Thanksgiving: Gratitude with Eyes Open

I'm reposting this Thanksgiving reflection from last year. As climate change and the world's response to it unfolds, the spiritual practice of gratitude is needed more than ever to inoculate us against despair. At the same time, pausing to find things for which we are grateful and express that gratitude through prayer and through sharing with one another keeps us mindful of the beauty and wonder of all that stands to be lost.

Thanksgiving Day in and of itself is a celebration of a spiritual response to everything in God’s creation that gives us life and joy. Despite the considerable cultural and commercial baggage it has picked up over the years, at its heart an annual day set aside for an entire nation to express gratitude is a great spiritual gift. Whether by design or by accident, this national holiday calls us to an essential spiritual practice. Some years our hearts are full of joy on the fourth Thursday of November and the gratitude comes easily; other years it falls at a less joyful point of our lives and we have to be very intentional to discover what can move us to gratitude even when we are caught up in grief or troubles. Giving thanks when things are going well and life is a delight is important, but developing the habit of giving thanks in more difficult times is a great spiritual gift to ourselves and those around us. 

While an annual call to give thanks is good, a daily practice of gratitude can transform our lives. The simple daily habit of naming five or ten things for which we are grateful changes us over time. The practice of gratitude requires us to notice bits of goodness, joy, or hope even in times when we might overlook those little bits. That noticing makes the dark times less dark and lets in a little light just when we need it most. 

For people who pay attention to climate change and pollution and their effects on living things, there is plenty to tempt us to despair. Yet those who grieve the passing of species and ecosystems most deeply are those who have loved these most deeply. Even as we grieve and wonder how best to live in this changing world, we continue to notice and treasure the gifts of God’s creation: the sky, the earth itself, the seas and lakes and rivers, and all the animals and plants that fill them. The living things whose increasing fragility we grieve the most are the very things that allow a glimpse of goodness, joy, or hope that can save us from our own despair. A daily practice of gratitude opens our hearts in a way that inoculates us against paralyzing despair. 

Both the cultivation of grateful hearts and the cultivation of awareness of our environmental problems are key practices for Christians at this point in history. Seeing and naming the world’s brokenness in terms of injustice, poverty, and hatred has always been an essential part of living the Christian life with integrity, and these aspects of the world’s brokenness in this century are intertwined with environmental degradation and the impacts of climate change. Accordingly, looking as fully as possible at the reality of our warming planet, a reality that can be difficult to acknowledge and perhaps impossible for us to fully comprehend, is an essential task for Christians today. But the practice of gratitude, the practice of intentionally looking for and recognizing the things both great and small that continue to bring us life and joy, is equally essential to the Christian life. Gratitude keeps us from being consumed with despair, but at the same time it keeps us from denying the value of what is being lost. We continue to love creation even as we grieve the loss of so much of what we loved; we continue to grieve loss after loss even as we continue to be grateful for all that we have loved. 

Thanksgiving: Gratitude with Eyes Open

Thanksgiving Day in and of itself is a celebration of a spiritual response to everything in God’s creation that gives us life and joy. Despite the considerable cultural and commercial baggage it has picked up over the years, at its heart an annual day set aside for an entire nation to express gratitude is a great spiritual gift. Whether by design or by accident, this national holiday calls us to an essential spiritual practice. Some years our hearts are full of joy on the fourth Thursday of November and the gratitude comes easily; other years it falls at a less joyful point of our lives and we have to be very intentional to discover what can move us to gratitude even when we are caught up in grief or troubles. Giving thanks when things are going well and life is a delight is important, but developing the habit of giving thanks in more difficult times is a great spiritual gift to ourselves and those around us.

While an annual call to give thanks is good, a daily practice of gratitude can transform our lives. The simple daily habit of naming five or ten things for which we are grateful changes us over time. The practice of gratitude requires us to notice bits of goodness, joy, or hope even in times when we might overlook those little bits. That noticing makes the dark times less dark and lets in a little light just when we need it most.

For people who pay attention to climate change and pollution and their effects on living things, there is plenty to tempt us to despair. Yet those who grieve the passing of species and ecosystems most deeply are those who have loved these most deeply. Even as we grieve and wonder how best to live in this changing world, we continue to notice and treasure the gifts of God’s creation: the sky, the earth itself, the seas and lakes and rivers, and all the animals and plants that fill them. The living things whose increasing fragility we grieve the most are the very things that allow a glimpse of goodness, joy, or hope that can save us from our own despair. A daily practice of gratitude opens our hearts in a way that inoculates us against paralyzing despair.

Both the cultivation of grateful hearts and the cultivation of awareness of our environmental problems are key practices for Christians at this point in history. Seeing and naming the world’s brokenness in terms of injustice, poverty, and hatred has always been an essential part of living the Christian life with integrity, and these aspects of the world’s brokenness in this century are intertwined with environmental degradation and the impacts of climate change. Accordingly, looking as fully as possible at the reality of our warming planet, a reality that can be difficult to acknowledge and perhaps impossible for us to fully comprehend, is an essential task for Christians today. But the practice of gratitude, the practice of intentionally looking for and recognizing the things both great and small that continue to bring us life and joy, is equally essential to the Christian life. Gratitude keeps us from being consumed with despair, but at the same time it keeps us from denying the value of what is being lost. We continue to love creation even as we grieve the loss of so much of what we loved; we continue to grieve loss after loss even as we continue to be grateful for all that we have loved. 

