What are you grateful for? Take a second and list five things right now.
What are the benefits of gratitude? Take a minute and write down benefits you can think of. Then Google it (or check this article out from Positive Psychology, Potential Benefits of Practicing Gratitude).
When I was gifted sabbatical leave in 2022, I wanted to use the time wisely and put tools into place that I thought might help me make the most of the time away from the demands of my role. I picked up a Mind Journal, which is made with men in mind (good Christmas gift for men!). The journaling practice incorporates gratitude every day, because it works.
One of the journal prompts was to list everything I was grateful for. I filled a few pages. Want to guess how I felt at the end of that exercise? Light. Grateful. Grounded. Loving and loved. Shalom. Energized. Hopeful. If you’ve never attempted such a thing, carve out some time and space in your schedule – maybe 20-30 minutes – and give it a go. You’ll be glad you did and surprised by the experience.
The perspective gratitude provides is more powerful than we can imagine. It can sometimes be used as a denial technique to avoid really painful issues. I’m not talking about that. What many have discovered is that taking time to reflect on what we are grateful for can buoy us even when faced with suffering that is part and parcel of the human experience. In case you have noticed, Pollyanna, life is a mixed bag.
Myriad expressions of hardship great and small come with the bargain. I am an eternal optimist, which has meant that at times I have minimized, dismissed, or completely denied (consciously and/or unconsciously) the painful realities of life. I have been guilty of being Pollyannaish. Yet life has a way of providing reality checks from time to time, and more of them as we age. We feel our physical age and cannot deny the changes. We suffer the consequences of decisions we or others made years before that get played out now.
Sometimes life just sucks.
Yet, as counterintuitive as it may sound, gratitude helps. A lot. I have presided over literally hundreds of funeral services over my nearly 30 years of being a pastor. Where there is deep grief, there has been deep love. Where there is deep love, there is deep gratitude. Taking time to write out all the ways we are grateful for those we’ve lost can be deeply healing. It doesn’t magically take away the pain, but it does change it in powerful ways, softening the pain somehow, grounding it, I guess. As my mother-in-law’s memorial service approaches, my wife and I feel the loss as we swipe through photos of so many shared experiences over the last decades. The pain is real, but the gratitude gives grief opportunity for healthy expression. Give it a shot.
Holocaust survivors have even noted how much gratitude has made a difference in prevailing through the horrors of one of humanity’s worst offenses. There is a lot of power in the practice of gratitude.
Our faith offers us another level of gratitude that can exponentially turbo charge the power of gratitude. The proclamation of our Jewish and Christian tradition (and from several other enduring traditions – maybe all of them in their own way) is that this life we live is happening within a much greater Life that we call the presence of God, or Spirit. Jesus was convinced (and many before him), that this Presence can be characterized as benevolent, loving, kind, gracious – all the words that collectively give us the definition of the Hebrew word, “shalom”. In the Easter story, Jesus’ disciples collectively experienced quite mysteriously and in various forms Jesus post-grave. The big take away? There is something more than simply life of flesh and blood. And it is welcoming and good. John’s words at the beginning of his “Revelation” certainly hint at such thinking:
John, to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace and peace to you from the one who is and was and is coming, and from the seven spirits that are before God’s throne, and from Jesus Christ—the faithful witness, the firstborn from among the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, who made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father—to him be glory and power forever and always. Amen.
Look, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. This is so. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “the one who is and was and is coming, the Almighty.” – Revelation 1:4-8 (CEB)
John’s weird Revelation reflects a lot of the hope Easter’s message proclaims. It is helpful to remember that he wrote at a time of despair. The Jewish community by that time had distanced themselves from the increasingly non-Jewish Jesus-following believers eventually known as Christians. On top of that, the Roman Empire was barely tolerant of the group since it challenged Domitian’s claim of being God. Recall that John wrote this general, coded letter to the churches while exiled on the island of Patmos, a penal colony. He had reason for despair. Yet hope was bigger. He recognized that God is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. Christ – the Presence – is, was, and will always be. And will always be shalom in character and deed.
The Apostle Paul never knew Jesus personally but was overwhelmed by Christ over a decade after Jesus’ death, experienced as a blinding light and voice that literally stopped him in his tracks. Paul was utterly transformed by this encounter with shalom. A satori moment for sure. And it stuck. He became a champion of the Gospel – the Good News – that Jesus proclaimed. Sometimes it cost him dearly yet hope prevailed and called him forward with renewed strength, all the way until the day he was martyred. Hear his words to a conflicted church in ancient Corinth:
The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom.
We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out...
We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us with Jesus, and he will bring us into his presence along with you. All these things are for your benefit. As grace increases to benefit more and more people, it will cause gratitude to increase, which results in God’s glory.
So, we aren’t depressed. But even if our bodies are breaking down on the outside, the person that we are on the inside is being renewed every day. Our temporary minor problems are producing an eternal stockpile of glory for us that is beyond all comparison. We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal. – 2 Corinthians 3:17; 4:8-9,14-18 (CEB)
As people of faith in the More, as Marcus Borg would suggest, our gratitude certainly includes all the normal things that show up on a Thanksgiving List. Yet because of the Good News Jesus proclaimed, lived, and represented, we are beyond grateful, filled with gratitude because we believe there is something beyond the confines of flesh and blood’s limitations. Beyond grateful with the hope that we are never alone – never have been, and never will be – because the Presence of God what gives us life and breath is our Ground of Being that never lets us go. The Spirit of God has been the fertile soil from which we sprung forth and will be the space we find rest when these earthly lungs give out, giving way to a new, deeper, greater Breath and breathing.
Scholar and mystic Barbara Holmes offered these poetic words, born from her real-life experience of suffering and prevailing with the shalom-Presence of God:
At the center of every crisis
is an inner space
so deep, so beckoning,
so suddenly and daringly vast,
that it feels like a universe,
feels like God.
When the unthinkable happens,
and does not relent,
we fall through our hubris
toward an inner flow,
an abiding and rebirthing darkness
that feels like home.
This Thanksgiving, be grateful for the many things you can be grateful for. And be beyond grateful as well, because no matter what life doles out, we have hope for shalom to come.