The Thing About Gratitude

Tags

God, gratitude, life

It’s all good, right?

I mean, we see it every day. The call to gratitude. We are told to journal it. We are told to start every day with it.

Well I read something the other day that got me to thinking that perhaps we are looking at it wrongly, or at least superficially.

Let’s be real here.

When do we invoke this “count your blessings” doctrine?

Usually when crap is going badly for us. When the winter has been too long, or we are challenged by a health issue, or a loved one dies, or doesn’t love us any more. When the kids fly the coop, when the sinuses act up, when a promotion falls through. The list of human bumps in the road are endless.

And somebody reminds us, or we remind ourselves, to remember how darn fortunate we are “all things considered.”

So we dig our way out of the hole by posting a list of ten “gratitudes” each day, or we write in a journal, or we at least start our meditation/prayers with a list. Partly this greatly enlarges our concept of what we can be grateful for of course. The flowers, the sun when it has rained for days, a really good cup of coffee.

But what underlines much of this process, either consciously or otherwise, is an assumption of who or what one is to be grateful to. In fact, it’s pretty much in your face in some meme’s I’ve seen on Facebook.

God.

We thank God for this, that, and everything good that happens to us. We thank God for a sunny warm day for that outdoor wedding, for surviving that heart attack, and for keeping us from that awful accident  at that spot we passed only seconds before.

And that creates the great unspoken counterpoint.

Other people died in the accident we avoided. Others don’t survive their heart attacks. It rains on plenty of outdoor weddings. What have these folks done wrong? not enough of?

When we give gratefulness to God for the good, we automatically suggest that others weren’t deserving enough, didn’t believe enough, well enough, or something. Not enough. We however, are “good” enough.

God must love us a lot since we have all “this”. And God, consequently must not love them as much.

That is what we mean, even if we don’t think it.

And of course even our prayer of gratitude is not pure. It’s done for a purpose. To get us out of our sad/angry/scared place.

See all the benefits?

Surely we should be grateful. We work hard, we are patient, we study, we have friends and family who help us. All these things can be the point of our gratitude and no doubt deservingly so. Whatever my parents were or were not, they got me to college, allowed me the opportunity to become a lawyer, make a good living, set myself up for a nicely comfortable financial life. I owe them my gratitude. I also owe it to myself for all those endless days and nights of studying that first year of law school without which their funds would have been wasted.

But when I take it up the scale and I thank God, then I’m heading in a whole new direction.

For then I must posit and belief that God is a meddler. God is a minutia freak. God is pulling an infinity of strings to make sure that I got that education, that job, met that man, moved to that place, and on and on and on. Once you start here, you can’t stop. God ends up being responsible for every tooth not rotted with decay. God becomes responsible for somebody remembering to post birthday greetings on your Wall.

Free will is out the door, because it’s all part of God’s plan, that fall-back position for “I don’t know how the hell this happened”.

And if it’s one way, then it’s all ways. God is also responsible for the flood that ruined your home with not enough insurance to cover the repairs. God is at fault the reason for sonny boy not getting into Princeton. God ruined the souffle.

Because He is either in charge or he’s not. There’s no middle ground. It’s all part of the great mysterious “plan” and it’s gotta happen that way. You have to have a headache on March 7, so that a husband doesn’t keel over from a stroke because you didn’t make that chocolate cake that was the last straw that would break the blood vessel’s  wall two days later.

And if all that is true, then people who are shot and killed in Syria today were only dying because God willed it. It was for that higher purpose “plan”. And if people live with not enough to eat, well they are supposed to. There are slippery slopes, and this is one of them. Start down the path to praising God for the good in your life, and you have to admit that he causes all the bad too.

I’m not saying that God sits back and never does a thing. I think he speaks to each of us urgently every moment, begging us to rise to the occasion. And if we do, we’re looking out for ourselves, our loved ones, and all the people we don’t even know. We’re kinder and better to ourselves and everyone else. God urges that surgeon to be the best surgeon and completely focused. He begs her not to drink the night before. BUT SHE EITHER LISTENS OR DOESN’T AND IF SHE DOESN’T, AND HER HAND SLIPS, SHE’S TO BLAME, NOT GOD, FOR THE PATIENT’S DEATH.

