The Practice of Gratitude

Listen: “Gratitude” by Earth, Wind, & Fire

The ten days leading up to Thanksgiving Day threatened my spiritual practice of daily gratitude. I woke up Tuesday morning (11/19/24) at four in the morning with a backache on my left side. By Tuesday afternoon, I was doubled over my toilet throwing up due to severe pain. After a doctor visit and a CT scan on Wednesday, I learned I had two kidney stones and three other issues (gall stones and hernias). Three weeks earlier I had my annual physical and thought my health was doing well.

Thursday, I had a wedding rehearsal. Friday, I had the wedding. Saturday, I had a funeral. For Sunday, I was preparing a message entitled “Gratitude and Generosity.” Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling incredibly grateful due to my pain and health issues.

Isn’t that life? One day were on top of the world celebrating a wedding, a birth, a graduation, a promotion, or a clean bill of health, and the next day we’re mourning at a funeral, a genocide, a financial setback, or an illness. People often ask me: “What are your biggest challenges in over forty years of pastoral ministry?” And I typically respond: “It’s the emotional challenge of being present with one family at a birth or wedding and then being present with another family at the death of a family member, sometimes within hours of each other.”

Can the spiritual practice of gratitude help us navigate all of life’s curveballs?

Reasons for gratitude. One of the spiritual practices emphasized in the recovery community is a gratitude list. Even in life’s darkest struggles (trauma, death, wars, elections, sickness, financial disaster, divorce…), there is always a morsel for which to be grateful—the breath of life, the beauty of nature, the benison of family and friendship, the balm of music, and the blessing of food and shelter.

We are all gifted with interconnections that make life possible. One of my fellow students in mindfulness meditation class, Samantha Case, brought this beautiful thought to my attention from Leo Babauta (“The Magic of Being Held By the World”):

You are reading an article written by me, sent across the Internet thanks to the work of thousands and thousands of engineers and power workers and workers in computer factories, using a computer device produced by thousands of people around the world. You are alive because you ate food and drink produced and delivered and served by thousands of people. You have shelter built by thousands of people (when you consider the manufacturing process), powered by a power system where thousands of people work every day, with water coming to you produced by thousands of people, cable (or Internet) entertainment streamed to you that was produced by millions of people. Your furniture, clothes, appliances, car, roads, work buildings, city were all built by millions of people.

Obstacles to gratitude. There is a strange interplay between toxic positivity and our negativity bias. The most ancient part of our human brain is the amygdala. It’s the flight, fight, freeze response built into our limbic system to protect us from danger. Negativity sticks like velcro to our amygdala. Positivity slips away like teflon (Rick Hanson’s words). According to studies in neuroscience, we need to meditate on positive thoughts and experiences at least fifteen seconds for those positive inputs to affect our mental health and wellbeing.

It’s a weird balance. We need to recognize and allow our negative emotions and thoughts to rise and fall within us instead of avoiding, numbing, or suppressing them (see RAIN meditation); and lean into the practice of gratitude to enhance our experiences of joy, wonder, and happiness. For example, one of the practices I have been doing for the last five years is journaling in the morning (what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages”). I start by dumping all my thoughts and emotions from the previous day onto the page, but then I always end my morning pages with gratitude.

Outflow of gratitude. In her breathtaking book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer encourages us to live life through the lens of a gift economy. From her Potawatomi family heritage, Robin learned to see all of life as a gift—receiving all gifts with gratitude and then giving back with generosity. Instead of owning and possessing with stinginess, Robin calls us to live in harmony with all creation—a symbiotic relationship with everything flowing in gratitude and generosity—receiving and giving with gratitude as a way of life.

Robin encourages the cultivation of ceremonies or rituals of gratitude and generosity. Reflecting on a coffee ceremony she learned from her father in which they poured a portion of the coffee grounds back into the earth with thanksgiving, Robin writes:

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

May your Thanksgiving and holiday season serve as a gateway to the spiritual practice of gratitude.

Shalom

©realfredherron, 2024