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A Commitment to Gratitude

By Charles Rush

October 24, 2010

[ Audio (mp3, 7.2Mb) ]

r men my age, if we received any appreciable guidance in matters of religion, it was in all likelihood, this very text. I remember hearing it from football coaches, Catholic and Protestant, Black and White. Our coaches were not in the regular habit of praying with the team but sometimes we would take a knee before a championship game, and this is what we would hear. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”

It made a big impression on me, probably because my coaches were pretty fiercely independent and self-made men, and talented. One of them had played for the New York Giants and was incredibly fit in middle age. To hear him publicly acknowledge that the source of his accomplishments comes from something beyond himself made a lasting impact. If my power parents have only one line to memorize for these moments to acknowledge the Creator in front of our children, this verse will do just fine.

After Michael Jordan won the NBA title, he briefly knelt in the locker room in silent thanks. I think it was the reporter from Sports Illustrated that said, “For all of his impressive acrobatic feats, His Airness never looked so good as when he humbly bowed to give thanks.” No question that Michael Jordan has struggled with his ego and who doesn't at that level. But for that moment, he embodied a way of looking at the world, articulated so well by Brian Piccolo when he was playing for the Chicago Bears.

A reporter was asking Piccolo why he did what he did and he answered, “My God is first; My country and family are second; I am Third”. Brian Piccolo was a man of honor and he lived and died with honor guiding him.

“Bless the Lord, Oh My Soul, and forget not His benefits… who redeems you from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you shall live.”

When we are younger, we are so anxious to prove to ourselves that we are accomplished, that we are worthy, we keep achieving and achieving and achieving. Particularly if you are in certain fields, you spend most of your time in a competition beating someone else and after a few years of this, you can start believing that you alone are responsible alone for your achievements (certainly no one else is), that you alone are the master of your own destiny. Of course, being in control of your own ship is very important and relishing accomplishment with healthy pride is a good thing.

But at some point, after you've become accomplished, after the accolades and the dollars come pouring in, you probably have a moment when you realize just how different this whole story could have become. You were blessed with a great team that jumped your whole project to another level altogether. You were blessed that events of history broke your way and opportunities opened up that could just have easily stayed closed.

General George S. Patton had one of those moments rather late in life, if the movie about his life is generally accurate. After the European campaign was over and the Nazi's were defeated, right at the end of the war, he was leaving a meeting at a Café, just about to step into the cobblestone street, when a colleague pulled him back to the curb to avoid a runaway cart that would have killed him. All of the Generals were joking about how ironic it would be to survive all of that tank battle, and die from such a silly accident. But those moments, you ought to reflect back that the world could have been quite different and that you are more dependent on contingencies out of your control than on virtues that you possess, and that a certain humility and gratitude should pervade your being. Suddenly, it is not such a bad thing to take a knee and remember that actually a whole lot of things had to break for you at just the right time. Come to think of it, you are actually blessed beyond your know it.

And if you don't take that knee, if you aren't moved to see the many ways that you have been blessed by the team that is around you, you will be sidelined before being leader in a broader context because you don't have the spiritual attunement inspire and motivate people at that level. Management Professors refer to it as “Servant Leadership”… people that create a culture that fosters personal and communal growth as the key for transformation. Service is characteristic and they embody that sense of service, building trusting relationships through collaboration, creating communal commitment.

When you think about these really great leaders, they are good at listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growth of people, and building community. These are skills that point in the direction of being emotionally and spiritually attuned. Part of the spiritual attunement is having learned to exercise the muscle of gratitude.

Gratitude directs us up and out of ourselves to a wider mission. It is a capacity to be developed. Partly we must develop it because self-interest is powerful and petty as every family knows. Wendy Mogul remembers the year her daughter was in first grade and she got a check in the mail from Nana and Papa for her birthday.[i] Her daughter had been obsessing about a Pound Puppy Playhouse. She was going on and on about having one. Alas, they didn't carry them at the wee toy store on Main street, so her daughter convinces her to go to Kmart, way far away. They get to the store, but no Pound Puppy Playhouse, and her daughter is crestfallen with disappointment.

