Sermon: Growing in Gratitude

Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067

781-784-3652
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Sermon by Rev. Tricia Brennan

November 23, 2008

At a recent retreat for ministers, the presenter, Barbara Merritt,
told us of being in India at a session with her spiritual teacher
and hearing another student ask her teacher this question
What is the worst karma a person
can undergo here on earth?
What is the greatest difficulty?
The harshest circumstances?

What do you think the answer might be?
To be born in extreme poverty,
as is one sixth of the world's population?
To be born into a loveless family?
To be born with an incapacitating illness?

According to Barbara's teacher it was none of these things.
The worst karma, he answered, is to be ungrateful.
If you suffer from ingratitude
then it won't matter what blessings and goodness
are in your life, you won't be capable of receiving it.
In contrast, if you are grateful then
even in the most challenging of circumstances,
you will be able to recognize the many gifts
that you are receiving.

The teacher's answer reminds me of the story of a man
who would come in every day to a restaurant
that served a small loaf of bread with its meals.
Shortly after sitting down, he would ask for more bread
to be served with his meal.
After a few days of this,
the waitress got tired of running back and forth,
so she put two loaves of bread in front of him.
Much to her surprise, he still finished them in record time
and asked for more.

She then gave him two baskets with four loaves
when he came in next time-
only to have him eventually demand more bread.
Finally, she had it with him, so she talked to the baker
prior to his next visit.
The baker make a large loaf of bread four feet in diameter.
She thought to herself, This will shut him up!
When he came in and was seated,
she went back to the kitchen for the bread.
Struggling as she carried it to the table
but still smirking all the while she did it,
she dropped it on the table in front of him.
He looked at it, paused, looked up and said in a whiny voice,
Oh, so we're back to one piece of bread again, eh?

More and more I think that a spiritual life
begins with being receptive.
And being receptive includes noticing all that is given to us.
Meister Eckhart said that if you only say one prayer
in your whole life, let that prayer be thank you.
A real thank you, one that comes from the heart,
means that you have let in the love
that is sent your way.

One contemporary practice that is catching on
is the keeping of a gratitude journal.
A couple years ago, my daughter's class was required
to keep one. 5 entries per day was the requirement.
Nora didn't think it was such a bad idea,
just didn't like being required to be grateful.
Forced gratitude does seem a bit of an anomaly, I have to agree.
And when she fell behind it could make for
some long lists on demand for a deadline.
I mean could you come up with a 10 day supply-
50 entries, of things you were grateful for?
It led to some funny inclusions in her journal:
I am thankful for school supplies,
I am thankful for tests,
I am thankful for giraffes.

In his book The Gift, Lewis Hyde,
talks about the importance of seeing the abundant gifts around us.
If we don't see the gifts, we can't be grateful.
If we miss the gifts we miss the opportunity
to know a deep elemental gratitude,
and of course we are unable to pass the gift along.
Lewis Hyde's premise is that human cohesion depends to some extent of gifts circulating- and you have to see the gift to pass it along.
According to Hyde, when you remove a gift
from circulation, you make it private property,
you diminish the cohesion.
We live in a society that we think moves on market transactions,
the buying and selling.
We grossly underestimate the amount
of our societal cohesion that depends
on the passing on of gifts- coaching, mentoring,
listening to each other, childcare swaps, shared meals.
And what is a church but a place of gifts,
an institutional gift economy.
We have our pledge drive, and we need the money,
but that's not the end of it.
We thrive on our gifts too- on the gift of song,
of lay ministry, of friendship,
of teaching each other's children,
of sharing spiritual journeys, of raking leaves together.
If there is one place in our lives where we see the gifts,
share the gifts, and know deep gratitude,
let that be church.

My friend Marylou knows what
she wants written on her gravestone.
She wants it to read, Here lies a grateful heart.
Marylou is a content, peaceful and happy person.
She is not wealthy and her life is not particularly easy, certainly her work as a hospital chaplain can be challenging and stressful.
I know, I used to work with her.
Chaplains only get called in
when things are looking pretty bad.
Marylou carries the heartaches
of patients and staff at her hospital.
At the same time, she has an unerring eye
for the good and the beautiful,
and for what she calls god's extravagance.
It is like she is living her way into that epitaph
on her headstone.
Here lies a grateful heart,
a heart that has always been grateful.
It is an interesting thought-
to live one's life into one's epitaph.
Based on how you are living now what would be the saying, the motto, the mantra you would have written
on your tombstone? I let you ponder that one.
But I like the way that Marylou knows what she wants
and lives her way into the final commentary.
Here lies a grateful heart.

Let's not underestimate gratitude, or perhaps better put,
let's not settle for a small polite gratitude.
We are not talking about good manners here,
of remembering to say thank yous
along with please.

Let's attempt to fully grasp what Elie Wiesel,
survivor of the Holocaust, meant when he said
No one is as capable of gratitude
as one who emerges from the kingdom of night.
He meant something more than gratitude
for surviving the horror, I think.
His is a gratitude deeper and firmer than life's vagaries.
It is a gratitude that doesn't depend on favorable medical tests,
or who wins the world series,
or whether the one I love loves me back,
or the rise and fall of the stock market.
It is a gratitude that says yes to life,
that claims that gratitude is the only decent response to life itself.
Unfettered gratitude, let us desire that.

