This rector’s note should be arriving on Thanksgiving this week, but no worries if you don’t get to it right away. I realize that this holiday can seem to ask a lot of us. For some, family gatherings can be rife with tensions old and new. Others have lost people dear to them, or are struggling with illnesses, loneliness or calamity. Some are quite worried about the safety and the future of people and issues they hold dear in the current political and social climate.
How does one manage to be thankful at a time like this?
It helps me to remember that gratitude is a very powerful spiritual posture. On the surface it can seem like a passive attitude. It has to receive before it can give. It makes one vulnerable.
But what I like most about gratitude at times like these is that it interrupts, subverts and thwarts. It takes on things like greed, bitterness, and fear both within me and outside me. But it accomplishes its purpose with an open hand, with gentleness and a soft heart. It has a lot in common with grace in that way.
It’s ironic that our holiday of gratitude is quickly followed by the biggest shopping day of the year, when anxieties about finances, and family expectations, and securing bargains are at fever pitch. But before all of that hits, we can use the practice of this day of thankfulness and gratitude to strengthen us for what is ahead – even beyond Black Friday and the strains of holiday demands.
Gratitude travels well. And so if this week of Thanksgiving prompts us to stretch our gratitude muscles and keep using them, it will have been to good purpose.
I’ve written and preached in the past about Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects. Macy is a poet, author and thought leader who has developed practices that help activists, especially those working on climate change, to resist the dread that often accompanies such work, and reconnect to its life-giving qualities. The cycle of the work that reconnects includes honoring our pain for the world, seeing the work with new eyes, and going forth into it with renewed insight and energy. But before one can do any of those things, one begins with gratitude.
For those in climate work, that often involves spending time in gratitude for the earth we are seeking to protect, in appreciating the life that we hold dear. In calling to mind all we love about the beauty and wonder and complexity of creation – all the ways it heals us and calls us and nurtures us.
Macy, in her book Coming Back to Life points out that the power of gratitude is its ability to steady and ground us in times of turmoil or danger. “It brings us into presence,” she writes. “and our full presence is perhaps the best offering we can make to our world.” Gratitude also allows us room for wonder and delight, even when things also seem dire. Two things can be true here. Gratitude allows us to draw strength from our love for all that we are trying to protect and to stand in solidarity with.
Gratitude also resists practices that prey on our dissatisfaction and need for something more or better. It invites us to be content and to appreciate that which is at hand, or at heart, rather than that which has not yet been attained. “It serves as a counterweight to the dissatisfaction with what we have and are, the craving and neediness inflamed by our political economy,” Macy writes.
The holiday called Thanksgiving has a lot of bad history stuffed into it. But we can carve room in it for actual gratitude, the kind that resists and reshapes and repurposes. We can set the intention that the day be about that and bring it to our conversations, our grace before the meal, our presence.
And if the holiday doesn’t quite do the trick, we can also look to our holy days for help. Eucharist means thanksgiving. It asks us to empty out the disappointments and the self-centeredness of the week, and to fill up on grace and love and community. It asks us to breathe in silence and love and to release prayer and song.
However you practice gratitude this week, make sure you carry it with you and are ready from here on out. The work ahead will likely get rocky. But if we’re doing it for love of earth and its creatures and its people, taking some time to sit in wonder and awe for all those things will go a long way to strengthening us for the work itself. Appreciating those we work with, those who teach us, those whose lives we cherish and want to be whole and well can strengthen our resolve. And it can soften us and make us pliable so that we can bend and not break. We can bow down and we can rise up.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Rev. Barb
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