You see what I mean?

That’s how God is God and we are we, fault-prone humans with free will to do or not do as we choose.

So by all means, give thanks for all you have. It’s a fine practice. Just remember who you need to thank and who not.

God can be thanked for much, but micromanaging your little life? Ahhh, not so much.

This Buds for YOU!

Tags

blogging, gratitude, Thanksgiving

Well, in thinking over all the things I have to be grateful about from this past year, one stands out above all others. Like Time’s “YOU” person of the year, YOU indeed are something I’m most grateful for.

I’ve moved, just recently, to thinking of myself as a writer, not “just” a blogger, though I’m not sure there is a lot of difference. The point is, I have come to see that I have a gift, one that I was mostly unaware of. Sure, I knew I could do good technical writing, but I had no idea I could write with a modicum of wit and satire.

In any event, I would surely not have realized it, had it not been for you, who read this blog with some regularity. Some of you have been with me from the start, and some of you are very recent additions to this family of thinkers. Each and every one of you is important to me, and I value your visits. Some of you comment regularly, and some not at all. Those of you whom I don’t know because of that fact, I value just as much.

I recall  the beginning of this blog in March of 2008, when I was ecstatic to have a hundred readers a week. That slowly, and I do mean, tortuously so, crept up literally one by one it seemed. In a year’s time, I had around 30,000 visitors. Then things veritably took off like a rocket.

Today, I often flirt with 1,000 visitors a day, and we have now been viewed by 190 separate countries. And, most countries have multiple visits. We have lots of friends stopping by from Canada and the UK of course, but Germany and Italy, India and Australia, the Philippines and Brazil are big followers. I have no clue if they are expatriates from the US or if some foreigners think I reflect a certain point of view in America which they find important.

You, with your utter support, which has always been unconditional in its tone, have allowed me to grow as a writer, pushing my envelope and exploring my talent. I am not yet sure what God wishes me to do with this talent, but I am thrilled to be learning my craft. There have been times when I wondered if my voice was heard, and you have always said yes, and encouraged me onward.

Of unspeakable value have been those of you who also blog. Your reasons for blogging may be similar to mine, or entirely different. You may blog on similar topics, or ones utterly foreign to me. Yet I have found so much wisdom and humor, so much passion that it has pushed me to work harder and think deeper at every turn.

There are so many to thank, I know not where to start frankly. On any given day, I can be completely transfixed by one or more of you. You have been my teachers, some of you. Some of you know more about writing that I can ever acquire. Many of you challenge my opinions, and tease me out of simplistic conclusions.

I am always a bit crestfallen when I read a comment from a new visitor and discover they don’t have a blog. For that is a missed opportunity to engage with a new person, a person full of ideas and dreams, who undoubtedly has much to offer us all. I can only hope they continue commenting so I can get to know them a bit better.

There are those that say that Internet “chatting” and all our Facebooking, Myspacing, and such, create false relationships. They are ways of avoiding real life and real people. That can be the case, but I don’t think it has to be. I think many of us care quite deeply about each other, and we are genuinely concerned with the ups and downs of each other’s lives. I make no apologies for my blogging friends, they are as real to me as the one’s I meet face to face.

The Internet remains the best place for international conversation on the issues of our day. Or the interests of our lives. We can share, discuss, argue, reject, embrace, and modify ideas on any subject under the sun. We can learn, in a nut shell. No doubt we must be careful in our sourcing, and in our evaluating of the information we acquire this way, but that is to say no more than we must do the same as to books and magazines and TV.

I hope that each and every one of you has a marvelous new year. Some of you are struggling as we look to this new dawn. Some will be mourning, some will be in fear. Some will be holding on as tightly as they know how, to Jesus. Some of you will be celebrating, and are full of hope. Some of you are young and full of expectation, some of you are old and full of remembrance while savoring the moment. Most of us are somewhere in between.

We travel the world, or our own small plots of land. We are all together, like it or not on this small blue ball traveling in the outskirts of a fairly nondescript galaxy. We sink or swim together, like it or not as well. I thank you for participating in this “community of ideas” and look forward to more conversation in the year to come.

