2018.9.9 Sabbath Practice: Gratitude

2018.9.9 Sabbath Practice: Gratitude as the Wellspring of Generosity

Rev. Laura Bogle, Foothills UU Fellowship

WisdomStory: The Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle (listen here)

Well, that woman who lived in the vinegar bottle wasn’t a particularly pleasant person, was she? 

But how often I’ve been like her!  We’ve probably all been there at one time or another—unable to see what we do have because we are so focused on what we don’t have.

It strikes me that the moral of this old folktale is not that we shouldn’t want to change our circumstances – after all, who should have to live in a vinegar bottle?  Or, who should have to live in housing unfit for human habitation?  I applaud that old woman for wanting to get out of that situation!

No, wanting to get out of a terrible situation isn’t her problem.  The problem is that she’s unaware and ungrateful, and so just wants more and more and more and will never be satisfied.  She’s ungrateful for what she already has, and then she’s ungrateful for what she is given. 

I wonder, how might her life, how might our lives, be different if we regularly stopped to give thanks?

This month we are considering the theme of Sabbath—today and the next two weeks I’ll be considering specific practices related to Sabbath.  Today, it’s Gratitude, next week it’s Play, and the following week: our relationship to technology.

Now, Sabbath might not be a word that you use, or think about very much.  For some of us, it is only associated with strict religious observance that keep us from doing certain things on a certain day.  For others of us it might simply mean a day off from work to watch sports and catch up on household chores. 

What I’m personally working on, and want to invite us all to consider, is observing Sabbath intentionally and centering our Unitarian Universalist value of the interconnectedness of all life. 

Yes, Sabbath is about rest—think about the original Sabbath in the Jewish and Christian traditions -- on the 7^th day God had seen all God had created and it was good and God rested.  But it is not just about getting to the end of the week and flopping over exhausted, to start it all back up again on Monday.  That is just the weekend, for those of us in working life.  Sabbath takes a little more intentionality than that, it takes practice and a spiritual rootedness. 

Theologian Walter Brueggeman says, practicing Sabbath “is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.” 

For the Hebrew people to practice Sabbath was to step outside the slave system of Pharaoh into a different value system. To remember they had value just from being, from being human, not from the amount of work they could do.  To observe Sabbath today is to counter to the capitalist values that we are constantly surrounded by, which also define our value based on what we can produce and what we can consume.

One way to observe Sabbath is to stop and consider all the gifts we receive which we did not earn, and could never earn through our effort, and to give thanks for those gifts.  To enter into a posture of gratitude.

When we stop doing and striving, we have space to remember the amazing gift it is just to be alive. 

That’s one of the things I hope we are doing when we gather for worship on Sunday morning.  We are simply being, together, lifting up that which is most important and valuable, and giving thanks.

Social scientists who study what helps people live happy and fulfilling lives have zeroed in on the effects of gratitude—(https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/materialism_gratitude_happiness )

Jason Marsh writes:  “Gratitude is proving to be about much more than the occasional “thank you.” 

Instead, the principles of thanksgiving give rise to a unique way of seeing the world.

The latest evidence suggests that, rather than simply being about good manners, the emotion of gratitude might have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary history, sustaining the social bonds that are key not only to our happiness but also to our survival as a species.”

One scientist after studying the impact of expressing gratitude in long term partnerships, calls gratitude “a relationship-strengthening emotion”.

Another scientific study (by Monica Bartlett and David DeSteno) found that people who were feeling grateful “devoted significantly more time to helping others than did the non-grateful people.”

A Sabbath practice of gratitude can re-fill our wells – helping us to approach life from a place of strength, connection, and abundance. 

This wellspring then flows out in further acts of generosity – generosity of time, generosity of money and resources, generosity of the spirit. 

Regularly spending time to reflect on what we are grateful for may actually be the key to fueling our action in the world for justice, for peace, for the Beloved Community.

UU ethicist Sharon Welch writes, “The wellspring of decency is loving this life in which people die, people suffer, there are limits, and we make mistakes.  The wellspring, then, of moral action… is a deep affirmation of the joy, richness, and blessing that the world is.  … The ground of challenging injustice is gratitude, the heartfelt desire to honor the wonder of that which is; to cherish, to celebrate, to delight in the many gifts and joys of life.”  (from Sweet Dreams in America)

What about those times when it is really, really challenging to find anything to be grateful for?  Is it possible for me to have a gratitude practice even when by all objective measures my life really sucks and the world is going to hell in a handbasket?  Spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen would say YES—and that’s perhaps the time you need to do it the most.

He says, “To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives — the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections — that requires hard spiritual work.”

That’s why we practice.

I will never forget the man I met at San Francisco General Hospital years ago when I was interning as a chaplain there.  By all objective measures, his life was really hard. He was homeless.  He didn’t have any teeth.  He was facing serious health issues.  His family had abandoned him.  And yet when we prayed together, he gave the most fervent and beautiful prayer of thanksgiving to God for what he did have.  For life. 

This kind of giving thanks was clearly a regular part of his spiritual life, he had been well practiced in it.  I thought, if he can do it, surely I can too.  I’m working on it J

Sometimes we UU’s get hung up on, “Well to whom are we giving thanks??”

So, let me tell you a story my colleague Christine Robinson has shared –

It’s an old folktale about an aged Russian man whose grandchildren begged him for a bedtime story about “the old country.”
The man stroked his beard, thought, and said, “Here’s a true story about my father. It was the bitterest cold of winter, and your great-grandfather rode his horse out to buy supplies in town, miles away. While he was on his way home, a blizzard struck -- the snow flew so thick that my father couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him. He heard the wolves howling, the sun dimming, and feared that he’d never make it home alive.”
The grandchildren listening shrank back, eyes huge. Their grandfather held up a finger.
“You know what your great-grandfather did? He loosened the reins on that horse, and he prayed. “It’s in your hands now, God,” he said, and let the horse walk through the thick blizzard. When the wolves got closer, the horse began trotting. My father prayed some more, asking God to forgive him for leaving your great-grandmother, and me and six siblings. After what seemed like ages, he saw -- there! -- dark, looming shapes in the snowstorm: his house! his barn! He led the horse in and stumbled to the house, where he asked all of us to get on our knees, where we all prayed, thanking God for saving my father’s life.”

The storyteller leaned back, taking in his grandchildren’s smiles.
But one -- the youngest -- leaned over to her cousin and said, “He should’ve thanked the horse.”

“Here’s what I have come to believe,” says Robinson: “In the end, there is only a shade of difference between thanking God and thanking the horse.”

So, you might give gratitude to God or Goddess or the fairies!  or you might thank the earth, the universe;  or you might express gratitude to your family or friends, to the circle of this community. Or all of that!  I’m not sure it makes much difference.  But while you are at it, give some gratitude to yourself, for your uniqueness. For your way of being in the world that no one else has.  Remembering that you have value and worth just for who you are, not what you do.

Let us regularly pause from work and activity and wanting something more or different,

Let us pause to recognize how much we depend on each other and that which is bigger than any one of us,

Let us pause to give thanks for life,

And from that place of great gratitude, let our lives and our spirits well up with overflowing generosity, making a life that is good and beautiful not just for ourselves, but for all. 

May it be so. Amen.

We will now receive our offering as an expression of that gratitude and wellspring of generosity.