Gratitude

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life."

-Melody Beattie

This year has brought a perhaps unprecedented number of disasters both natural and man-made. Tsunamis and hurricanes and floods and earthquakes. Wars, and rumors of wars. The principalities and powers of this world continue to hold their destructive sway over the lives of innocent people. So why, you might well ask, should we be grateful at all?

If Parisa is right, we should be thankful that we have lived to see another day. We should give thanks for the gift of life where there might well have been none. We have survived, and like those pilgrims of old, we are asked to stop and take the time to give thanks that we have been brought thus far along the perilous journey of life.

Thanksgiving Day as we know it did not start with those far off settlers in Plymouth Bay Colony. They gave thanks because the Bible told them so, in the Book of Deuteronomy. Thanksgiving Day actually started during the American Civil War, in 1863. Hardly a propitious time to give thanks, in the midst of so much death and destruction! It was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed a national "day of Thanksgiving and Praise . . . with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience. . . ." We don’t generally like to look at our "perverseness and disobedience," at least not head on. We like to think that we are mostly good and beloved of God and that our causes are just. We hear it all the time from the lips of politicians and preachers and pundits: "God bless America." Lincoln knew better.

Lincoln knew that there was no guarantee that God was on his side. He knew that there was more than enough guilt to go around, that both the North and the South deserved blame as well as sympathy. He was wary of any sense of superiority or righteousness on the part of himself or those who were his followers.

Our gratitude must ever be tempered by the recognition that our good fortune is, in large part, a mystery. As Parisa Parsa wrote, "It’s not a gift we get because we’re more clever, or virtuous, or even lucky. It’s a gift we get from we know not where, and most of the time we know not why."

Boston Globe columnist and former priest James Carroll has written that although we may offer our thanks to a god,

The truth is . . . no one knows definitively who that is. At a certain level, we are all agnostics. The very word "who," with all its implication of personality, is more than many people want to say at all. Certain believers may find the radical otherness of God contradicted by all such anthropomorphic references. The faith of many others, altern- atively, thrives in a setting of highly personal images applied to God, taken quite literally by some, metaphorically by others.

The spirit religion of native peoples, Calvinist Puritanism, Anglicanism, the Catholic faith, the Orthodox traditions, the Scripture- centered worship of Anabaptists, African-American gospel religion, the faith of Jews--and lately of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Confuc- ianists and Sikhs: The American imagination is like a window with many colors, allowing the light of religious experience to shine through, in William James’ great word, in all its varieties--including "through a glass darkly." As the winter solstice will soon remind us, the utter absence of light can be a faith, too.

We may not always feel that life is such a wonderful gift. Beset by whatever it is that ails us, tormented by pain or emptied by grief or loneliness, we may not feel very thankful at all. But as the morning prayer by Richard Gilbert hopefully suggests, "Always there is beauty and joy and meaning/ Glimmering beneath the blanket of depression and despair." How do we keep our eyes on that prize? How do we keep the attitude of gratitude and not succumb to our fears?

There are times in life, in every life, when we may feel that our lives have gotten off the path, when we are unsure of the direction we should take, and when we wonder if we will ever rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose for ourselves. At those times it may be difficult if not impossible to be grateful for what we are and have. But it is precisely at such times that we need most to keep burning inside ourselves what the late Paul Carnes [former President of the UUA] once called "that flame of hope which carries us through the many causes of despair which life inexorably brings to us all." Indeed, we need to be thankful every moment for whatever small embers of hope continue to burn within us.

Melody Beattie has written that "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow." I believe her, but I also know how difficult it can be to keep that faith.

All of us have experienced desert times in our lives, or will. No one in this life will be spared the pain of grief. All of us live in the foreknowledge of our own mortality. Life is sometimes unfair and often difficult. Still, I believe that it beats the alternative. And there is help available for many if not all of our hurts if we are willing to say "yes" to life and to reach out to our fellow travelers along the way. We are surrounded by more love than we may know. And sometimes, as James Carroll implies, it is in the darkness that we begin to see the light.

My colleague Sylvia Howe in Beverly has written in a prayer,

This desire to do something in return brings the sense of gratitude full circle. For how many times, in my own life, have I discovered that it is in doing something, almost anything, for others or for a good cause that I have found my own sense of gratitude for life returning or growing? It is often as I step outside of myself and of my own troubles and preoccupations that I begin to experience again the sense of thankfulness for what I am and for what I have.

It is as we let go of our own egos, as we practice compassion and selflessness and self-forgetfulness, that we are freed. In a lecture I attended last week, Karen Armstrong, the wise and prolific contemporary writer on religious topics, called this a kind of "immortality" in life. Our egos, she said, "distort our vision" and "limit" us. But to go beyond our limitations is to achieve a kind of immortality and to discover moments of joy, peace, and serenity.

I began this sermon with a question: what are we going to do with that sense of gratitude for the gift of life which is both unearned and undeserved? Armstrong would say that the only proper response is compassion and altruism. If we all practiced the golden rule, and did unto others as we would have them do unto us, we could have our immortality today, right in the here and now. It is what Jesus meant, I think, when he said that in order to find our lives, we must first be willing to lose them. One way to lose them is in doing good. That is what religion is really all about. It is simple, and it is universal. And God knows we need it.

It all begins with gratitude. As James Carroll writes of the observance of the Thanksgiving holiday,

A bowed head, a raised glass, the squeeze of a neighbor’s fingers, a song, a silence--all such expressions on this preeminently American day respect both each individual’s freedom of conscience and the very mystery of God, which finally eludes every attempt at definition except, perhaps, this Thursday’s. When we are lucky enough to discover at the very core of our beings an overflowing well of gratitude, it is God to whom we instinctively offer it. Who is God? Let this be enough: god is the one we thank.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock