Sermon: The Gift of Gratitude

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The Gift of Gratitude

By Charles Rush

September 3, 2006

(First preached on November 26, 2000)

read an interesting article on suicide recently that cited a number of correlations of the suicide rate and living conditions in general. Some of them were profound, some were just silly. On the silly side, this one struck me. Did you know that the suicide rate is highest in our country in cities where… country music is the most listened to sound on the radio. Maybe coincidence, maybe not. I love country music for… about 3 hours a year- usually in a pickup truck driving across Texas. Much more than that and I am running towards New York. Wherever I am in our great nation, if I can only get two radio stations on my radio- one will be some ignorant fundamentalist preacher, the other will be country music. And I can't get National Public Radio to tune in unless I'm a block from the radio transmitter. My wife says God is trying to tell me something. What? we are not quite sure.

Anyone who knows anything about suicide knows there is no correlation with someone's particular depression unto suicide and the wider social conditions around us. But it is true that Country music dwells on the negative. If you don't have a broken heart, you don't have a country song. I have a friend in Nashville, himself a country singer, who once said, ‘you know what you get if you play a country record backwards? You get your girl back, your truck back, your dog back'. It is true that country music dwells on downers.

Who knows what effect Country music generally has on us. But we do know that a regular spiritual diet of negativity has a big impact on our lives. If you are constantly bombarded with subliminal messages that say ‘things aren't going to work out,' ‘you can't do it', ‘you're not good enough'- it affects you. [Cynicism, conflict, screw your buddy, duplicity]

And it is also true that we are dramatically shaped by a positive spirtual environment arrounds us. David McClellan, the psychologist at Harvard University did a study that demonstrated this. He showed a group of students a very uplifting documentary about the life of Mother Teresa that focused on the way that she nurtured others and gave them compassionate care. He monitored their bodies production of antibodies. Antibodies of course help stave off infection. He discovered that as students watched this uplifting film, their antibody level rose significantly- even for those students who didn't particularly like Mother Teresa.

Then he showed them a film on Atilla the Hun, a rather vivid depiction of his violence and rapacious conquest. The students antibody levels dropped significantly. Our physical bodies are driven in part, by our spiritual disposition. We are shaped by our environment. As we absorb graciousness around us, models of spiritual wholeness, we develop a sense of gratitude. We become physically and spiritually healed, physically and spiritually healthy.

And it is a fact that we are blessed with quite a lot in our country, particularly in our area. I saw an article recently that said that the average wage world wide was $69/yr and that the average American lost more $75/yr in loose change. We have a tendency to take all this around us for granted.

Gratitude is a cardinal spiritual virtue. You either have it or you don't. We all need to let it flourish more in our lives. It is something, however, which is constitutive of who you are every day. And it transcends circumstances. It transcends suffering. It transcends death. Gratitude is the visceral awareness of the precious wonder of life itself. There is something fundamentally awesome about the giveness of our world, something precious about the fact that we are here to experience it, something precious about the people we have been given to love. Even when life is tragic, even when it is cut short, even when we are filled with frustration, suffering, sorrow- the very fact of life is still awesome and wonder- filled.

I think of the people interviewed for the book Wise Before Their Time, most of whom died from AIDS. AIDS is a crippling physical disease. But there is something triumphant about the spiritual transformation that happens to so many of the people you read about in that book, who, in facing the reality of their own dying, find the precious wonder of simple things in life. Life is wonder-filled.

I was talking with someone not long ago about their spouse that had died in the last couple of years. I was asking this woman how she was doing and what it was like living a new single life, now that she had done it for a while. We talked about the aloneness, about the lonliness that you can fall prey to, and some other things. At one point she said, ‘he brought me so much joy. He had a way of making me bloom. I'm so grateful for our time together.' What a touching thing to say. Profound love is like that though. It has an influence on us that carries us through the rest of our lives and fills us with a gracious gratitude for the wonder of this life, it's essential goodness, the beauty of simple things.