Month's End: Pentecost and Praying the News

The last Sunday in May was Pentecost this year. Pentecost is a fitting time not only to look back at the gift of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost described in Acts 2:1-21, but also to consider how the Spirit calls and empowers the church today to share the Gospel.

Our Psalm on Pentecost Sunday (Psalm 104:25-35, 37b) praises God for the earth and for the great variety of creatures  – “O Lord, how manifold are your works” – and for God’s provision for creation. It’s a picture of the abundance and biodiversity we would expect to find in the unspoiled creation of a gracious and loving God.

The Epistle lesson from Romans 8:22-27 describes human beings and all of creation waiting together for redemption. Paul talks about hoping for things we cannot yet see, because “hope that is seen is not hope”.

Surely the Spirit calls us in the church to be part of God’s redeeming work for the earth as well as humankind. The world described in Psalm 104 is a picture of the Reign of God, where even the Leviathan, the serpent of the sea, is something good and playful. One way to tell whether a push or pull toward action is of the Spirit is to look at whether it works for or against the restoration of God’s creation. Even when hope seems slim, we are called to trust in God’s power and do the redemptive work of the Gospel.

Some of the news stories from this past month were so devastating that we might very well find it difficult to pray in response to them. Where do we begin? Our spoken prayers can seem inadequate. St. Paul says (Romans 8:26): “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” I ask your prayers for some of the situations that leave us at the point of placing much hope in the deep prayer of the Spirit

Acceptance our repentance, Lord for the wrongs we have done: for our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us, Accept our repentance, Lord.

From the Litany of Penitence (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 268)

Please pray for:

The future of life on the earth as greenhouse gas levels rise.  Many scientists consider 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be the upper limit of safe levels of the gas for life as we know it. Today there were reports  that monitoring stations this spring across the Arctic are measuring more than 400 ppm. Worldwide, levels average around 397ppm. May also brought a report from the International Energy Agency(IEA) that CO2 emissions reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011. This is a 1.0 Gt increase over 2010 levels.

Wisdom to find just and compassionate ways to address the economic consequences of climate change. We are beginning to understand more about the way climate change will affect us economically. Some are beginning to talk about what scientist and climate writer Joe Romm calls “Dust-Bowlification”, the expectation that the sort of aridity associated with Dust Bowl may spread from Kansas to California by mid-century, endangering agriculture and food security. CBS News ran a piece on assessing the risk of climate change that explored some of the economic effects we have already seen.

People exposed to toxic chemicals. Discussion of the proposed Safe Chemicals Act  has brought our attention to our exposure to toxic chemicals. For example, an article today reports  that chemicals like fire retardants are being detected in common foods. Young children are especially vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals.

Grateful hearts.  Along with some record-breaking heat and severe weather, May has also brought some beautiful days to be outdoors in Nebraska. May we continue to find joy and meaning in God’s creation and give God thanks for the goodness of God’s creation.

We might also pray for our own hearts to be open so we can see the needs in the world around us and gladly respond to those needs:

O heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty; Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works; that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayer for Joy in God’s Creation (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 814)

Thanksgiving: Falling In Love Again

A day set aside to give thanks is splendid. The significance of the day deepens when we use it to commit ourselves to a regular practice of gratitude. Thinking of a few things every day for which we are grateful and giving thanks for those things is a powerful spiritual force when practiced regularly over time. It opens our hearts to be more responsive to others, more compassionate, and more aware of God’s presence in our world and our own lives. We are grateful for things that we love; feeling gratitude for something is like falling in love with it to at least some degree.

Gratitude is intertwined with love, hope, and faith, all essential elements of a spirituality that results in and supports an ethic of environmental stewardship. When we are grateful for the land, waters, plants, and animals and for our sisters and brothers with whom we share this planet, we are in compassionate relationship with the world around us.  The more we know the natural world around us, the more likely we are to fall in love with it and care for it.  A regular practice of gratitude helps us fall in love with the wonders of creation over and over again, deepening our love for and relationship with God’s creation each time we give thanks for some part of it.  As our love for God’s creation deepens, our love for the Creator deepens as well.

As children, some of us could hardly wait for the Thanksgiving dinner to be over so we could go outside and play.  Finding some time to get outdoors, even for a few minutes, and give thanks for what we find there brings joy to adults as well as children. May Thanksgiving joy be yours!

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us, With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us; And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed; And free us from all ills, in this world and the next! ("Now thank we all our God")

For the beauty of the earth...

Happy Thanksgiving! Just around the time the Christmas shopping industry calls us to notice what we don’t have and to focus on things we really, really want, the national Thanksgiving holiday calls us to step away from our usual Thursday routines and focus on gratitude for what we already have.  The practice of gratitude is a basic spiritual practice; far from being the focus of one day each year, it’s an important part of daily spiritual discipline for many of us.

