Grateful. Grateful. Grateful. Grateful. Gratefulness flowing from my heart.[1]
That may be as good a summary of today’s message as we’re going to get. That beautiful piece—thank you quartet—was a gift. A call to begin with gratitude.
We get the message at an early age that it is important to say thank you. When a child receives help or when they are given something, we encourage them—indeed we expect them—to say thank you. Much of this, I think, is about good manners. It is just important to say please first, and then to say thank you.
But I have also come to know that that is a good spiritual practice, no matter what age or stage in life we might be. To express gratitude for the blessings in our lives. And sometimes more than others it may be that we need to lean into that practice—and this may be one of those times.
This Thanksgiving, to state the obvious, won’t be the usual Thanksgiving for many of us. And while that call to say thank you might be there, truth be told some of us may at least be a little grudging in our response. In talking with many of you the last couple weeks I’ve heard some real struggles this year. Struggles about what is safe in this pandemic time weighed against traditions with family and friends. Just what is this holiday if we are not with the people we love? You add to that, almost like the layers of an onion if you will, so much that is uncertain right now. Not only are we facing this new and devastating spike in COVID cases and renewed restrictions on gatherings and so many people affected economically and emotionally. But with that we have a sore loser Commander-in-Chief, with divisions in our country that only seem to be getting worse by the day. And with that fears of what the long-term consequences might be on our democracy.
No, this will be anything but our usual Thanksgiving. And—and—it might be at such a time in the midst of a lot of noise and loss and uncertainty—it may be in this particular moment when we need to be called back to some of the basics, when we to be reminded of some the practices that might help us as we navigate through this time.
It was the 13th century mystic Meister Eckhart who said, “If the only prayer you say in your life is “thank you,” that would suffice.”
Gratitude is, I think, is a kind of primal expression, recognition, of our lives and what it is we have been given. That gratitude is a recognition of all that we are in relationship with. And maybe that is the first thing to say about gratitude, that it is a recognition of how it is we are connected with life. Perhaps we notice it most in those moments when we are called out of ourselves by beauty or by someone else does.
This is how Galen Guengerich, minister of All Souls Unitarian in New York describes it:
“Gratitude has its basis in our awareness of all the things that have come our way from the people and world around us. We begin with this inescapable reality: we are contingent creatures. We depend on our environment for everything we need. We depend on the largess of the natural world for our very existence, and we depend on the people around us for the quality of our ongoing lives. Without the natural world, we wouldn’t have air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat.”[2]
It begins with parents who nurture us along the way. And we have extended family and teachers and mentors as well. We have institutions that help us, like schools, like communities of faith; we have medical care (if we are so privileged) and governments that help us structure our lives and the lives of the larger community. We have art and music and sport and all that connects us with something larger.
We are individuals, yes, but our individual lives exist in a larger context. And perhaps the spiritual task begins there, in that recognition of our interdependence. It begins with the recognition that we as individuals really don’t amount to much outside the relationships we have with families and with communities—sometimes with people we don’t even know. Through all that we are asked to see in our individual lives the lives of others. Part of the spiritual task is to recognize and honor that, to try to put our struggles and our blessings into context.
In his book This is Water, David Foster Wallace finds himself at the end of an exhausting day in the middle of what he describes as an exasperating week. His words: “You are hungry, tired, and desperate to get home. The store is crowded, the light is harsh, the lines are long and everyone is annoying.” In this situation, Wallace says, “my natural default setting is that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to get home. And who in the world are all of these people, and why are they in my way?” That what happens, he says, “when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that may immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”
He continues that there is another option: “I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is probably just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people actually have much harder, more tedious or painful lives that I do.” Maybe the man yelling into his cell phone has a son in prison. Maybe the woman blocking the aisle to the ice cream freezer has just been laid off. Maybe the impossibility slow checkout clerk has just been dumped by her boyfriend.”
