Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera "The Tender Land" may be set in springtime, and he may have borrowed the Shaker hymn “Zion’s Walls” for the melody, but none of that matters to me.
Librettist Erik Johns’s lyrics for “The Promise of Living” make this stand-alone chorus feel like a true Thanksgiving hymn. In the opera, the neighbors sing of “hope and thanksgiving that is born of our loving our friends and our labor.”
Then the chorus lists its blessings: “Give thanks for the sunshine. Give thanks for the rain.”
Those simple lines may be more profound than the Depression era characters could have recognized at the time. Today, scientists are searching the universe for exoplanets — for worlds that might hold even a promise of living.
To support life as we currently understand it, a planet must orbit a relatively stable star at just the right distance, in the “habitable zone.” Astronomers often call it the “Goldilocks zone,” because it is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water.
But even that is only a beginning. A living world must also have the chemical ingredients for life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen... the building blocks found throughout Earth’s biosphere.
And then something else must occur.
Here on Earth, green plants slowly evolved the ability to capture the energy of our star and convert it into food and release oxygen. A process that took billions of years to develop.
As we search outward across countless stars and countless galaxies, we naturally wonder: Is Earth unique? Could we truly be the only place with the promise of living?
And yet, whether life exists elsewhere or not, what matters is that we are here, with blessings we can share. We have sunshine and rain, friends and neighbors, and the capacity to care for one another.
So let us be joyful.
Let us be grateful for the promise of living, for the promise of growing with faith and with knowing, born of our sharing our love with our neighbors.
