Next to Christmas
Thanksgiving is the most popular
and one of the most expensive of the holidays
that we celebrate in the US.
According to the US government
we will spend over $1.28 billion dollars on turkeys alone
then there is the projected $254 billion dollars
that 130 million of us will spend on travel.
And even though Black Friday has diminished in popularity
it is still projected that 182 million U.S. consumers
will shop during the Thanksgiving weekend
spending upwards of $130 billion for gifts.
Besides the appointed day for national overindulgence
which one punster characterized as
the one occasion each year
when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty
and a weekend for inflicting pain on our wallets and credit cards
It is also a day for reflection by many Americans
for counting blessings, for giving thanks,
for expressing, even embracing, gratitude
as the virtue of the day.
Being grateful is a virtuous thing … and there is even science
that demonstrates that gratitude is good for us in many ways.
The leading expert on the science of gratitude
Dr. Robert Emmons is professor of psychology UC Davis.
Emmons’ work demonstrates that there are actually
physical advantages to practicing gratitude,
i.e., it affects our health,
strengthens our immune systems,
helps us to fall asleep more quickly,
sleep more soundly,
and awaken more refreshed.
Emmons’ work also demonstrates psychological benefits.
Gratitude strengthens our brain structure
for social cognition and empathy.
It reduces stress in our lives.
It boosts our psychological well being,
enabling our relationships.
There are even economic and environmental boons.
The Journal of Retailing and Consumer services reports
businesses that practice gratitude
generate more loyal customers.
In the midst of the current climate crisis,
it is also noteworthy that studies indicate a relationship
between being grateful and caring more for the environment.
Dr. Emmons and his colleagues
offer multiple strategies for developing the virtue of gratitude.
They suggesting starting with what they call “gratitude light.”
It is a very brief form of journaling
that requires one to write down each day
5 things for which one is grateful.
I had a wonderful friend, Connie,
a Lutheran Pastor, and professor of theology.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.
And, while she was going through radiation,
then surgery, then chemotherapy,
she practiced a form of “gratitude light”
without ever having read any of Dr. Emmons’ work.
She said that every day she fought her cancer,
she would write down 3 new things
for which she was grateful.
She said it sometimes took her an hour-
not because she wasn’t grateful,
but because she just didn’t want to repeat herself.
She always looked for something new for which to be grateful.
She had to look carefully in her life,
especially at the small things.
One of her examples often comes to mind:
it’s when you’ve been in bed
and you turn the pillow over
and it is newly fresh and cool against your face.
I often think gratefully of Connie when that happens to me.
As Connie progressed in her illness,
she also had to practice what Emmons calls “deep gratitude.”
Deep gratitude recognizes the sacrifices and hardship,
the sorrow and suffering,
that have allowed us to be who we are:
to live in freedom, even to prosper because of sacrifice.
Connie remembered how her folks struggled to provide for her-
how they let her go to Chicago from North Dakota
as a high school graduate
to join Vista – Volunteers in service to America –
although they didn’t understand her passion for justice
and didn’t quite understand when she told them
that her small group leader during her training
was a charismatic young preacher
by the name of Martin Luther King!
Deep gratitude sometimes hits me like a wave.
When I think of my own folks … how they struggled
to put five kids through Catholic education
on a single meager salary.
I remember my mother claiming the chicken back
as her piece at dinner… always wondering why she liked
such a meager serving …
until it eventually dawned on me
that she was leaving the larger portions
for her husband and children
without comment or fanfare.
We all have stories like that of deep gratitude
for unexpected gifts, for undeserved gifts.
Besides gratitude light, and deep gratitude,
without Dr. Emmons’ permission,
I would like to say that there is a third kind of gratitude:
what we might call profound gratitude
that allows some to be grateful
when their lives are not full … but emptying.
Some of you have experienced that most unexpected of gifts
in the lives of those
that no matter what the world throws at them
it cannot dislodge them from their living and their loving.
I head such a story a while back
on the “This I believe” website
A young woman wrote:
A dying mother is a tricky thing, especially when she is not your mother. I was 13 years old when Isabelle married my father. Part of the nuptial deal for Isabelle was three unruly teenage daughters–among them me. My father packed us up and moved into her elegant colonial across town. The home we left was a split level with dirty shag carpeting, and each small room within held some echo of sadness.