Now Mama Bear develops missionary zeal and they go to a couple more stores, where finally at the Mega “Toys R Us”, they locate the veritable Holy Grail. She buys it before her birthday, let's her open it right away, and for three days the daughter plays with it constantly. And then… it was over… never played with it again. Now she wants a Backstreet Boys CD, also so, so, so bad.

Without really realizing it, it can become easy to fall into habits that weaken our sense of gratitude in our families, without really intending to undermine our sense of gratitude. We rely on outings to the Mall for rewards for our children (more so for our teens). It makes shopping more of a panacea than it is in reality. We could be at the museum, in the reservation, making a field trip of some kind- the Mall is a kind of default mode.

We are flooded with catalogues and on-line shopping, so we keep feeding our sense of desire and we create more of an ethos in our home and we don't quite realize the degree that our children are influenced by all of the things we leave lying around. We could be exploring new ideas on-line or learning together.

We find ourselves using the word “Need” when you really mean “Want”. As our wants become needs, opportunities become flattened into expectations (entitlements).

We express our envy in unguarded moments.[ii]

All of these habits communicate fairly powerfully indirectly, perhaps non-verbally, but they feed desire and self-regarded satiation. Add these few habits together with a wider culture of Marketing that is already expert at stimulating desire in us, and you realize that if you don't have a commitment to gratitude, you aren't going to exercise it enough to combat this social ethos of Entitlement. Left on default mode, with our prosperity, entitlement will win.

It has to be managed and it has to be managed our entire lives because it doesn't go away when we have more assets. It is always there. Just ask a financial advisor during a really volatile time in the market what it is like advising their clients. No matter how much you have, the prospect of losing it, is unnerving to big fish as well as the small. I remember visiting one of our Investment Bankers who had to take a call, the screaming on the other end so loud, that it sounded like cicada's in July in his office. Embarrassed, he hangs up and says, “We have a lot of high maintenance clients”.

That anxiety that we don't have enough, that there won't be enough, somehow this is hard-wired into human nature and we over-react to it because of our deep evolutionary history. This penchant to anxiety has to be managed with the virtue of generosity.

We become stronger characters with generosity. Giving allows us to become God-like. We are exercising some responsibility for one quadrant of the world that we are in contact with. We are focused on ‘others' not on ‘self'. When we exercise the character muscle of generosity, we start to see ourselves as channels of blessing. We can direct the flow of blessing.

Reciprocally, it also opens awareness. You pay attention to blessing. You start to realize how blessed you've been. You become aware of the people that positively shaped you in the past, people that fostered in you the things that later came to bloom in important ways. And you start to see yourself as a kind of channel in this process. If you are lucky enough to actually be involved in raising more than one generation, how humbling and grateful that awareness really is… We really are, literally, channels of blessing to those around us. It is at the core of what it means to love and allow yourself to be loved by others.

Generosity and Gratitude exercise that muscle. They take you out of yourself, out beyond yourself. They re-direct that anxiety about ourselves and empower our attention to others, our empathy. It channels that anxiety into blessing.

Last spring, I got a note from one of our financial secretaries, alerting me that one of our kids at Christ Church, a Senior in High School, had written the church a check. I called him about it. He said, “Yeah, I meant to tell you about that. I've decided that I'm going to tithe 10% for the rest of my life and I haven't really thought through how I want to invest myself yet and I believe in the church and that is a good place to start. I've been caddying and investing my earnings and making a good deal more that way.” It is moving. Humbling.

I get another note from one of our financial secretaries, alerting me to another check from him. I called him about it. He said, “Yeah, I meant to tell you about that. I got some scholarships to college and some money from relatives for school. It is all income.” Wow… and I'm adding his name to my mental Rolodex, not just because I was the recipient of his generosity, something tells me that this young man will turn into an exceptional adult, accomplished in a variety of ways.

I wished I'd had that maturity at his age. He is not fixated on what he doesn't yet have. He is already investing himself.

I love the story from the Old World about a businessman that complained to the Rebbe in his village that his profits were too low, no matter how hard his partners and he worked. The Rebbe asks him a question, ‘How much of your profits do you give to charity?' The answer was, ‘at the moment, none' implying that he couldn't afford it, a line we all use routinely.

The Rebbe says to the man, “In your next venture, make God your partner by contributing 10% to charity and like any good business partner, God will do everything in Her power to see your business succeeds.” Clever, cute. But for most of us, the truth is that we do need to get our focus of “Me, my needs, and I”. And 10% because it needs to be big enough that it makes a difference in your life. If you don't notice how much you give, your not giving enough. If you don't notice how much you give, you aren't changing yourself enough either, and this may be the central point.

What we want to become is generous people in all aspects of our lives. What a gift that really is and what a difference that really makes in our leaders. I remember hearing the Headmaster at Phillips Academy in Newark, a school in the hood, where every student is on scholarship, and all the students come from the blighted part of Newark. He took his kids down to Washington to tour the Government buildings, which almost none of them had ever seen.

He had dropped a note to the Secretary of State who was then Colin Powell. He said that General Powell invited all of the students into his office and stayed there with them for a very long time, asking them questions about their lives, and talking to them about how you make a difference in our world. He got right on their level. The Headmaster got all choked up thinking about it.

Now the Secretary of State has a very busy schedule and he had to meet with a lot of very important people that day and deal with some very difficult negotiations. But the truth be told, meeting with a group of students from Newark was probably the most important thing that he actually did that day. And he will never know how he inspired some of those students, how he gave them a daring confidence they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Colin Powell is a leader that is generous of Spirit and on his brief time in power, on his brief watch, what a blessing he was.

If you pay attention to the people that opened doors for you, if you give thanks for the values that shaped you, you start to see your role in this process, you start to see that what is important is that you direct blessing in some tangible way yourself. You don't generate it and you don't get to hold on to it forever. You receive it and open the doors to pass it forward.

The truth is that everybody in this room has a problem of excess cash, not a problem of scarcity, and I know some of us this morning are in debt. It is still true. We all make more than we need, and some of us make way, way, more than we need.

And the times you stretch, looking back, turn out to be seasons just before you start to really grow personally. When the Spirit of the Lord moves freshly in the Rush household, it often follows a pronouncement from my wife, a pronouncement over Sunday lunch like, “we are going to take in 2 foster children.”

I'm like, “wait a minute, can we talk about this.” And notice that the discussion is now oriented around one or two children. They taught us on the Debate team at Wake Forest that if you could just define the context of the argument, you've half-way won already.

And then we get this at my house that you don't get at yours, “Well I was listening to the Minister this morning.”

I'm like “Stop it, I'm not talking to you”

Oh, the integrity question, don't you hate that, especially from your loved ones. I'm thinking to myself we have four kids (three teenagers), two dogs and a cat. I don't need any more subscriptions to the “responsible for dependents” category. There we were at the training, I was certainly competent enough to do this. And what did we learn? Among other things, that there is, in fact, more room under the tent.

Looking back on it, I'm not sure who it was really more of a blessing for, a couple of homeless children from Elizabeth or my teenagers who actually rose to the occasion, transcended their worst selves, and kept a wonderful connection to childhood when they could have become really unbecoming. And when I think of all of the people at Christ Church and some of our neighbors in town, and the many things they did to bless those kids, we unleashed a little conspiracy of goodness. And at the end of the day, I'm appreciative that my spouse has encouraged and cajoled my higher self and given us the opportunity to do something of significance.

That is really what you want, to live a life of significance, to make a difference. What can you invest yourself in with your family that is significant? What are you channeling blessing towards? Why don't you dream about that together?

And among other things, we hope that this community becomes a community of significance for you. We hope you commit your time, talent, and lives with those right around you here. May we dream dreams of good deeds together. May we inspire each other to live out of our higher selves. May we grow in grace and blessing together.

[i] Wendy Mogul, “The Blessings of a Skinned Knee” (New York: Scribner's, 2001), pp. 115ff.

[ii] Ibid. p. 126.