Gratitude enlarges us-
makes us bigger, more connected to others-
to our past, and to our possibilities.

Gratefulness is a generative thing,
it moves us up and out,
gets us to do things we didn't think we could.
And then we grow some more.

When I was a young girl I swam on a girls swim team,
three nights a week at the local YMCA.
I had a wonderful Coach, Coach Larrabee.
I still remember his hearty welcome
the first day I arrived,
a skinny eight year old who hardly knew
any of the other kids.

After 4 years I decided I wanted to stop swimming
and try another sport.
But I couldn't just quit and not show up
when the new season started.
I had to tell him personally, I thought,
and I wanted to thank him for being so great to me.

But since my decision came in the summer off-season,
that meant I would have to call him on the phone-
and this was back in the time when kids
didn't call grown-ups on the phone.
I really didn't want to,
and I really did want to, at the same time.
I remember I was watching TV with my family
and suddenly just bolting up,
willing myself to go upstairs and make the call.
Coach Larrabee answered,
I told him my news and said thanks.
It was a blissfully short phone call.
Why thank you for letting me know, Tricia, he said.
I went back to my TV show. Whew that was over.

Coach Larrabee told my parents later
I was the only kid who had ever called him
to say goodbye and thanks and it meant a lot to him.
So that's good, maybe my expression of gratitude landed in him
and moved him along in some way.
I am more aware of what it did for me.

I am aware that that feeling of just take a deep breath
and do the thing you are afraid of
is pretty familiar to me now.
So that wasn't the only time I willed myself
to do something I was scared to do.
But it may have been one of the first.
Which means it was gratitude to my coach
that got me into this habit of just screw up your courage and do it,
gratitude got me going,
gratitude helped me grow.

If gratitude enlarges us, then its opposite is smallness.
Theologian Sr. Joan Chittister writes that .
the chief barrier to gratitude,
lies in a stubborn refusal to grow beyond the limits of our lives.
If we were poor, or rejected, or unsuccessful yesterday,
we define ourselves as unable to be anything
but poor and outcast and a failure today.
We refuse to claim the power within us.
And we blame the rest of the world for the prisons
in which we place ourselves.

That's not really how we want to live, deep down.
Deep down we want to live large and generous lives, loving and brave lives.
And deep down is where the real gratitude lives-
not the polite kind, but the powerful kind.

What did you think of the Galen Guengerichs'
contention that the most appropriate theology
for Unitarian Universalists and their churches is gratitude?
I think he is on to something there.

It has long been a challenge for UU churches
and to our denomination that we don't have
a unifying religious language.
It is great that we respect all religious paths-
thus we can serve as bridge-builders
in our religiously fractured world,
and we can benefit from the wisdom of many traditions-
but when we get together and worship,
it can be challenging to know what to say,
what to hold sacred together.

Gratitude as a religious practice and a theology-
and by those terms I mean gratitude as a way of life
and a system of belief- has a lot to offer us UUs.
It does not require belief in a particular entity,
nor adherence to a set of beliefs-
so there are none of those stumbling blocks
that can befuddle us.
Gratitude starts with our experience-
and we are an experiential faith-
and from there moves us outward, enlarges us,
as I said before.
A practice of gratitude makes us aware,
as Guengerich writes
of how utterly dependent we are on other people
and the world around us for everything that matters.
It has that element of awe and grandeur
that is crucial to religion-
how can we not marvel at all that supports life-
all the ways in which the natural world
moves to maintain life, all the ways our own bodies,
even when ailing, try to keep us alive and thriving?
And felt gratitude gives birth to generosity.
We can't be grateful and selfish at the same time.
It doesn't work that way.

Leonard Bernstein has that wonderful piece
with the lyrics
God loves the simple things,
for God is the simplest thing of all.
In the end, gratitude is simple too.

For those for whom God is a unifying core,
to live in gratitude is simply to live in the spirit of God,
for God gives all and gratitude acknowledges that.
For all of us,
the world offers itself to our imagination,
as the poet wrote, whoever we are and no matter how lonely,
calling like the wild geese, over and over,
announcing ourselves in the family of things.

Simply put we do belong to this world,
it is here that we live and move and have our beings.
We and the world are in constant dialogue,
giving and taking air, seeing and being seen,
birthed into human shape
and dissolved back into the earth
when we die.
The world is our once and future home and here we belong,
here hopefully we know ourselves as belonging.
May this felt sense of the garden of earth as our home
gives rise to unceasing gratitude.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Notes:
Rev. Barbara Merritt is the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Church in Worcester, MA.

Chittister quote comes from Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by St. Joan Chittister, Sheed and Ward, Chicago, IL.

Guengerich quote comes from "The Heart of Our Faith" by Rev. Galen Guengerich, published in the Spring 2007 issue of UU World.

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