GRATITUDE AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
November 20, 2005
Chris Bell and Noreen Kimball

NOREEN
So it’ll be Thanksgiving soon. Time to be grateful. It made sense for us this morning to look at gratitude because that’s the commanded virtue at this time of the year. And, you know how great we UUs are at handling commanded virtues. It’s such an old-fashioned word, “grateful”. “Gratitude.” Actually, considering how much has been written about other virtues—love, charity, forgiveness—gratitude appears to have been one of the more neglected virtues. But, when I began to look around to see if anyone, any sage, had written anything noteworthy about gratitude, I bumped into something that surprised me. Scientific research. On gratitude. Gallup, for instance, discovered a few years ago, that on every list of the most valued traits, “grateful” is very highly valued and appears near the top of the list. And, moreover, “ungrateful” is rated one of the most negative traits—right down there near the bottom. But that’s not all. Four social scientists, Phillip Watkins, Katharine Woodward, Tamara Stone, and Russell Kolts, decided to study gratitude because their work had convinced them that gratitude was important to our emotional well-being.

They developed the GRAT, the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test (GRAT) to measure dispositional gratitude and its relationship to subjective well-being. Now, I actually got pretty fascinated by all this but I’m wanting you to be at least a little grateful for the service this morning so I’m going to boil it down.

For starters, they found that grateful thinking improved mood, and that gratitude is an affective trait very important to subjective well-being. And they found that there are several characteristics grateful individuals have in common. First, they experience a sense of abundance; second, they do not feel that they have been deprived in life, third, grateful people appear to be appreciate the common, everyday pleasures of life. And finally, grateful individuals appreciate the contribution of others to their well-being. The scientist point that these grateful people still take appropriate credit for their successes, but the test results show that grateful individuals are quick to acknowledge how others have contributed to their well-being.

What tickled me about the research though, was that the scientists were unable to determine whether the relationship between gratitude and subjective well-being resulted from gratitude causing happiness, or happiness causing gratitude. I’d like to read you how they resolved that: “In answer to this conundrum we support the notion that happiness and gratitude may operate in a ‘cycle of virtue’, whereby gratitude enhances happiness, but happiness enhances gratitude as well. This may well be another ‘upward spiral’ where positive affect has been proposed to provide benefits for the individual that tend to feed into further benefits.”

What all this means, interestingly enough, is that perhaps one of the major reasons to consider the acquiring the virtue of gratitude, is a perfectly selfish one—if you get good at gratitude, it’ll probably make you happy.

CHRIS
Can spiritual living really be that straight-forward? Be thankful and be happy? It might be.

As Noreen spoke of the cycle of virtue, of a feedback loop of increasing happiness and gratitude, the image that came to my mind was of a carousel. Yes, those children have their ups and downs, but the big wheel keeps on spinning, and what goes around comes around, and my, doesn’t everybody riding look happy?

Today’s message is almost trite: gratitude is good for you. It can relax us, can free us from comparison and worry, lifts our eyes to the beauty of the world. It can bring joy from simple things, like a carousel, returning us to a child’s sense of pleasure and wonderment in living, carefree and content.

The question is, how do we get on the ride? Do we have to be happy first, or do we have to be grateful first? These two things, gratitude and happiness are in fact, intimately linked, and knowing that we may feel that we’re in chicken-and-the-egg territory. If we’re not happy, we may not feel grateful, and if we’re not feeling grateful than our happiness may feel very elusive.

How do we start? We practice. We fake it ‘til we make it.

If we feel that we first have to become happy, we may present ourselves with what feels like an insurmountable challenge. Faking happiness vs. faking generosity.

That’s why attending to becoming more grateful, simply committing to behaving more gratefully, even if we don’t feel it or have to dig really deep, can be the key to getting on this cycle of virtue, the carousel of well-being and generosity of spirit that we are invited to ride.

In other words, we start feeling more grateful by acting more grateful. This process isn’t arcane or mysterious. It’s very practical.

It’s about discovering what we are grateful for.
Second, becoming more grateful for it.
Third, expanding the boundaries of that which we’re grateful for.
This is the spiritual practice of gratitude.
Let’s practice it together.

One thing spiritual practice does is directly connect you to a feeling. A particular feeling that’s connected to an experience of depth or insight or love, etc. We’ve all had these moments of awakening or contentment, these moments where what we have is enough. When we have all we need in a deep way: sitting with a child on your lap, a moment’s pause when the graying, fleeting beauty of fall really catches your eye, intimate moments of conversation, intimate moments when our bodies did the talking. Throughout our lives we have these glimpses.

Here’s what I want you to do: close your eyes and think of something that you are really thankful for, or if that feeling doesn’t readily come, think of a time you were really content, really at peace, really alive, really happy. Find what really makes you happy, and feel that sense of gratitude. Is it a person? A stroke of good fortune? A time in your life? Your favorite painting or piece of music or mountaintop view? Even a pet? Hold on to that feeling for a moment. This feeling is your doorway. If you decide to engage in a practice of gratitude, this feeling can grow you and guide you into a place of peace and open-heartedness. This feeling is a gate to the divine.

If you like that feeling and want it in your life more, here’s another thing you can do: once a day, every day, at the end of the day, write down 10, no fewer than 10 things that you are grateful for. Concentrate on the concrete, the ordinary, the mundane, for there may be days that are so lousy that the only things that make it on the list are, “my toast was neither underdone, nor burned” or “the clouds were beautiful early this morning.” That’s enough.

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” – Emerson.

There are countless ways to practice gratitude. Once a week send a thank-you card to someone. This needn’t be in response to a specific present or service received, but just because they are in your life. Take the time to say “thank you” before meals. If it doesn’t make you feel too silly, say “thank you”, out loud every time you are conscious of your blessings.

“Thank You.” It’s really that easy! IF YOU: Say it. Write it. Think it. Live it.

The great mystic Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you’ that would suffice.” Suffice for what, you might ask? Well, if since this advice is coming from Meister Eckhart, a person of very profound contemplative insight, I would say the prayer of “thank you” might just be sufficient for nothing less than right relationship with all being, with your deepest, truest self, with God.

NOREEN
Sometimes, our vision is clouded and it’s hard to see what we should be grateful for. Growing up, I had friends who felt un-American because their Thanksgiving feasts started with lasagna or with a bowl of borscht and sour cream. There wasn’t a scrap of gratitude involved.

When we are children, we long so for our family to be like everybody else’s family and, we when we perceive that it may not be, it can make us very unhappy. So few of us would sit with 12 or so other loving, beaming faces around a harvest table crowned with a golden turkey, brilliant cranberries, cornbread, stuffing, gravy, homemade pickles, beaten biscuit, candied yams, mashed potatoes and three kinds of vegetables and lord knows how many pies presided over by a blue-eyed, white-haired grandmotherly type in an apron and a stalwart, white-haired grandfather in a plaid flannel shirt and a worn, but gleaming carving knife that probably belonged to his grandfather. Poor Norman Rockwell, if he only knew what havoc he wrought with that glorious magazine cover.

I don’t know that I was very good at gratitude when I was young; I don’t know that any of us were—we were too ambitious for our lives to look a certain way. And when they weren’t, we grieved so. Of course, now that I look back on it, I realize that we didn’t know the difference between real grief, and self-pity. Gratitude never came into it at all. I believe that we get better at gratitude as we age, and I’ve learned that if children are very lucky indeed, they have parents wise enough to help them learn the habit of gratitude early in life.

