Practicing Gratitude

Sermon by Rev. Clare Butterfield
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
November 19, 2005

Reading:

Listen by W. S. Merwin

Listen.

With the night falling we are saying thank you.

We are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings.

We are running out of the glass rooms.

With our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you.

We are standing by the water looking out

in different directions. 

Back from a series of hospitals, back from a mugging,
after funerals we are saying thank you.
After the news of the dead,
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you.
In a culture up to its chin in shame,
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you. 

Over telephones we are saying thank you.
In doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators,
remembering wars and the police at the back door,
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you.
In the banks that use us we are saying thank you.
With the crooks in office, with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you, thank you. 

With the animals dying around us,
our lost feelings we are saying thank you.
With the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you.
With the words going out like cells of a brain,
with the cities growing over us like the earth,
we are saying thank you faster and faster.
With nobody listening we are saying thank you.
We are saying thank you and waving,
dark though it is.

Sermon:

Good morning, friends.  It is good to be with you on this Sunday before Thanksgiving.  For those who are visiting and don’t know me, I’ll introduce myself as I always do.  I’m the community minister here, which means that my ministry is out in the community somewhere.  In my case, it is as the Director of Faith in Place, which works with religious congregations around the Chicago region, to give religious people tools to become better stewards of creation.  We work on renewable energy, energy conservation, direct markets for local and sustainable farmers and a youth program using urban agriculture in Logan Square in Chicago, which is also where our offices are.

A couple of times a year I get to be here, at home, to join with you for worship.  It is always good to be home.

I am engaged in a strange project.  Our offices are rental space in a dying congregation (it might revive, but it’s been dying for a long time).  They leak when it rains.  We landed there because they opened their doors to us and didn’t charge us much, and because the space is cheap enough to allow us to use a couple thousand square feet.  Enough space to operate an afterschool program that includes beehive construction, worm bins and 20-some bicycles.  But it definitely leaks when it rains.

Funding is a continual struggle.  We wonder from month to month if we’re going to continue to exist, and I’ve almost gotten used to that.  We’ve existed for 6 years.  We’ll probably make it. 

The children in our youth program come from low income families.  Some of them have two parents, some of them have more than that in a blended arrangement, and some have fewer.  Some of those parents speak English and some don’t, some are employed and some aren’t.  Most are responsible, caring parents, but some are not.  A few have records, and a few do drugs.  The kids look like gangbangers, but they aren’t.  In the neighborhood, that’s protective coloring.

Their lives are very complicated, and sometimes they break our hearts.

Keeping that program alive and healthy and folded into a program which has us working now with over 100 congregations on ecological practices – congregations from as far south as Mokena and as far north as Grayslake – some mornings I just wake up, try to remember what day it is, and drive in the right direction.

I’m not complaining right now, I’m setting the stage.  I could set it in more personal detail, though mostly I won’t.  I’ll just say that I am blessed in my life by the people I love but that some of them struggle with physical health and some with mental health, and it’s been a long time since I had a stress-free day.

I’m telling you this so you won’t think you’re being preached at on the subject of gratitude by someone who has her life completely together.  If I ever did (and I never did, but there were moments when I thought I did) I sure as heck don’t now.  Nor do I see a day ever coming when I will (though I pray that there are days coming that are a little more relaxing).  My husband’s mother has dementia.  My mother is delightful, but since I’m getting older she must be too.  My children are trying to find their way as adults and, you know, they don’t always do that in the manner that I would design for them. 

It’s not effortless to have a body anymore.  It aches sometimes.  I can’t run like I used to.

And because all these things are happening, I try to remember to start every day when I wake up by saying thank you.  And, when I sit down to dinner at the end of the day I try to remember before I take that first bite to say a prayer.  Just these words: “Thank you for this meal and this day.”  I say it to myself, but I say it.

When I’m walking down the street I think, “Thank you.”  When I lie down to rest I think, “Thank you.”

I started this practice when I was going through a particularly difficult time. I started saying it because I couldn’t sleep, because everything was a source of stress, because work was doubtful and difficult, and there was no down time at home either.  So, I started each day with a prayer of thanksgiving, because I knew that if I said the words often enough eventually I would remember to feel them, and things would get better.  They did.  I don’t mean that events have resolved themselves, but I have been recalled to gratitude – to the great blessings of my life.