It is no small truth to say the woman who became my stepmother transformed me into her daughter. She immersed herself into the tedious rituals of raising a teenage girl, paying close attention to the social particulars of high school. She helped pick out my first prom dress and hosted elegant lasagna dinners for my friends. She introduced me as her daughter. She sat through every high school play I was in even though her macular degeneration prevented her from seeing anything. She always sent roses backstage.
It took Isabelle three years to die. My sisters and I were there to make sure she kept her food down or didn’t fall out of bed. We drove her to church and discreetly held her portable oxygen tank in the pew. In the final days, we took turns reading her poetry as she lay in her rented hospital bed by the window, facing the ocean she loved.
The last time Isabelle spoke, I covered my hand over hers and said, “You saved my childhood. Have I ever told you that?” “No,” she answered. “But I am glad to hear it now.”
I do not have Isabelle in my blood; yet she is inside me somewhere, her voice saying my name, her small hands, her “pleases and thank yous,” all her good manners and grace. These are not memories, but the being of her still around me, making me who I am.
The writer concludes, I believe that the best kind of grief for the dead is gratitude. And it’s hard to tell the difference between the two when it comes to missing a mother who is now gone.
Profound gratitude … even in profound grief.
There is some irony, to my way of thinking
that the Thanksgiving feast
always occurs in the month of All Saints and All Souls.
The festivals of stuffing ourselves and football frenzy
occur in the light of memorial candles and the altar of the dead
And, while that might seem at least an unusual
if not unwelcomed reflection,
it goes to the heart of profound Christian gratitude:
for each eucharist, each Mass,
we formally and repeatedly give thanks
for the death of the only begotten.
We do not anticipate black Friday at this table
but recall Good Friday,
when’s God’s inexplicable love for humankind
found eternal expression
in the terrible beauty of the cross.
We have been liberated from death
because of the sacrifice of the innocent-
a gift that moves us to profound gratitude.
It is also possible that the power of such a gift
could provoke in us some guilt,
sometimes considered by the Irish as God’s favorite emotion,
but the more appropriate provocation seems to be Mission.
When we have experienced gratitude.
for someone’s profound gift of self-emptying love:
a parent’s grace in letting go,
a spouse’s self-sacrifices for us,
a friend’s legacy of extraordinary faith when facing death,
the outpouring of the Godhead on Golgotha-
we are actually commissioned
not only to express our gratitude
but to mirror the original gift
and extend ourselves in self-emptying love
in self sacrifice,
in startling service,
so that others might experience the gift of profound gratitude
from us … and in us.
It is not a new idea for those who celebrate the death of the Lord.
It is not a new idea for this community
that pours itself out in hospitality and care,
that embraces the grieving,
anoints the ailing and broken,
and extends its embrace from North Lawndale to Nicaragua,
from post-Katrina New Orleans to Peru.
But, it is one that must be renewed again and again
so that the sacrifices of those who prepared our way,
not only inspire in us deep gratitude
but charge us to mission again,
so that those who follow us
will have the chance to glimpse and experience
such gratitude as well.
And so with the poet … we hope … we pray:
One morning
we will wake up
and forget to build
that wall we’ve been building,
the one between us
the one we’ve been building
for years, perhaps
out of some sense
of right and boundary,
perhaps out of habit.
One morning
we will wake up
and let our empty hands
hang empty at our sides.
Perhaps they will rise,
as empty things
sometimes do
when blown
by the wind.
Perhaps they simply
will not remember
how to grasp, how to rage.
We will wake up
that morning
and we will have
misplaced all our theories
about why and how
and who did what
to whom, we will have mislaid
all our timelines
of when and plans of what
and we will not scramble
to write the plans and theories anew.
On that morning,
not much else
will have changed.
Whatever is blooming
will still be in bloom.
Whatever is wilting
will wilt. There will be fields
to plow and trains
to load and children
to feed and work to do.
And in every moment,
in every action, we will
feel the urge to say thank you,
we will follow the urge to bow low.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.