Blessings, and Happy New YEAR!

Reflectively Yours

Tags

essay, evaluations, God, gratitude, life, measuring, New years resolutions

We have been talking of late about our back looking propensity. And we have established good and intelligent reasons for doing so. In a sense, we review the past in some attempt to give meaning to the present. It gives contextuality to our “now.”

Yet, we do more than just engage with the past in order to discern lessons for the future and to give concreteness to the present. We also look back in some attempt to measure.

What do I mean? I mean that we are prone, in much of our lives to measure things. We measure time surely, we measure our progress. We measure our fullness of anything with respect to what others have. We count, and we project into the future. At this pace, we will be . . . .next Tuesday.

Measure twice, count once. A good thing to remember.

The counting of things is done in some sense to define “progress.” We like to think that we have made some, week to week, month to month. But we especially evaluate and measure at year’s end.

Some of us are so dedicated to self-punishment that we actually keep a copy of our “resolutions” to re-examine at year’s end. Most of us are not so masochistic as that. But we recall at least the major ones.

So we measure our weight loss, the reduction of our “debt”, the quantity of books read, the success of that new Yoga class. We feel alternately, good or bad, depending on how we “measure” up.

We make excuses, vow to do better, rethink, reword, rewrite all such things again. We add, subtract, multiply and divide. Momentarily depressed by our utter lack of success, we reconfigure and regain our optimism with bold new ways of approaching our resolutions for the coming year.

Even when we reject the entire concept of resolutions, we are not immune. We still reflect and grade ourselves in some fashion for our accomplishments or lack of  same. We plan and devise a better strategy for the coming year.

And I’m not quite sure why we do so. It seems that we as humans need some marker to identify that we have “grown” in some way. We believe in God, those of us who do, yet, we are not satisfied to simply “do” living. We must evaluate and judge our living. As if, (don’t tell) we might not quite believe that immortality awaits us, and we need to make some showing to the world that we mattered.

There, I said it. We need and want to matter in the world, because it may be all we have. And so we attempt to measure out our successes or failures as if this all goes down into some impossibly long eulogy to be delivered at our death.

Here lies Sherry Peyton, who at age 1 and 1/2 mastered the art of spoon and pooping in a receptacle. At age 4, she tied her shoes.  . . . at 59, she knitted a sweater, and learned to make Peking (Beijing?) duck.”

Yet, we profess, and assert that we do believe. We look about us at the grandeur of the world (those places unsullied by human trashing at least) and we see the clear finger of God. We notice the flora and fauna and gasp in delight, knowing that, some wonderfully gracious transcendent power by His word uttered, set all in motion.

We see the dance of galaxies, and the Northern Lights, tears appear as we gaze upon beauty so haunting and so perfect, moments so tender and precious that we choke momentarily in wonder. We KNOW in a way that is inexplicable and far to holy to commit to mere words.

In frail fleeting seconds we KNOW, and then return to the realities of carpooling and flu bugs, and car payments and arthritis. And  so we count, and measure, and evaluate, and judge, and we hope it means something in the end to us, to them, to those strangers who will buy our pathetic belongings at auctions. I see my sewing machine in a box on the floor of a garage, carried off by a bidder for 4 bucks. My life is sold off for a few hundred dollars.

Is it enough? Surely, for these things are but stuff. We live on in the minds of loved ones, family and friends. They are mindful of our measuring. For they measure too.

Better, I think that we strive to not count, but rather give thanks. That we peruse that history we have built and thank our lucky stars (so dramatically created of Godstuff) that we had homes and loved ones. We saw the Grand Canyon, we reveled in Mozart’s 40th symphony. We held a grandchild and caressed a lover. We tasted caviar, and sipped a good champagne once. We saw a puppy being born, and saw an eagle soar. We read Thomas Merton, and laughed at Erma Bombeck.

Give thanks as these last moments of 2009 drift by. We are alive, we have minds to think with, and hands to work with and feet to travel upon. We have loved ones, friends, and pets. We have eyes to see a quiet beauty everywhere we look, if we but look, carefully. Give thanks, and then do it some more. We are more full that we imagine with that which we should be grateful for.

Amen.