Dwelling in Gratitude

Readings:

Psalm 90: 1-2

Holy One, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Contemporary reading

Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer

There are only two feelings. Love and fear.
There are only two languages. Love and fear.
There are only two activities. Love and fear.
There are only two motives, to procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.

Good morning, beloved Lyndale community. This week was Thanksgiving, that insanely complicated holiday week when we struggle to hold together the joy of gratitude with the history of American genocide, the complexity of family gatherings and the onslaught of consumer Christmas. It’s a bit much, really, if you are paying attention. No wonder many of us, myself included, attempt to numb our fear, our overwhelm, with tryptophan and sugar and retail therapy. The distance from social anxiety, hate-filled headlines, and full-on fear to love can feel as big as the Grand Canyon.

How do we cross this divide? We ground ourselves in the dwelling place we call God, that gorgeous image of holiness from Psalm 90. And the shortest distance from wherever we are to that dwelling place is gratitude. The shortest distance from fear to love is gratitude.

I asked on my Facebook page this week what wisdom about gratitude you all have. One of my friends and colleagues, Pastor Jim Bear Jacobs who is from the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, offered wisdom from one of the historic leaders of the struggle for indigenous sovereignty in this country, Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee people.

When he was a child in the late 1700s, Chief Techumseh’s father was brutally murdered in battle that took place when white settlers invaded indigenous land in violation of a recent treaty. As a result, Tecumseh resolved to become a warrior like his father. In time, over years of resistance to white settler invasion, he became Chief Tecumseh. He attempted to build an independent indigenous state in the Midwest with a coalition of indigenous tribes in the area. American settler forces killed him after about 30 years of conscious resistance, of fighting battles for his people, in the War of 1812.[1]

All this is to give you context for what Pastor Jim Bear Jacobs wrote about gratitude on my Facebook wall from Chief Tecumseh:

“When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.”

Gratitude can sound like a cheesy, Hallmark solution to the world’s struggle. But true gratitude is a kind of non-violent spiritual warfare required to maintain spiritual resistance – whether in Chief Tecumseh’s times, Jesus’s times or our own.

A little closer to home, the contemporary, American poet W.S. Merwin wrote this poem, “Thanks,” about the kind of defiant gratitude I’m talking about:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is[2]

This kind of gratitude does not simply condone the world as it is. This kind of gratitude helps us notice the intricacy of the world as it is so that we can orient ourselves toward the holy that is there already and make more dwelling space for holiness, for love, to grow. It also teaches us to see what needs pruning – all that is choking off that love.

Sometimes I feel daunted by this kind of gratitude practice. In the thick of life – when our minds fog with depression, when the doctor calls and it’s not good news, when family dynamics feel so toxic we cannot remember that we are no longer 14, when our exes appear in unwanted proximity to our present day lives, when hundreds of people worshiping are killed in terror, when a the history of indigenous genocide haunts our current political realities, when police shootings happen down the street from our own homes, when our stories of assault and harassment and rape become fodder for humiliation instead of justice, when the list is too long for any one sermon… Gratitude can feel either too puny or too grand a practice.

That’s why I love this wisdom another friend of mine shared with me on Facebook about gratitude this week. He’s a Zen Buddhist practitioner and he said there is a dedication, a Zen scripture of sorts, that reads: “We give thanks to all the ancestors of meditation in the still halls, the unknown women and men, centuries of enlightened women and men, ants, and sticks, and grizzly bears.” Enlightenment is not only about gratitude. But what I love about this passage is that it reminds us that any spiritual practice is not something we do alone. It’s something we do on the shoulders of spiritual ancestors – yes, including non-human ancestors. It’s something we do best in community in still halls, alone but together.

So for that last few minutes of our sermon time this morning, I’m going to invite you into a very small gratitude practice. You should have a notecard in your bulletin. You spiritual task now is to write a note of gratitude to God, like a modern day psalm writer. And if that feels too grand or if your image of God makes that feel like a ridiculous task, write a gratitude note instead to a person in your life in whom you see or feel the holy palpably.

Start with noticing where you are now, the intricacy of the world as it is so that you can orient ourselves toward the holy. And then just write…

[5 minute pause]

If you wrote a gratitude note to God, keep it. Put it somewhere you can find it easily when the world feels like a place for which it is hard to be grateful. And if you wrote to a friend in whom you see the holy embodied, I dare you to send that note.

Holy One, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Amen.

[1] http://www.indigenouspeople.net/tecumseh.htm
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57937/thanks