I really haven’t given you the litany of my troubles to burden you with them.  As a matter of fact, I am an astonishingly lucky woman, surrounded by great blessings of meaningful work, loving family, wonderful husband, comfortable home.  The heat’s on; there’s food in the fridge; I drive a newish car; I can pay my tuition at school, so I get to study marvelous things; and I have the time as well as the money to do it.  I couldn’t be luckier.  I live better than 2/3 of the world.  I’m insisting on putting my amazing good fortune into perspective for you because I’m about to insist that you are lucky too, and I don’t want you assuming that I’ve never known any trouble my own self. 

But I know when I’m well off, and I hope you do also. I’m not climbing on a garbage heap sorting trash to make my living.  I’m not selling tortillas on a street corner.  I’m not carrying water two miles each way three or four times a day.  The water comes right out of my tap, and it’s clean.  Both of my children survived to adulthood.  I have no medical conditions that can’t be treated, and I have a good doctor and insurance.

More than lucky, I’m blessed.  Is there anyone out there who can’t say the same?  So, I adopted the discipline of saying thank you, mostly because I need to say it – not because I suppose that anyone with literal ears is hearing it.  And, I’m offering it to you because I think we need practices, and I think that we don’t always know how to engage them.

Saying thank you is a religious discipline.  It’s one I would encourage because I think that so much of what gets aimed at us in our society encourages us to be ungrateful.  We do expect things to be perfect, and it seems that the standard for perfect just keeps going up.  Obviously, it’s in someone’s interest that we feel dissatisfied.  Perhaps the people who sell things.

Yes, I think it might be them.

When we are here together on Sunday we are not the people who sell things.  We are the people who are grateful to God, and by God I mean whatever I mean and whatever you mean by that, or whatever word you use to mean the thing that I mean when I say God.

I was talking to a parent recently who said to me that he was looking for ways of practicing religious values to teach his children at home.  But practices didn’t come naturally to him and he felt a little awkward – he needed some tools.  Certainly, I was not raised in a praying tradition, and have adopted the practice of prayer very slowly and without any particular gift.

I wonder how many of you do table prayers – would you mind raising your hands?  I mean actual prayers, directed to a higher power, God, or the ground of being, spoken at table regularly? 

How many do some little quieting ritual of reflection at the table – taking turns with the kids reading something or sharing a thought about the day before the meal begins?

I thought there would be more in that second group.  I’m not here to argue you out of your family building practices – whatever they are they are weight on the right side of the scale, and there can’t be too much of that.  I am here to suggest that there is a difference between taking some quiet and centered time to reflect on some idea or story that you think is interesting, and actually directly expressing your gratitude for the food you’re about to eat.  And, maybe gratitude for having survived another day while you’re about it.

There is a difference between playing with a thought and saying thank you, out loud, like you mean it.  One allows you a little distance.  The other doesn’t.  Prayer is an act of religious intimacy.

Some people are good at this.  I live an interfaith life, and I work with some pastors who can pray you right off your feet.  They can go on for hours, sometimes with a very clear and anthropomorphic reference to whom thanks are directed (usually “Father God”).  I admire their facility. 

I just don’t have that much to say. 

But I believe in the power of thank you.  So, my prayer is that simple one I told you.  “Thank you for this meal and this day.”  By which I mean thank you for the people who grew the food and who put it in the CSA box and who brought it to the house in Chicago where I pick mine up.  Thank you for the farmers who grew the cow (I happen to know them) and for Farmer Floyd and his chickens (I know him, too) and all the ones I don’t know who grew the good things that I am lucky enough to sit down at the end of a day in a comfortable, warm, dry room with someone I love and eat.  Thank you for the truck drivers and the grocery store workers.  Thank you for the people who made the paper it came wrapped in.  Keep them all safe.  Send them home to their families for a good meal at the end of the day, and send them home saying thank you.

Thank you for the earth that still holds fertile soil.  Thank you for the rain that came in time and for the sprinkler system when it didn’t.  Thank you for the lake, for the good, good water.

Thank you for the time to cook, and the ability to read a cookbook.  Thank you for Fannie Farmer.  Thank you for taste.  Thank you for warmth and for a light at the dinner table now that the days are getting short.

