Sabbath Devotional :: Gratitude Grumpies

I was asked to give a talk, the week before Thanksgiving, on . . . you guessed it, gratitude. I was grumpy about it. And I wanted to talk about my grumpies and my right to feel grumpy and not be tone-policed about my grumpiness. And how I can be grateful and grumpy at the same time. And that gratitude is much, much more than a rosy-cheeked smile on my face. But I’ve been taught well to happily accept all callings and “invitations” to speak, so I threw myself on my bed and shed a few tears and then got to work making sense of this complicated (to me) topic and to find what felt like truth to me. I would like to share a few truths I learned by sharing some excerpts from my talk with you. The full talk can be found here.

Truth number one: Gratitude can take the form of awe and can come at the most unexpected times.

“When I was a Senior at BYU, I took a trip to visit a friend in Canada. I was spending the summer living in Seattle working, so the drive was short enough. I finished work Friday, loaded a few things into my powder blue 1972 VW bug, and headed north across the Okanagan valley. I was on my merry way, Nancy Griffith and Allison Kraus songs to keep me awake. The sun set and it became pitch black as I drove through miles and miles of apple orchards, no towns in view.

Up in the distance and over the horizon, I noticed some strange lights. They shone from the horizon into the night sky. They were colored: green and purple and pink. And they seemed to shimmer, almost dance. I was not expecting to approach a large city ahead, but saw no other alternative. There must be some city. As I drove, the lights continued to dance across the sky, but no city appeared. I don’t know when or how it dawned on me, but at some point the meteorology class I had just taken the semester before all came back, and I realized that this was no city. This was none other than the Aurora Borealis–the northern lights. And it was absolutely stunning, awe-inspiring. All alone, surrounded by blackness, watching this once-in-a-lifetime show of nature, I felt very small and yet very large.

God had bestowed on me a gift of unfathomable beauty. I, one tiny, insignificant human on this gargantuan planet, one of billions. And yet it felt like the gift was created for me alone. My gratitude and joy were overflowing. I felt God there. In the words of Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, it was a moment of “being present to the presence”.”

Truth number two: We often do not value and appreciate blessings we enjoy everyday.

“Experiences like this don’t happen every day. In fact, it is precisely because they happen so rarely that they are so awe- and gratitude-inspiring.

I remember running at Saguaro Park one Saturday and seeing a couple stop their camper to snap photos of the saguaro cacti. They were admiring these giant beauties. I stopped to talk to them. They were from North Carolina and were on a cross country trip. I had just come home from a trip to next door Tennessee with my running girls where I had been awed by the beauty of the thick green forest. I asked them which of the many places they had visited was the most beautiful. You won’t believe what they said. I didn’t.

Here. Tucson. “Tucson is the most beautiful.” “Are you crazy?” I wanted to shout. What about all of the trees and streams and lakes of North Carolina. They said the trees were so thick that it obstructed your view of everything. I said the trees are the view. They said that the openness of the saguaro forest with the vast sky and colorful sunsets surpassed any beauty they had seen anywhere. I thought about this for the rest of my eight-mile run. Sometimes we don’t value those things that we see everyday. We take it for granted. The things we take for granted might just be the things that inspire awe and gratitude in others.”

Truth number three: you can feel great sorrow and immense gratitude simultaneously (and no, you are not required to feel thankful for your trials).

“So the great challenge for me is how to harness that gratitude and joy for the unusual, for the new, for the once-in-a-lifetime, and feel it every day for the seemingly mundane. And to do so while I struggle with all of the weight of life’s challenges and all of the ensuing emotions that can really hamper my style.

How can I feel daily gratitude when I am sad over losses? How can I feel daily thanks when I am angry over being treated unfairly? How can I feel hopeful when I fear the future or what is in front of me? How can I feel grateful when I am stewing over the apology I am probably never going to get? How can I feel thankful when my children are not choosing the way I am sure I taught them?

Francis Ward Weller is a psychotherapist/author who wrote,

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”

It is possible to simultaneously feel sorrow and gratitude, to hold them in tension. I will explain with a bit of physics. Yesterday I went to grab some grain from my neighbor for our pigs. He kindly picks up brew grain once a week and our pigs love it. He has a structure to cover his hay. He calls it a barn but it is really 4 poles sunk in the ground with a roof. No walls.

The problem is that his structure started to lean. While the poles are at a 90 degree angle to the ground, completely straight, the structure holds quite nicely. The weight on the roof pushes down with a force pushing straight down into the ground. But when the poles start to lean, and especially if they all lean in the same direction, you have a situation where the center of gravity is no longer in line with the pole and the force is no longer pushing the pole into the ground, but it is now being forced down to the ground with no pole underneath it to stop it. Rotation of the poles ensue, and without intervention, the structure will collapse. This is what started to happen to his barn.

So last week he set out to fix it with some tension wire and metal poles. Since it was leaning right, he produced a force (tension) through wire, pulling it back in the opposite direction. But, he also knew that if he pulled it too far, it would just collapse in the opposite direction. So he propped up a bar against the other side of the poles to push back on it should he need it. Forces in both directions. Pulling and pushing, holding this structure in place.

This is how I see the tension and balance between sorrow and gratitude. We can feel both at the same time, one pushing, one pulling. Sometimes we feel more of one than another, then a gust of wind comes and everything changes, the direction changes. I can feel sorrow for a sick child while also feeling gratitude for help I am receiving from ward members. I can feel sorrow for a job lost while feeling gratitude that I have enough money stored away to meet our needs for a year. I don’t have to feel gratitude for the lost job (although I might), but I can still feel simultaneous gratitude. And then, I might have a sorrow so strong that I cannot feel gratitude for a long while and I can only pull and pull and pull with all my might so the structure does not fall.

As we were talking about this structure, we segued into a conversation on gratitude and the need for balance. I was painfully aware that he was out feeding his animals because his wife, Diana, the sweetest human on the earth, a nurse who visited me every day Eli was in the hospital to share her nursing wisdom and support with me, a few years younger than me, is dying of cancer, and is too weak to do the daily chores that for years were the highlight of her day. Every treatment has been exhausted and without a miracle, it is just a matter of time. His tough exterior melted in front of me as he shared his understanding of this truth: that we can feel beautiful joy and gratitude even as we are surrounded by almost unbearable sorrow.

May the Lord give us all the strength and wisdom to find healing, safety, joy and gratitude even as we muddle our way through our daily challenges.”