then he'd say, come back and see this and the light at 5 o'clock. And then he'd be waiting for me at 5 o'clock. And then after that, he'd say, come back and see this in the early morning light. Well, it finished by my staying three days at Chartres. And I went on my holiday to Switzerland. And I learnt afterwards that I'd been taught by a very famous man. His name was Etienne Houvet. He was the head guardian of the cathedral and he'd written all the important books about it.

Well, 25 years later, I was making a movie in Paris and I went down to Chartres again. And Etienne Houvet was still there in his 80s now, very bent, flat feet like a waiter, white, grizzled hair, the same sharp, bright eyes. And he looked at me for a long time and he said, where have you been for 25 years?

[LAUGHTER]

Yes, I was very touched because the incident had meant something to him as heaven knows it had to me. I was also rather ashamed because I hadn't been back to see the man who had taught me so much. And he said, what became of you? I said, I became an actor. He said, are you successful? I said, yes. He said, come along. I'll show you what I showed you 25 years ago.

It was like a solemn ritual in memory of my youth. And I remember when we parted that time, he said to me, well, if you don't come and see me for another 25 years, I shall certainly be dead. But they'll give me a cathedral up there to show people around. And if you've behaved yourself, I'll show you around that one too.

[LAUGHTER]

That's the last time I saw him because, two years later, he was dead. Well, now, the story changes direction a little. I suppose the most sought after of all the French modern abstract painters is a man called Alfred Manessier. That's M-A-N-E-S-S-I-E-R. And I'd always wanted to own a Manessier. And one day, I bought one in Paris.

Oh, it's got a background of purple, blue. And there's a tumbling force of green, blue, and black, and vermilion, and violet rose tumbling through the picture. And there was an echo of something else that had happened to me in that picture, but I didn't know what it was at the time.

But that evening, the evening of the day, I bought the picture, I met Manessier for the first time. We were very shy with each other. We're very good friends now. But eventually, he told me that what he'd been trying to show in this painting was the pursuit of man by God. And the tumbling force of color through the purple, blue of the upper air was a representation of the spirit of God in pursuit of the soul of man.

Well, that year I was at Stratford on Avon in England, where Shakespeare was born. And I was acting in Shakespeare. I was acting King Lear there. And I had a letter from Manessier asking me if I'd be the first person to see his new collection of paintings. Well, it's a very great honor to be asked to be the first person to see a great artist's new paintings. So I had three days off from the theater and I went over.

I saw the paintings, and as I was leaving, before lunch, I was making my excuses to the household because I didn't want to burden the household. Manessier said to me, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to Chartres Cathedral, because that's only about 14 miles away from Manessier's farm. And he said, I'm coming along with you.

Well, in the automobile on the way there, my heart was pounding with excitement at the idea of seeing the great stained glass windows through the eyes of the great painter. And unaccountably, the purple blues, and the green blues, and the blacks, and the vermilions, and the violet rose of the painting I owned were swirling around in my mind. It was just as if pieces of a puzzle were trying to fit themselves together.

And I suddenly had a wild suspicion. And I said to Manessier, did you know Houvet? And there was a long, long pause. And then he said, you too. And so we didn't speak to each other all the way to Chartres Cathedral. We were too moved that this man had picked us out. And so when we got to the cathedral, we ran about like children. Shown us the same thing, said many of the same things to us.

And it finished up by standing underneath the great central tower of Chartres. And there, the stone pillars go up, and up, and up until the stone seems to lose all weight, and the great stone roof seems to float in the air above your head. And Manessier looked down to me and said, we have good fathers, you and I. And that's the end of the story.

[APPLAUSE]

Well, those two things were about religious experiences. And now, there's a third thing here about a religious experience. This is a Psalm, and it is a song by a man who felt his creator and all the wonders of nature around him. And if you want to look it up, it's Psalm 104. It goes like this.

"O Lord, my God, Thou art very great. Thou art clothed with honor and majesty who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment too. Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, who laid the foundations of the Earth that it should not be removed forever.

The waters stood above the mountains of Thy rebuke. They fled at the voice of Thy thunder, they hasted away. They go down by the valleys unto the place which Thou hast founded for them. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man that he may bring forth food out of the Earth, and wine that make us glad, the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart. The trees of the Lord are full of sap where the birds make their nests.

As for the stalk, the fir trees are her house. Thou makest darkness. And it is night wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. O, Lord, how manifold are Thy works. The Earth is full of Thy riches. So is this great and wide sea wherein are things creeping innumerable. There go the ships. There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to play therein. He looketh on the Earth and it trembleth. He toucheth the hills and they smoke. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live. I will be glad in the Lord."

I suppose all you can gather from those three things. Is that the spirit goes on. It goes on from the Psalms to the great medieval artists, to a great medieval scholar, to a great French painter, to an actor, to a writer from San Francisco who's been called a beatnik. Same thing, you know. And it'll go on from there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing

He chastens and hastens His will to make known

The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing

Sing praises to His name

He forgets not His own

[MELODIC HARMONIZING]

Beside us to guide us

Our God with us joining

Ordaining, maintaining His kingdom divine

So from the beginning the fight we were winning

Thou, Lord, was at our side, all glory be Thine

[MELODIC HARMONIZING]

We all do extol Thee, Thou leader triumphant

And pray that Thou still our defender will be

Let Thy congregation escape tribulation

Thy name be ever praised

O, Lord make us free

JOHN BIRGE: We Gather Together, arranged by Stephen Paulus for the Dale Warland Singers. Before that, actor Charles Laughton, from a long out-of-print LP called The Storyteller that won a Grammy award back in 1962. Laughton read the 104th Psalm, an excerpt from the Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, and told his Chartres Cathedral story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You've been listening to Giving Thanks, a celebration of fall, food, and gratitude. You can hear the program again and get the playlist at our website. There's also a 10-year archive of past shows. And if you want to email questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Go to americanpublicmedia.org and click on Giving Thanks.

I produce the show with lots of help from some extraordinary talents. Many Thanks to Galway Kinnell and Rabbi Harold Kushner for their time, their words, and their generous spirit. Giving Thanks is a production of American Public Media. I'm John Birge. Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 4: American Public Media.