When we decided to talk about gratitude today, I tried to think of a time I could actually recall how it felt to be grateful. I wanted to do the exercise just as Chris described it. Certainly I’ve been grateful a lot in my life but I wanted to recall an actual incident or time when I could definitely say that I was moved by gratitude. Actually, a memory of such a time came to me right away. I was in the hospital, and it was the second day after I’d had a fairly serious surgery. They got me out of bed and put me by the window with tubes and monitors stuck on me, put a blanket on my knees, and left the room. But, there I was, breathing. And there was sun on the blanket. And my whole world was reduced to just that—breathing, and sun on my blanket. I’m pretty sure I hurt somewhere. But I recall being perfectly happy. Completely suffused with gratitude. Everything else was reduced to this—I was alive and breathing, safe and looked-after, sitting in the sun.

The rest of my life, measured against those few minutes when my life was so basic, looks pretty good. Fairly interesting. More than supportable. Ever since then, when I hear people describe what they think would be an unbearable way to live, I want to tell them, “You know, your life can get very small, and still you can feel it is worth living. You can feel grateful just to be breathing.” Once I had that memory, I realized something else. My most profound models for people who have been truly grateful, have been those friends I have companioned through the last months of their lives. It has not been true of every friend who has faced death, but it has been true of enough of them that I have been moved to acknowledge something. It seems that people who have faced the biggest thing in life, generally come to feeling one of the most profound emotions—and that emotion is nearly always gratitude. And it transforms them. And when I worried about whether I would remember to court gratitude; whether I would be able to find the time in my life to search for things to be grateful for, I realized something else. It doesn’t seem to be so hard to find the time to complain. That means all I have to do is make sure, when I’m complaining, that I give gratitude equal time.

CHRIS
Victor Frankl writes, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” So we must ask, what attitude will we choose?

Today we sing, “For all that is our lives, we give our thanks and praise. Our hymn challenges us to give thanks for ALL that is our lives, even the sorrow we must bear, for our failures, pain and loss, for our mistakes, even for our fear. I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’ll put that hymn to the test next week when I preach on Job, I think, but for now let me just say, I really believe this kind of gratitude is possible. No, I know it is.

We can choose to live this way. We can take that step of expanding the boundaries of that for which we are grateful, and oddly enough part of this practice is realizing how little we actually need and how miraculously life seems so often to give it to us, even in the midst of sorrow and pain. “You can’t always get what you what,” wrote the prophet Jagger, “but if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.”

There is a little shift that happens, when we allow ourselves to be content with a piece of cabbage, with the sun on the blanket, with lasagna or borscht for Thanksgiving. A window opens, a door, that if we pursue it, can lead not just to happiness with our daily lives, but to nothing less than enlightenment, peace, a God’s eye view of the world, where even when we are deeply suffering we can still find a way to treasure life as it is.

Gratitude is so much more than self-improvement. It’s more than feeling happy, as precious and fleeting as that can sometimes seem. The cycle of virtue rises ever higher, as high as we want to go, really. Gratitude opens our hearts, joins us to our lives and to all life, helps us be free of worry, and despair and bitterness, and spawns kindness and generosity. Through regular practice, we find a deep gratitude and a deep happiness that, while nourishing our own lives in a very real and transformative way, also empowers us to nourish the lives of others.

When we realize we have enough, in fact, more than enough, we also realize how much we have to give away. When asked how she could continue serving ruined and destitute people day after day without losing her spirit and good will, Mother Theresa replied that she had discovered a well of compassion and love, and that she found that the more she returned to that well, the more water was in it, and the deeper it went down. The more we have the more we have to give away.

This was her discovery. If she didn’t really feel the presence of that infinite reserve of generosity, she would not have been able to share it. Thankful for the blessing she had received, she gave that blessing away. Here is the fountain that creates justice. Here is the water that sustains life.

Everything we experience in our lives is a gift, good and bad, because it all comes from beyond us. We are part of a far larger, far more complicated, far more ancient whole that brought us forth like apples are brought forth from a tree. We’re born into it – we don’t make it. I owe everything I am to something else, and toward that something else I want to say, “Thank you.”

I close with the words of the Rev. Lynn Unger: