There are things I don’t believe I do well, and don’t like to do (funny how those go hand in hand) and giving a speech is one of them. I’m grateful ….that this talk is limited to three minutes. It’s a measure of how much I love this church that I am up here speaking to you;Kevin and I feel that we receive so much more from Grace Church than we give. We give when we are asked, and ongoing, in whatever ways we can think of. It’s one of those principles of life that hopefully one discovers early on- the more you give of yourself, the more involved you are, the greater benefit you receive . This idea of giving is intrinsically linked to gratitude. Giving of oneself makes one more aware, more grateful for blessings. The more involved one is at Grace, the more blessed one feels, the more grateful. It’s a paradox, but that’s how it seems to work.
To me, gratitude is essentially an awareness.
Spiritual thinkers through the ages have posited that what we put our mind on grows, or becomes our reality. I can’t help but be reminded of those I work with as a mental health nurse…daily I meet folks who cannot stop thinking of ways to kill themselves, and sometimes they take action. In order to make an assessment, I have these odd conversations with folks in which we dispassionately discuss how they planned to jump off a bridge, take pills, or run their car into a bridge abutment. Taken out of context, anywhere else such sentences would appear as totally incongruous or even blasphemy…and yet they are spoken on the path to healing, or they wouldn’t be spoken at all, just suppressed. One has to acknowledge the present awareness in order to begin to think of living again.
On the gratitude scale, a person whose mind is constantly occupied by suicide cannot be simultaneously counting their blessings. As with many types of mental illness, a person’s equilibrium can be compromised because certain thoughts,certain emotions, predominate and become the entire awareness to the exclusion of others. It can become a negative habit of mind; the converse is also true, that maintaining a practice of gratitude is a habit of mind as well.
It’s possible that maintaining a mental stance of gratitude may even be self-protective, as it demonstrates awareness. Certainly, when we thank God in prayers, we are in this stance. Apparently the early American pilgrims built seven times more graves than they did houses, yet despite their losses, the enduring tradition they have bequeathed us is a day of Thanksgiving – fast approaching, I might add. Nor is it an accident that many of the words associated with gratitude speak to holy origins – words like benediction, invocation, blessing, and grace , to name a few.
We can demonstrate our practice of gratitude by giving, praying, doing good works, acknowledging, and maintaining awareness. I will close with these words from the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson:
'There are two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.'