Thank you for another day of work done as well as I can and perhaps useful to somebody.  Thank you for another day tomorrow to do better.  Thank you that I’m still here.  Thank you that I’m not here alone.  Thank you for the goodness of the people I passed this day with.  Thank you for the books I will read after I’ve washed the dishes.  Thank you for a mind to think with.  Thank you for a thousand theories about who you are – about who I’m talking to when I say thank you.  Thank you for the struggle which keeps me from getting soft, even though I’m getting soft.

Thank you for the encouragement that comes every day in a thousand ways.  Thank you for the good people who walk in our doors just when I’m about to give up again.

Thank you for this spoonful of soup, this bite of salad, thank you.

That’s what I mean.

What I say is, “Thank you for this meal and this day.”

Now I know some of you won’t want to do this, but why not say that with me right now – try it out.  “Thank you for this meal and this day.”

Does that feel ok?  Not too awkward?  If you start there you might develop some facility yourself and get fancy.  Knock yourself out.

We don’t really have our ready list of prayers, and so at praying moments we may opt for meditation because we simply feel silly praying.  We don’t know what to say and we are people who second-guess our words all the time because they might be misinterpreted and you never know who might be listening.

Thank you for this meal and this day.

It could mean a lot but how could it hurt you?

I’m not insisting on the phrase.  Maybe you’re miles ahead of me already.  Maybe you sing blessings at the start of the meal, maybe you say the Hebrew blessing for the breaking of bread. I forget how that one goes in Hebrew but what it means is, basically, “Thank you for the bread.”

Thank you.  And when you’ve thanked God for the grace of another day and all its blessings, then you might thank whoever cooked the dinner at your house, and whoever’s gonna wash the dishes after.  And then the conversation that can happen at your table will be one that is embedded in gratitude.

You don’t have to remind me that it’s dark times out there.  You don’t have to remind me about the trip to the emergency room or the CT scan.  I’ve been there myself.  You don’t have to tell me that the transition to non-fossil fuel derived sources of energy isn’t going so well.  Don’t create excuses for gratitude.  The habit of saying thank you every day is the single most powerful religious practice I know of.  Thank you, as you wait for the bone to be set.  Thank you as you drive out again to another late night.  Thank you as you leave the meeting at 11 and only three people came.  Thank you as another foundation turns you down.  If you are still drawing breath you should still be using it to say thank you.

Thank you because the complex beauty of this life is with you as an act of grace every second that the air is in your lungs. Thank you because the last thing we say before dying should be thank you.

The act of prayer is a discipline of the mind.  It is the trick of happiness – being satisfied with what you already have.  The practice of gratitude will make you content…which reinforces the practice of gratitude. 

“Count your blessings,” your mother might have told you growing up.  “Make the best of it.”  We tend not to say those things any more.  I’m instigating their revival.  If we can keep our eyes on the incomparable worth and beauty of the gift of life, we won’t be fooled by those who have it in their interest to draw our attention away – toward the petty dissatisfaction of everyday consumerism.  And, if we could learn the secret of contentment, we could stop destroying the beauty and complexity of the natural world with our insatiable appetite for more, and more, and more.

Gratitude is also an ecological practice, you see.  All disciplines of personal integration are ecological practices, it turns out.  That’s why someone like me, who spends her days as an advocate for the earth in a faith context, must also be an advocate for the kinds of religious practices that can lead to a life lived well and carefully on the surface of the only habitable planet – the one we share with the only life we’ve ever been able to find in the universe.

This week we will gather with our families.  We will sit down to tables that groan with the plenty of another growing season.  We’ll tell stories that we already know the endings to, we’ll laugh anyway.  We’ll see our children and our parents, and whomever we are still lucky enough to be standing on this side of the sod with, and we’ll eat.

When you sit down together this year and that awkward pregnant pause comes at the start of the meal, and you begin to nod in the direction of your Presbyterian grandmother who actually seems to know what she’s doing when it’s time to say the blessing, why not just seize the moment yourself instead.  Join hands around the table.  Take a breath, pause, and say, “Thank you for this meal, and for these people, and for this day.”

 Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Clare Butterfield, All Rights Reserved.