I am in the midst of what I call my gratitude season. Ever since the year I celebrated Thanksgiving in Canada at the beginning of October, and American Thanksgiving at the end of November, I have designated October and November as my gratitude months. Maybe its because I grew up in Australia where we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and I feel I need to make up for lost time. Maybe its because the joy and delight that gratitude brings is addictive and I realize I need more of it in my life. Or perhaps it is because I am horrified by the research that suggests we suffer from a gratitude gap.
This year I feel I need the season more than ever yet like many in our churches I struggle to find much to be grateful for. The ongoing challenge of COVID, the turmoil caused by racism, economic inequality, political turmoil and our anxieties about climate change weigh heavily on all of us. Talk about a gratitude gap. The escalating war in Israel/Palestine and the heart wrenching images of death and destruction pull at our heart strings. Yet in the midst of these horrors we need to express gratitude. In fact, the practice of gratitude is one of the tools we all need to cope with the exhaustion and looming burnout that besets us.
In preparation for the season, I reread Diana Butler Bass’s book Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks. She helped me realize that one reason we struggle to establish gratitude as a way of life is because we do not fully understand what gratitude is. She explains that gratitude involves both emotion and ethics (moral principles). We feel grateful when we see something beautiful or receive unexpected gifts from someone – that is definitely emotion. Writing a thank you note to show we appreciate the gift is a choice, an ethical decision that comes from our belief that thank you notes matter.
Bass points out, that most of us have a distorted view of gratitude, usually relegating it to feel good emotions that come and go in our lives. It is this confusion that makes it so difficult to choose to practice gratitude whether we “feel” grateful or not. Depression, anxiety and stress strip away the gratitude emotions.
“Gratitude is not only the emotional response to random experiences, but even in the darkest times of life, gratitude waits to be seen, recognized and acted upon more thoughtfully and with a sense of purpose. Gratitude is a feeling, but it is also more than that. And it is much more than a spiritual technique to achieve peace of mind or prosperity. Gratitude is a habit of awareness that reshapes our self-understanding and the moral choices we make in the world.” (Grateful 60)
Don’t you love that? Gratitude is a habit of awareness that reshapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In other words, we can choose to be grateful people and establish practices that develop it into a lifelong habit. In the process we become happier, healthier and less stressed people. Teaching gratitude as a way of life to our families and our congregations, is, I think, essential to help us overcome burn-out.
As I read Bass’s words, I was reminded of the words of 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “Give thanks in every situation because this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” Not give thanks FOR every situation as some interpret it but IN. Not give thanks for disasters but for the first responders who put their lives at risk to help others. Not give thanks for the destruction of God’s beautiful creation but for the many activists who work tirelessly to see nature restored. Not give thanks for the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine but for the people that work in the midst of these horrors to bring peace and reconciliation.
One aspect of gratitude I have not considered until recently is its relationship to grief. We cannot talk about gratitude without also talking about grief. We cannot develop effective rituals for expressing gratitude without creating equally powerful rituals for processing grief.
In The Geography of Sorrow – Francis Weller on Navigating Our Losses, Tim McKee points out that most of us hold huge wells of unexpressed grief inside us because we live in a culture where grief is unwelcome, something we need to get over quickly. We are ashamed to grieve. As a consequence, we are prone to addiction, depression, violence, suicide, possibly cancer, heart disease and I would add PTSD.
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend towards cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible. (The Geography of Sorrow)
We need rituals that help us grieve, and these rituals should be communal. This doesn’t mean we don’t go off and weep in solitude, but after we do we should be welcomed back into a group where we can pour out and empty our sorrows together in an environment of comfort and mutual support. I love the ritual that Lilly Lewin introduced us to in her recent Freerange Friday: “God Holds Our Tears” where she used a pitcher of water to represent our tears. It was very profound. These are the types of practices we all need to help us maintain the grief/gratitude balance.
