Today’s blog is written by Pastor Jen.
Sometimes, gratitude is instinctive. A knee-jerk response to when things are going well, or a crisis is averted, or something surprises us and fills us with thanks.
We have been reading Anne Lamott’s wonderful little book, “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers” during staff meetings for the past few months, and here is some of what she has to say about “thanks”:
“most of the time for me gratitude is a rush of relief that I dodged a bullet […] Or ‘Oh my God, thankyouthankyouthankyou’ that it was all a dream, my child didn’t drown, I didn’t pick up a drink or appear on Oprah in underpants with my dreadlocks dropping off my head.
It is easy,” she writes, “to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it’s harder than we would like. It’s a package deal, though.”1
Which brings me to my next point: sometimes, gratitude is a practice. A discipline.
A thing we have to bring ourselves to do, when it isn’t our instinct, things aren’t going well, we aren’t overflowing with thanks.
I thought about this a lot over the past week.
Generally, I love Thanksgiving week. I love how things slow down at church, at school or at work. How people spend much more time in the kitchen – my favorite place – putting the extra effort in to make (or purchase, or reheat) a wonderful, abundant feast for their people. How the Christmastime race to get gifts is absent, and the focus is on table-setting and menu-planning and people contributing what they can.
Last year, I was fully in the spirit, preparing to host Thanksgiving for some of my oldest friends and their family; making pies, dry-brining a turkey, tearing up bread for stuffing, stewing cranberries for sauce. I was cooking and cleaning and loving every minute of it.
But this year, I was working my way through boxes of Vicks-infused tissues. Moving from couch to bed and back again. Refilling my humidifier, rubbing essential oils into my skin, emptying my pantry of soup. Wondering if I should get a chicken to roast on Thursday because I might just be alone, not having the energy to go find friends or being worried about infecting them.
It was hard to be grateful.
But the holidays can do that to all of us – whether we’re fighting off a cold or flu, or not. We can often hold memories of what this time of year could be, or was, or dreams of what it should be. These almost mythical scenes of a peaceful family gathered around a full banquet table, snow falling outside can dog us down and leave us unhappy, comparing what things are to what we’d rather they were.
It’s hard for anyone to feel grateful when that happens.
And yet…
There is still so much to be grateful for.
As Anne puts it, in her trademark honest way, “So many bad things happen in each of our lives. [….] We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the picture.
In the face of everything, we slowly come through. […] And at some point, we cast our eyes to the beautiful skies, above all the crap we’re wallowing in, and we whisper, ‘Thank you.'”2
She goes on to talk about how gratitude is a response that changes us, that prompts us to action, to share what we have because we realize we’re blessed and thankful for it.
But sometimes gratitude can just help to heal us when we’re in a bad spot. Get us through a rugged week, or a rough holiday season.
Because no matter how low things seem to sink, there is still something to be grateful for.
This week, I found it in a friend who still lets Zoe come over to play while we’re treating her for ringworm.
In the act of making a pie, and listening to the parade.
In the difference that a few Christmas lights can make to a heavy sort of darkness.
And all of that allowed me to breathe deeply again; to find a moment of peace; to look up and out and beyond my muck.
I hope that you might find it too: something to be grateful for, and a reminder that we will, however slowly, come through.
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