From Your Minister
BY MEG RILEY, SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
During a time when yet another gay man had been brutally murdered in Fenway Park in Boston, I attended a vigil and rally. One of the speakers was Carter Heyward, Episcopal theologian and activist. After saying a few words, she invited us to sing “We are a gentle angry people.”
A voice called out from the crowd, defiantly, “I don’t FEEL gentle!” Heyward responded without a pause, “Being gentle is not a feeling. It’s a commitment.”
Like gentleness, I believe that gratitude is not a feeling. It is a commitment. When we are committed to gratitude, regardless of how we might feel inside, we make life choices which offer thanks to what is good in the universe around us, rather than cursing it all, whole cloth.
It wasn’t until my mother died that my father began signing his emails “Lucky Charlie.” He never said why he was doing this, why in his time of deepest grief and loneliness he would feel more need to assert his good fortune to the world. But I am positive it was not because he was suddenly feeling luckier than he ever had before.
Recently, he did share with me (and permitted me to share with you) that when he can’t sleep at night, when he’s lying awake with the pain of sciatica, alone in the bed he shared with my mother for over fifty years, he often tells himself stories of the happiest moments of his life. He says that remembering those happy times offers them to him again. He feels lucky!
This makes me think of that old joke,
“REWARD: LOST DOG!
Missing back left leg.
Blind in right eye.
Tail broken.
Patch of fur chewed off.
Answers to the name, “Lucky.”
My father does not stop, however, at telling stories to himself. Later, he emails family and friends the memories, small or large, with his trademark signature, “Lucky Charlie.” Thus, his own gratitude practice leads to greater happiness for all of us in his orbit, who laugh with him at a long-forgotten limerick or school memory, or tuck away another moment in family history.
When we live in gratitude, we behave differently. Because we are able to receive love and support from the universe, no matter how hard we have to work to ferret it out, we are able to offer it back to the universe in whatever currency we carry.
It often appears to me that people in the hardest conditions exhibit the strongest commitment to gratitude. Perhaps that’s because those who are swimming in comfort and health, love and money, privilege and opportunity, take so much for granted, or are too busy to notice all of life’s abundant gifts. The people whose commitments to gratitude most often inspire us are not the comfortable, not the privileged, not the ones who on the surface have the happiest lives. And if you are like me, your own spiritual teachings around gratitude have come in your own hardest times.
I hear regularly from members of the CLF about gratitude and grace you exhibit daily, in assisted living facilities and hostile workplaces, prisons and unemployment lines, facing illness and even death. Because of your commitment to see what offers life, even in difficult times, you are sharing joy with those around you, exhibiting faith that can multiply and grow. Your commitment fuels that of those around you, including all of us in the CLF.
But sometimes we feel neither grateful nor committed to gratitude. During those times, how do we remember who we really are, so that we can have a break from our pain or grief, bitterness or fear? I think my father is on to something with his middle of the night spiritual practice. Which, I should say, he would never call a spiritual practice! But I do, because I think the stories we tell ourselves can feed us or starve us spiritually. If our inner monologue is a constant rant—and there may be good reasons why it is!—even taking a moment to look at something beautiful, or to take a breath and pause, or to touch our hand to our own heart, can give us respite from our pain. Remembering something funny and feeling ourselves chuckle again can offer freedom. Looking at the face of someone we love, or their photo if we can’t see them in person, can connect us to our bigger selves. We have the power to shift our experience in the world with every breath, with every thought. To bring ourselves back to center.
It is a mark of my contrarian self that, in this season of gratitude, I felt compelled to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. I am not advocating the kind of dangerous positive thinking Ehrenreich describes, that believes we can visualize away oppression, or judges people who have “negative energy” as deserving, for instance, to get laid off or have cancer.
But I do think that a commitment to gratitude can serve as a daily compass in this big, messy world. Every day we find cause to weep with anguish and rage, and to drop open our mouths with awe and wonder. The commitment to gratitude aligns us with what is life-giving, even in the midst of the mess, and allows us to see its value, no matter how tiny it might be. Gratitude gives us the breath to blow on the flame of life, and to cradle that force in our hearts.
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823, U.S.
or
Phone: 617-948-6166; or for international callers, use 00-1-617-948-6166
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