In healthy cultures one person’s wound is an opportunity for another to bring medicine. But if you are silent about your suffering, then your friends stay spiritually unemployed. In Navajo culture, for example, illness and loss are seen as communal concerns, not as the responsibility of the individual. Healing is a matter of restoring hozho – beauty/harmony in the community. (The Geography of Sorrow)
We should approach grief with reverence, engaging it, sitting with it, mulling it over and recognizing it is worthy of our time. This is particularly important at the moment. We all came out of the pandemic with a load of grief weighing us down. Since them we confronted not just the horrors of war in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, but also earthquakes in Turkey and Afghanistan and the climate crisis that overwhelms us. We are encouraged to feel we should get over our grief quickly, or pretend there is no grief weighing us down. We are encouraged get back to normal, maybe go on a shopping spree and enjoy life again. Grief is seen as something to be ashamed of, not something to embrace. It is easy to dismiss the need for rituals of grief especially as the consumer culture hypes up for the Christmas season. After all isn’t Christmas meant to be “the happiest season of all?”
Here are a few of my suggestions on rituals that can help us process our grief and move towards gratitude in the coming months:
- Sit around the table with your family or a few close friends and talk about those things from the past that still need to be grieved over. I have sat around tables with a cup of tea in the most unlikely circumstances grieving together with friends and family. I still vividly remember when I was in medical practice in Christchurch New Zealand and a teenager died of cancer. I sat, with his family as we created a circle around his body and they shared stories about his life. Just talking about these together can bring a measure of healing. Discuss other ways that you could support each other as you process your grief.
- Plan a celebration for All Saints’ Day at the beginning of November. Celebrating, grieving and giving thanks for those who have gone before are all interwoven in these important days on the church calendar. I love the ribbons of remembrance that our church creates every year. We all have an opportunity to write the names of our loved ones on ribbons that later are woven around the altar rail or hung around the church.
- Plan a Blue Christmas celebration. At Godspace we provide a growing set of resources to help with this celebration. During the COVID lockdown, I participated in a powerful and extremely meaningful online Blue Christmas service where we interwove liturgy, creativity, scripture and music together.
- Plan regular retreat days over the next few months to help you slow down, grieve and find that much needed balance between grief and gratitude. Part of the wonder of the Advent and Christmas story which we are quickly moving towards is the recounting of both joy and tragedy. If you follow the liturgical calendar, you know that December 28th is Holy Innocents Day when we commemorate the execution of the innocent, male children in Bethlehem as told in Matthew 2:16. It is an uncomfortable day that I always want to skip over, but this year I know it is worthy of remembering. So many innocents have died in the last year from hunger, disease, violence and natural disasters. This story gives us the foundations for grieving our own losses. It is just as easy for us to skip over the tragedy because of our desire to focus on the joy. This year we need to make space for both.
- Write or read poetry, create a piece of artwork, take a photo that juxtaposes grief and gratitude. This was one of my responses to the horrors going on in Israel/Palestine. This poem flowed out of my heart as I look at what is happening and was overcome by grief. It was inspired by Matt 5:43-47 and Colossians 1:18-20 in The Message. As I wrote it, I found myself giving thanks for the many places in scripture where grief and gratitude come together Is our world broken beyond repair?
Will we always meet violence
With more violence?
Death with death?
Hate with hate?
What happened to love?
What have we done with Jesus,
With the One who holds all things together
And promises to fix,
All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe.
The One who told us:
Love your enemies
Let them bring out the best in you
Not the worst
Live out your God-created identity,
Live generously and graciously towards others.
Be loving in all circumstances.
God is love.
- Listen to Leonard Cohen’s incredible song Hallelujah which I listen to regularly to help me process some of my grief burden and help me find the silver linings of gratitude often hidden in its midst.
- Journal about your grief feelings. Read Psalm 130. Allow the words to resonate in your heart. It begins with grief and ends in praise and often it is easier to pray with someone else’s words then trying to form our own. Sit in the presence of your feelings and allow God to bring healing. As I did that this week, this simple poem grew in my mind. Perhaps you would like to use it to express your own grief.
Is our world broken beyond repair?
Will we always meet violence
With more violence?
Death with death?
Hate with hate?
What happened to love?
What have we done with Jesus,
With the One who holds all things together
And promises to fix,
All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe.
The One who told us:
Love your enemies
Let them bring out the best in you
Not the worst
Live out your God-created identity,
Live generously and graciously towards others.
Be loving in all circumstances.
God is love.