November 20, 2011
“For Everything that has been—Thanks.
For Everything that will be—Yes.”
- Dag Hammarskjold
Dag Hammarskjold’s little quotation, which I have included on your orders of service this morning, just about says it all for me on the theme of thankfulness. His simple words would seem to constitute a thoroughly adequate attitude toward life.
Not that it an easy one. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I am not an optimist by nature. But I try to be thankful for my blessings, and even to find the thankful places in the losses and disappointments that I, like all of you, have sometimes experienced. And most of the time I try to say “yes” to life.
Often, I turn to my religion to help me through the “dark nights” of my soul. I am grateful, among other things, for our hopeful faith which draws me out of my negativism and occasional defeatism toward something resembling appreciation and gratitude for what I am and for all I have. As self-help author Melody Beattie has written,
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
I suppose what I am saying is that thankfulness doesn’t always come easily or naturally for me, and perhaps it doesn’t come so for you. In so many ways, the world belies our gratitude. As former Catholic priest and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll has written, “An intense awareness of what is given assumes the like awareness that it will be taken away.” Suffering and tragedy and loss are part and parcel of this life we share, and sometimes, and for some of us, they are the larger portion. This is unfair, but it is a fact, and we had better not equivocate about it.
So I don’t want to offer you just another glib catalog of all the reasons why you should be thankful. Certainly there are manifold reasons for sorrow and sadness in this world, and in many of our individual lives. But part of what we need to get over is the idea that an attitude of thankfulness must preclude the element of sadness and regret. Indeed, it would seem that a mature thankfulness must include a recognition of these other realities of our existence. That is, we must be thankful in spite of, and even in some instances, because of, those realities.
Perhaps a true spirit of thankfulness and the ability to say “yes” to life is impossible without them. Not that we must have those realities, but that, as the Buddhists so clearly recognize, we do have them.
The Buddha’s great discovery was that all existence is suffering. Despite his parents’ best efforts to protect him from this reality within the walls of his palace, Prince Siddhartha Gautama found out, as we all do eventually, that life is not the proverbial bed of roses. His Buddhahood—his enlightenment—resulted from this initial discovery of the suffering which existed beyond the palace walls and united every living being.
I daresay that the most inspiring people we know in life are those who remain grateful and hopeful in the face of great suffering. Those who have suffered loss but who have transcended it. As someone has said, with truth, the greatest company is the company of those who have suffered loss. All of us, if we live long enough, will suffer loss and disappointment at some time in our lives. All of us will experience sadness and sorrow and regret.
Fortunately, that is not all there is. The vast majority of us survive and even thrive. And that, to my mind, is the true source of thankfulness. It resides in the resilience of the human spirit and its ability to rise above the suffering and to be grateful once again. We need to give thought to this word of thankfulness so that we will be reminded of our ability to rise again, so that we will remind ourselves of what is precious and life-giving in this world and in our lives.
A few years ago, our fellow church member Cyd Raschke shared with me the following poem which she had written; it’s a great reminder about some of the things we ought to be grateful for, but oftentimes aren’t:
Shout to the stars your
prayers of thankfulness
for safe journeys,
profound insights,
and friendly strangers.
Loft into the wind your
indebtedness to failures
that teach you to pay attention,
or fulfill an obligation thoroughly.
Welcome warmly like the break of day
the difficult person who compels you
to be patient and gracious.
Bow at sundown
and seek forgiveness
for gratitude not expressed
for a loved one now lost,
good health,
peace.
And when a thousand small storms
threaten to cloud your vision,
may you see that your greatest blessings
have been right in front of you
and deep inside you all along.
A few years ago, I elaborated as follows on a favorite prayer of mine [“The Word of Thankfulness”] by the late Unitarian Universalist minister, Robert Storer:
I remind myself to be grateful and to say yes to the new day that never fails to dawn. It will come even when I am gone, for others to enjoy as I have, and there is comfort in that. For the earth with its high places and its low places: for my native coast of Maine with its dark spruce trees against granite and ocean, for the prairies of Minnesota and the Black Hills of South Dakota, and for the beautiful green mountains and valleys of Transylvania, home of our partner church.
For growing things, for our own ability to grow, for our children whom, we pray, will outgrow us. For treasures we can see, and for treasures that are hidden. There is always hope, and if we are patient our treasure will be revealed to us, and it may be buried under our own kitchen.
For the places where we live, where our true treasure lies, where we are at home and safe, where we learn to share and to understand one another,–perhaps the most difficult and challenging task, as we must reveal ourselves, our own true, hidden selves, to discover the ground of that understanding.
For people we have learned to trust, and who trust us: that is faith in a nutshell, my friends. “Be ye faithful people”: that is, trust.
For people who have never let us down—we know who they are—who believe in us when we fail (over and over again), who help us over the rough places (and on the long haul, they’re mostly rough places), and for whom we wish to give thanks (for whom we must give thanks, if we think about it at all).
For the life that is ours on this once only day of our lives, the only day of which we can be certain, the only day that really matters at all, since none of the others is certain, and all the ones that have gone before are gone for good. The life we would not exchange with any other person: this one is hard, because it is always tempting to believe that the grass is greener in someone else’s yard. The life we would not exchange (it’s the only one we’ve got) with any other person (because it is unique and it is precious and it is ours, and we are loved if we are loved at all for what we are, not for what we might be).
My prayer to the ever present help for each of us is that we will say “thanks, yes” for this day and for all the days still to come. Not because we are naïve and foolish optimists, not because we have never had any doubts, but because we have looked at all the realities of life and of our particular lives and know that we must be thankful and affirmative.
May we be truly thankful for every gift of life we have received. And may we have hope and companionship to carry us through the inevitable disappointments and heartbreaking losses, and over those rough places where we cannot yet be thankful, that our lives might be filled not with despair and loneliness, but with the possibility of grace and life. So may it be. Amen.
- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