I was standing at the maternity ward earlier this year, looking at the babies through the glass. It is one of the best parts of my job, stopping by the maternity ward. There was a mature man, shall we say, that had come to get the baby for his daughter. He was rolling the little cart out. He picked that baby up so gently. The baby was making some pretty good racket for Mama's milk. He held that baby so soft next to him. I said, ‘your granddaughter?' He nodded… and after a minute he said, “It's been a long time coming and a long road to get here.” What a blessing that moment was for him. What a beautiful, precious thing.

Memory of the past and hope for the future become tangible realities for us because the blessing of love is so profoundly reorienting, so deeply grounding and expansive. Gratitude for the love of life is something we come back to over and again to get us through the difficult spots in our life

In the play ‘Trip to Bountiful', Geraldine Page played a grandmother that had been forced to live with her son and daughter-in-law in Houston, Texas. She thought the big city of Huston was hell. She had been raised on a farm near the gulf coast in South Texas. She keeps dreaming of being able to go back to her home town. The town was named Bountiful- Bountiful, Texas. She wants to go to Bountiful and re-visit old friends and old memories but her son won't take her and her daughter-in-law is a witch that thinks she just needs to give up those old country ways and learn to be happy in the city- which is so much more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. She just needs to deal with reality.

But she's getting old and she knows it. She knows that every day she puts off that trip, it is less and less likely she will be able to do it in the future and she doesn't want to get old and frail, cut off completely from her roots.

One day she runs away, catches a bus, and goes on a trip back home. But the bus no longer stops in her home town because her home town no longer exists. Bountiful is now just an overgrown weed patch. She gets all the way out right near Bountiful, only to be told that there is nothing there anymore. She breaks down in tears… The local sheriff takes pity on her and takes her in his car, drives her across overgrown field after overgrown field. All the while she is talking to him, telling him who used to live where, what they did for a living, how they all got along when they were younger.

They pull up to this abandoned farm house, windows are all broken. The fruit trees haven't been pruned in thirty years. The pasture is knee high. She gets out of the car, walks up on the porch, tours the inside. Every room is filled with so much memory that she is silent as she pauses for a reflection in each one. She walks outside and digs a small hole in the ground, the Sheriff comes over to help her. She says to him, “I've kept saying to myself if I could just get my hands in the soil again, I'd be all right.”

The Sheriff goes back over to his cruiser ready to go but patiently waiting for her. She steps back on the porch and looks to the front door. She turns back to the Sheriff and says, “You know ever since we've gotten here, I've half expected my parents to come through that door and welcome me home.”

Gratitude takes us back home. And home, spiritually speaking, is wherever we experienced that love and acceptance, that trust in the goodness of life that we were able to open up and bloom.

As we turn our routines back towards normal, it is time to focus on the family, on our wider community of love. What I hope for you is this- that you are lucky enough to be able to create that spiritual space of love and acceptance for those around you. I hope that you are lucky enough to give them an experience they can come back to in the future. It is a short ride and we are in the middle of it right now.

Researchers did an interesting study. A 12-month-old infant sits on a glass table. His mother stands at the opposite end, about ten feet away. Beside Mother at the end of the table is a beautiful toy ferris wheel. Directly beneath the glass is a red-and-white checkered cloth. The lighting is controlled so that the glass is invisible, thus giving the baby the feeling that the cloth is solid ground. Halfway between the mother's end of the table and the baby's end, the checkered cloth beneath the glass drops rather drastically- giving the impression of the cliff.

The baby crawls to the halfway point, enroute to his mother and a beautiful toy, comes to what he thinks is the edge of the cliff. He looks down. He is uncertain. He has a natural fear of heights, but he also wants to get to mother and the pretty toy. Unable to resolve his ambivalence and uncertainty, the baby looks at his mother's face to see her emotional feeling about the situation. Psychologists call this ‘social referencing.' When the baby doesn't know what to do, he looks to mother and takes his cue from her. If the mother is instructed the show fear on her face, the baby will not cross the cliff and, in fact, will often retreat and become upset. But if the mother conveys a nice smile, sending the message, ‘you are doing fine honey', the baby will crawl to her, right over the cliff.

We have that kind of spiritual power for each other, both for good and for ill. Brothers and sisters, it's a short trip, make the most of it. Open yourself to the wonder-filled world around us. Give thanks. Bless those around you. Give them something to come home to. Amen.