As human beings, Wallace says, we are able to choose what we pay attention to and how we construct meaning. These choices involve “attention, and awareness, and discipline and effort and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them.” The key, he concludes, is awareness: awareness of what is real and essential, what’s hidden in plain sight all around us.[3]
The Hebrew term for gratitude means “recognizing the good.” Practicing gratitude is about recognizing what’s good in our lives, even when we may be facing our share of things that are not so good. If you have been laid off from your job but have good health and are able to work, you can be grateful for that. If your physical vitality has been declining, but your mind remains keen, you can be grateful for that. The first century rabbi Simeon ben Zoma said “who is rich? Those who are happy with what they have.”[4]
It is important to name and to recognize suffering in the world. But is it also important in all that to not lose sight of what we have. We know the stories of people who have been faced with a serious health condition or have faced some other tragedy in their lives. That experience is a kind of coming face to face with life and in the process to put it all in perspective, to not take all that we have for granted.
And sometimes when things don’t go well, when we lose someone precious, when we suddenly find our lives shut down, when things are not the way they have always been, that is when we are asked to pause and to take stock and to maybe see things that we haven’t seen before. To remember the relationships in our lives and what they bring our way.
The spirit asks us to be present with the world—not just when things are good. Not just when the sun is shining. The spirit asks us to be present when things are difficult, when things are broken—when we may feel as if we ourselves are broken.
The writer Anne Lamott says: “Gratitude contains a heightened and amazed realization of how much goodness is marbled into our strange and sometimes hard, annoying lives. This catches us by surprise, as if we are children, and a sudden breeze is playing with our spirits, as if with paper planes, lifting us, restoring our sense of buoyancy, where before there was the opposite — the worried, the trudge, endless calculations and scheming, numbness.
She goes on, “Gratitude tugs on our sleeves and says, “Wake up!” Look around at the kindness that surrounds us, the love we are being shown, the hope that now makes sense. Emily Dickinson wrote that “hope inspires the good to reveal itself,” and we can be taken aback by a sense of amazement at how much someone has shared with us, or even sacrificed, for us, for cranky, secretive, mealy-mouthed you, and me.”[5]
Part of our job here is to show up and to pay attention. To be open to those moments of grace when they come our way.
In 2016, Wanda Dench didn’t know her grandson had changed his phone number when she invited him to her house for Thanksgiving dinner at 3 p.m. sharp. First there was confusion from the apparent stranger on the receiving end of the text, then an exchange of selfies. “You not my grandma,” texted Jamal Hinton, then a 17-year-old high school senior. “Can I still get a plate though?”
“Of course you can,” responded Dench, now 63, of Mesa, Ariz. “That’s what grandma’s do … feed everyone.”
That was the beginning of a holiday tradition you may have heard about. The young man tweeted photos of their exchange, promptly drawing the internet’s attention; Dench received so many requests for plates that year that she had to change her number. A few weeks later, Hinton took Dench up on the offer, and the pair and their families celebrated that Thanksgiving together — and each one since.
This year’s holiday will be different for Thanksgiving Grandma, as it will for millions of other people. Dench’s husband, Lonnie, died of the coronavirus in April. And Dench and Hinton weighed the risks of holding a Thanksgiving celebration during the pandemic. They wondered if they could find a way to celebrate together early in the day, before splitting off to see their respective families, but decided the risk of spread was too great.
Instead of a large multifamily event, the two had a small dinner this past Friday, where they gave thanks and talked about their friendship and about Mr. Dench’s death. During their meal, they kept a burning candle and portrait of Mr. Dench in front of his seat at the table.
“It’s going to be different, my first Thanksgiving without him,” she said. “My husband was always right behind me, telling me how proud he was of Jamal and me for what we’ve done.”
That chance encounter in 2016 blossomed into a deep friendship. “After meeting her the first time I just knew, she’s another person, age is really just a number,” said Hinton, who is now 21 and works as a car salesman. “It doesn’t matter, you can be friends with anybody, you can be family with anybody.”[6]
For many of us this year, this will be a holiday marked by loss, be it the death of a loved one or just the loss of the traditions we have known. And hopefully it will be the relationships in our lives—near or far, expected or unexpected—that will sustain us.
I expect that years from now as we look back, this year of 2020 it will be remembered. All too often years have a way of blending together and one Thanksgiving can be hard to separate from the others. Not this year.
