Come, ye thankful people, com

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 11, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As Thanksgiving approaches, let us talk about gratitude in the midst of difficult circumstances.

Call to Worship
Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Writings to Young Women”

As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.

Meditation reading
Sharad Vivek Sagar

Let’s be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Sehna on that great day, those men and ,vornefi who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Maficrelas eVery single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet.

Sermon

Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You’re excited, yes, happy that all the Hallmark holiday movies are starting up, or entering into the Little Drummer Boy contest, where the person who goes the longest without hearing that song, but you can also feel irritable and tense, nothing looks fun, you can’t think. When your soul is getting sick, it’s time to dust off your spiritual practice. Not that you dust it off just when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty dishwater of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

A lot of people on Facebook are practicing gratitude by naming one thing they’re thankful for each day. I really like reading those posts. Gratitude is one of my favorite spiritual practices. It doesn’t require equipment, and it’s so simple that you don’t really have to feel guilty if you forget it for a couple of weeks and pick it back up. When I stop to think about what I’m grateful for, it brings me into the present moment. We suffer sometimes when we live in the past with the things that hurt us or our family, and when we live in the future with all of the bad things that may happen.

Most spiritual teachers urge us to stay in the present moment as much as we can, and to fill our minds with the things that are good, and the people who are good. It’s easy these days to get addicted to outrage, and it’s all appropriate, but it strengthens me to better deal with the outrageous events if I hold on to my spirit, and gratitude helps me do that. That is the purpose of a spiritual practice: to build your resilience, to make your spirit sturdy so you are not as easily knocked off balance. When I think about balance, I think about the martial arts training I had years ago that taught me I was harder to knock over if I kept my center of gravity low. To me this means not trying to live up here in my head more than I live in my heart and my gut. It means not having to be perfect in all things, which makes you brittle and defensive. It means having the humility to get peaceful with saying “I could be wrong.” It means being okay with learning from other people, and with leaning on other people. It you can’t be wrong, and if you hate to be helped, you are more of a pain to everyone around you. People who are grateful are easier and more fun to help. Their center of gravity is lower because they are reminding themselves that they are not doing all of this by themselves, that they have help, that they are not alone. Gratitude trains our habits of attention.

Habits of attention are your go-to things to notice in a situation. Some people can go to a nice restaurant and only remember the loud couple at the table nearby Ð they gave them their whole experience. Some people can go on a drive and hold on to the guy who cut them off in traffic, fuming and missing all the beauty and fresh air. Some people look out a window at a gorgeous autumn day and say “Oh my goodness, this window needs cleaning!” We need to notice these things, we need folks who can clock what’s not working well in a system, but it has to be balanced with a habit of noticing goodness and beauty. And being grateful for it.

Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart says if you only ever said “thank you” as a prayer, it would be a good prayer life.

Cicero, born about a century before Rabbi Jesus, wrote: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others,” he said. By the 18th century, the free-market thinker Adam Smith, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” supposed that people who did not feel gratitude were only cheating themselves out of happiness in life. And in the 19th century, Immanuel Kant described ingratitude with “the essence of vileness.”

We certainly don’t want to participate in the “essence of vileness,” so let’s take a moment to think about something for which we are grateful. Now take another deep breath and try to feel it in addition to thinking it. ….

One of the things the board of trustees does here is write thank you notes to volunteers who have helped hold up the sky here at First UU. It’s fun to sit around thinking about the events that have been brought to the community, the people who help with fixing things and chairing ministry teams and helping with our sanctuary work, people who go to meetings and reach out to other organizations in town and who visit with Alirio and who decorate for Thanksgiving Dinner here which is happening on Thursday at 3:00 and people who teach the children and some who teach adults and people who coordinate justice work and welcome folks who come to the church or call on weekdays. So many people do so much, and its nice to think about them with the board and then write and sign notes to them. It feels good.

Now I’m going to ask you to breathe together with me for a moment and think of a person who has helped you, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, a supporter, someone who made a difference in your life. I’m going to invite you, if you have a phone with you, or if you want to write it on your oos, to make a thank you note right now to them. If they are still living, you might want to send it. If not, it will do the universe some good anyway for you to write it. You are welcome to write while I’m talking. It will not hurt my feelings. It will make me happy.

In the Jewish scriptures, in the book of Proverbs (17:22) it says “A merry heart does good like a medicine: but a broken spirit dries the bones.” Social and psychological research is beginning to bear this out.

Psychologists are beginning to take gratitude seriously as a field of research. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, says: “Psychology has generally ignored the positive emotions. We tend to study the things that can go wrong in people’s minds but not the things that can go right. Gratitude research is beginning to suggest that feelings of thankfulness have tremendous positive value in helping people cope with daily problems, especially stress, and to achieve a positive sense of the self.”

Studies are beginning to indicate that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others and either to God or to creation in general tend to have higher vitality, more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. These results hold even when researchers factor out such things as age, health, and income, equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty might have “more to be grateful for.”

Psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, whose specialty is well-being research, says he recently became interested in gratitude when he saw studies suggesting that increasing a person’s sense of thankfulness could lead to lower stress and better life “outcomes,” meaning success in career and relationships. Gratitude isn’t even listed in the 1999 addition of the presumably encyclopedic “Encyclopedia of Human Emotions,” a standard psychology text. “But if a sense of thankfulness can turn someone’s life from bitter to positive,” McAdams notes, “that makes gratitude an important aspect of psychology.”

Gratitude reminds us that there is more going on than just our one life. When we say thanks, as we did last night at our elegant Thanksgiving dinner in this room, thanks for food and drink, for friendship and sustenance, for beauty and for love, we acknowledge that we are part of a web of life, that the Spirit of Life flows through it all. Some call that God, and believe that it is benevolent toward us. For others, it is enough just that Being is so large and powerful and mysterious. That in itself makes it worthy of our awe. A grateful heart keeps us open, so thanks can flow out to those who are working hard, toward those who have offered our gifts, and so we can receive the next thing that is coming. It reminds us that we do not control all of what happens, so we enjoy it while it is here. “He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise.” (William Blake, 1757 – 1827).

Enlightened travelers of life don’t mourn because joy fades; they smile because it happened. Watch, this Holiday season, for joy to fly around you. I hope it does.

We start by being grateful for things. We move into being grateful in all things. Let me end with the words of Dag Hammarskjšld: To Everything that has been–thanks For Everything that will be–yes.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 18 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.