Gratitude

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 23, 2014

The sermon is on gratitude as we recognize the one hundred year legacy of founding member and longtime music director Janet McGaughey.

Call to Worship

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Centering

“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart:
Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
– Khalil Gibran

Sermon

It’s Thanksgiving and that means family. My family will be getting together this week in NC. Here is what it was like a couple of years ago.

Coming into the front room, I saw knives gleaming on bookcases and coffee tables. Uncle Lindsey had recently returned from Pakistan, where he and my mother had grown up as missionary kids, and he’d brought back a collection of Gurkha weapons. There were kukris of every length, dangerous curved blades whispering of battles long past. My cousin Rebecca’s twelve year old son Thatcher was running out the door to the screen porch brandishing a long Talwar sword, chasing his little sister Park into the back yard. No one seemed overly concerned. Since half the adults there were doctors and the other half were lawyers, I figured that if anything happened we could sort it out, so I set my casserole down on the side board and drifted over to where Lindsey was holding forth on his trip, on the bravery of the Gurkhas, and on the beauty of the Himalayas.

Listening to Uncle Lindsey is like surfing the web with no pop-up control. You will be talking along about the Himalayas, and suddenly he will start talking about Roger Bannister’s four minute mile, or he’ll say something like “Presbyterians are the only denomination that requires their ministers to be educated in Hebrew and Greek,” or “Santa Gertrudis bulls are too large to be pastured in North Carolina.” Still listening, but letting my eyes wander, I looked out the back windows into the yard and saw an enormous Brahma bull being led around the yard by a woman dressed like a rodeo cowgirl. Her blue vest with the silver stars sure was sparkly, but I could not be dazzled by sparkles when right behind her was this two thousand pound animal, speckled gray and white, with a hump on his shoulders and a dewlap flapping from side to side under his neck as he plodded behind her with the expression of a being praying for world peace. I was glad somebody was, with all the knives around. Most of us rode the bull that day, except the very elderly generation. They watched and clapped, though. Even cousin Pooh was tenderly coaxed out of her wheelchair and onto his broad and placid back.

Uncle Henry used to pray before dinner every year, a long prayer that reminded us about the Puritans and the Native Americans, a prayer that named one by one the blessings of this land and this family. Since we were at Rebecca’s house, I had been invited to say the prayer. No one else recognizes that I’m a minister, because they don’t approve of women ministers. My prayer was of gratitude for the land too, for the family, for the love that surrounded us. I invited those present to call the names of those we missed, those who weren’t able to be there or who had died. One person said “Margaret Annie, that was real nice.”

The food and the company were a great pleasure. We told stories of long-ago mischief and the planned some new mischief. One cousin and his wife told about entertaining the devout and extremely dull President of a southern Christian college. They had made the mistake of inviting a couple of the other cousins, and one of those had attempted to liven up the conversation by slipping Amaretto liqueur into his own wife’s after-dinner coffee. Through an unfortunate mix-up, the devout President’s wife was the one who was served the doctored coffee, and throughout the rest of the evening she pestered my cousin’s wife for her recipe. As the two who were in the know shook the sofa with their suppressed giggles, she said, “I finally turned to the woman and held her gaze.” Her hands were on either side of her face, like a horse’s blinders. “I held her gaze so she wouldn’t see them over there on the sofa laughing, and I told her, ‘Well, my secret is: I grind my own beans.'” They bet the lady ran right out to get a coffee grinder, but the taste of that coffee would continue to elude her.

After dinner we all lined up, as always, for flu shots. One of the doctor cousins brings a cooler full of medicine and doses everyone in a back bedroom with the help of his ten-year-old daughter. She’s an expert with the alcohol and cotton swabs. It’s good to get a chance to be brave together after dinner.

Thanksgiving for me is the family. I took my sons to this gathering every year since they were born. I am grateful for the tradition, the talent, the wildness, the faith, character and kindness of these people

Most families can be fun for a couple of hours. For many of us there are moments of being judged, moments of being misunderstood, pressured, evaluated. Maybe there are moments when we want to put out faces down into the sweet potato casserole and just give up. Maybe there are moments when we cross our fingers and pray that Aunt Elise won’t drink so many glasses of sherry that she ends up face down in our potatoes. We wish Uncle Haim would quit joking about our hair and that Aunt Nancy would leave our love life alone.

There are also moments of companionship, of feeling surrounded by love, moments when you share stories, take a nap, receive or give nurturing care, have good conversation. If it is just god-awful every year, then I question why you go. Usually it’s just a matter of building habits of attention that direct your receptors to the good things. Part of how you develop better habits of attention is through spiritual practice.

I am no good at spiritual practice. Even the one I use is easy for me to forget. I think I’m busy with important things, and I can’t be bothered with something so simple a child could do it. Even though studies show it’s good for your physical and mental health. Even though the Jewish scriptures say it will make your heart strong and merry. Even though mystics and psychologists alike praise it. What is my spiritual practice? Gratitude. It’s cheap too, and doesn’t take a lot of equipment or training.

A practice of gratitude starts with habits of attention, which shape your experience of your life. Gratitude begins with a habit of noticing the good things in your life and being grateful for them. You might say “thank you, God, or Higher Power, H.P. or Spirit, or Force, or Universe, or Soul Of All Things. Many of us have a sense of the Divine that is different from the traditional Judeo-Christian descriptions, and for some people, the name “God” is too much attached to the sense of the Divine they are trying to get away from. I read about one person who called her Higher Power “Donna.” It’s okay to explore different ways of thinking about the Higher Power you DO believe in. The Force has many names. 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.”

Br. David Steindl-Rast, an author of many books and articles about gratitude says: “All gratitude expresses trust. Suspicion will not even recognize a gift as gift: who can prove that it isn’t a lure, a bribe, a trap? Gratefulness has the courage to trust and so overcomes fear. ” It takes trust in the bending arc of the Universe to be grateful. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, in the mid-1800s, said “The arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Can we trust the universe? Is everything going to be okay in some way? Gratitude seems easier if you are willing to believe that. If we are just all headed to the slaughterhouse, gratitude seems stupid. All belief is a choice, and I choose to go with Parker on the arc of the Universe, and with Julian of Norwich, who said “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Believing a thing just means choosing to act as if it is true. In an experimental way. To see what happens.

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.” 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 life 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.”

In an experiment with college students, those who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things they should feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly, and described themselves as happier than a control group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began. (Researchers use frequency of exercise as a barometer for general well-being because it is an objective measure that links to subjective qualities; people who exercise three or more times per week tend to have better indicators of well-being). 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 keeps you in the present moment — it clears your mind of the wishing, wanting, worrying, regretting and story telling about why we are this way or why someone else did what they did. You are freer to move, to change, to be guided as to what your next step might be. I do think that trying to change things you cannot change is a sure way to lose your mind. It’s a textbook way to stay exhausted. It is a textbook way to stay dissatisfied. Exhaustion and dissatisfaction are two indicators of soul sickness. Sometimes, around the Holidays, your soul just gets tired. You 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 only when you are sliding into a sink full of the dirty mop water of despair, but that’s as good a time as any.

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