And perhaps with the losses, with so much that has happened, with uncertainty about what the future holds, perhaps in all of that might also come opportunity. Just as an accidental text began a relationship with two strangers, what might we discover in this time that can feel so different from other times? Maybe in this time is an invitation to be grateful, to be mindful, to give thanks for the blessings in our lives. A renewed awareness that we can’t take anything for granted. And that what’s important, ultimately, are the relationships in our lives. That what we have there is a kind of foundation upon which all the rest is based. And that it is from that place that we live–with other people, yes, but with animals and plants, with the creation around us, with all that sustains our lives and the lives of those we love.
Any maybe, just maybe, it can also be an invitation that can take us out of our comfort zones, those familiar places that can help us maintain the status quo. One of the gifts with disruptions is that they do shake things up. They may make us aware of our privilege, of our blind spots. They may call us to be aware of people maybe we haven’t been so aware of before. Of black and brown lives, of trans lives, of people with different abilities. They may make us aware on some new level of the systems of oppression we are all part of and perhaps the benefits that have come our way whether we have asked for them or not. The things that may ask us to see our lives in a much larger context, in some much larger whole.
Saying thank you is a recognition that we are in relationship with everything and everyone else in this creation. It is a recognition that starts with the fact that we are utterly dependent for everything that allows us to live.
Words of Alice Walker:
I do not doubt that you are there
and that I am also, in some future
past time;
and that together
we are enjoying it all.
And so I thank you,
Great Awareness
in which I also live,
for Calla Lillies
and Birds
and Hollyhocks
and Bougainvillea
and the aroma
of a good posole
and the fit of a new dress.
There are then the stars
that I love
and the rivers
I adore
and the single leaves
of trees in which I can
lose my temporary
this moment self in.
The sheer wonder
of it all.
And women marching
everywhere!
And being the most
wondrous of the human lot
with their amazing capacity
to recreate the human universe.
Oh, Great and Everlasting Awareness
I have been with you
while looking for you
all my long life!
And here you turn up
today
as you do everyday
as myself,
all the awakened women,
children,
and men,
in the world,
and everything else.[7]
Each week at the end of our service as part of the benediction we offer a statement of thanks for this day we have been given and are asked to rejoice in it and to be glad.
Gratitude is not something that happens just on thanksgiving. It is not something that just happens when everything in our lives is great. In fact it is when things are not great, when we are out of our usual patterns, when we know loss, when we know fear and uncertainty, perhaps those are the times when we most need to call ourselves to that place of thanks. No matter where it is we find ourselves on this thanksgiving may we begin in that place of gratitude, even if it may be a little grudging, and may that help all of us to recognize all that holds us, that love that will never let us go.
May this be so. Amen.
Let us pray: God of mystery and wonder, god of hope and of joy, god of uncertainty and loss, help us as we find our way. Remind us to breathe, remind us to pay attention. Remind us to give thanks for all the blessings we know. For the voices of children, for the wisdom of old people, for the love that comes our way in unexpected moments, even in the midst of disruption. May the gratitude we know ground us and sustain us. May it help us to recognize our interdependence—that we need others and that others need us too. Help us to open ourselves to see all that life offers us. Help us to say thank you over and over again. Amen.
Benediction: As you go forth into this day, remember that you are blessed. And remember that you are a blessing. May you use your gifts to bless the world.
This is the day we have been given. Let us rejoice in it and be glad. Go in peace. Practice love. Amen.
[1] Grateful by Hezekiah Walker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=yE0W-kQyz6A&feature=share
[2] The Way of Gratitude: A New Spirituality for Today by Galen Guengerich, pp 60. Random House New York, 2020.
[3] Guengerich, pp 98-99.
[4] Guengerich, pp 62.
[5] https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott/posts/today-is-world-gratitude-day-im-sharing-this-piece-i-wrote-last-year-as-gratitud/945895655540078/
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/wanda-dench-jamal-hinton-thanksgiving.html?searchResultPosition=1
[7] https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2017/01/prayer-to-the-great-awareness-for-the-awakening/
Topics: Prayer