About half a century ago, before adults worried about whether children had what Richard Louv has termed nature-deficit disorder, my most constant experiences of gratitude came through nearly daily experiences of nature. Our church and Sunday school made little explicit connection between this and the things we talked about on Sundays; one of the few revelations of the connection was in the hymn “For the beauty of the earth” that happened to be one of our regular Sunday school songs. Here’s a lovely version of it:

Gratitude is basic to spiritual practice because it’s intertwined with love, hope, and faith. Thanking God for something brings us to an awareness of our love for God and for the things for which we are grateful; finding the gifts for which we are grateful helps us see bright spots of hope in any situation; and acknowledging the good things God has provided for us gives us faith in God’s goodness and love for us. Love, hope, and faith give us a good foundation for doing the work God calls us to do, including the essential and enormous work of restoring a sustainable environment on our planet.

It’s difficult to look at the harm we have done to the earth and at the big effort and change in priorities it will take for the course of things like climate change and plastic pollution of the oceans to be changed for the better. Giving ourselves time to notice and appreciate the wonders of God’s creation is a good antidote to the temptation of despair; gratitude is as essential a piece of this work as is the willingness to look at the problems we face.

Happy Thanksgiving! Many daily returns of the spirit of the day!

Water, Love, and Gratitude

At St. Stephen’s this morning, we had our United Thank Offering Ingathering, remembered Ascension Day with the Collect for Ascension, and connected with the Rogation Days in the homily and music. The lessons we used for all of this were simply the lessons for the Seventh Sunday of Easter; the theme of responding to God’s gifts with grateful hearts filled with love tied together the lessons and this set of occasions.

The lesson from Revelation includes this: “…[L]et everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” (Revelation 22:17) 

Water has been in the news recently. Without water we humans wouldn’t last long.  When we speak of the water of life, we’re talking about the spiritual gift of metaphorical water that’s as essential to us as is the water we drink and the water that sustains the other living things on whom we depend for survival. That the metaphor for Christ’s essential spiritual gift to us is water underscores the essential nature of non-metaphorical water for life on this planet. 

Water is essential, and an abundant supply of fresh, clean water is a wonderful gift in any community that can access it, but as we have been reminded the past couple of weeks, water can also be destructive and water can be poisoned. The record rainfalls in Tennessee caused the sort of destructive flooding that’s predicted to become more common as our climate continues to get warmer. Warm air holds more moisture; there’s a reason we talk about tropical downpours. And the oil gushing – not “leaking” as first reported, but gushing – into the Gulf of Mexico has polluted the waters off the American Gulf coast. This disaster will have long-term consequences for the entire Gulf Coast ecosystem, including the people.  There are some serious problems to tackle, and tackling these problems is made more difficult by the division, the lack of unity, that has become so pronounced in our culture in recent years.

But while there’s plenty of doom and gloom to consider, if that’s our only focus when we look at God’s creation, we will never find ourselves restored to good relationship with one another and with the rest of God’s creation. As in other areas of our lives, it’s essential to maintain grateful hearts. Caring for creation must go hand in hand with giving thanks for God’s creation. One reason the voice of the faith community must be heard in discussions about the environment is so that we remember the spiritual sustenance God offers us through the wonder of God’s creation, and so that we can encourage a shared ethos of gratitude for all of creation. If we aren’t in loving relationship with God, with one another, and with creation, we won’t be very successful in caring for ourselves or the world. We know that children raised in orphanages where they are kept fed and clean but where there’s no opportunity to bond with a caregiver don’t thrive in the way that children raised by loving caregivers do. It works the same way when we go out to serve others or to care for creation: if it’s done out of duty without grateful hearts filled with love, it won’t be the same.

There is news from the Gulf  today about “giant plumes” of oil beneath the surface, with the oil itself on the one hand, and the oxygen-depleting microbes that feed on the oil (and its dispersants) threatening marine life.  There is good news as well, that the most recent attempt to control or contain the oil seems to be working. That good news is tempered by this from Samantha Joye , one of the researchers looking at the underwater oil plumes: she says it could take “years or even decades” for the ecosystem to recover.

The news from the Gulf illustrates the spiritual challenge facing us as we come to understand more and more about the long-term effects of our neglect and abuse of the environment. How do we maintain a spirit of hope and gratitude when presented with the magnitude of the problem?  How do we keep ourselves spiritually whole and healthy?  I’m thinking that the simple practice of counting our blessings – consciously listing those things, no matter how small, for which we are grateful – is an important spiritual discipline for these times.  The same heart can hold gratitude for God’s gifts and concern for our world. In fact, being intentional about gratitude can open our hearts in a way that allows us to be more compassionate and more effective in the world.

Today we have a lovely, gentle rain in central Nebraska.  The grasses and trees are especially green, and the late spring wildflowers and garden perennials are beginning to bloom. We do have access to clean, fresh water in Nebraska. And along with all the gifts we can see in God’s creation, there are many people who are working and praying for the repair and healing of the damage we have done to our waters, air, and ecosystems. There is much for which to be thankful!

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