Thanksgiving Thoughts on Gratitude: Where Do You Stand?

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” – Henri Matisse

Where are you standing today, in this week of thanksgiving? Are you in a place of gratitude for what you have in your life or are you in a place of grasping for more, of unfulfilled desire?

It’s all about perspective.

His name was Manley and for ten years he was one of my best friends, an important spiritual teacher. Almost every week for a decade we would meet over coffee, sometimes sitting in Adirondack chairs at the top of my long driveway or in the front yard of the comfortable house I call home, in a suburb of Boston.  Inevitably, every few weeks, this is how our conversation about God and life would go.

I’d complain about some thing going on in my life. A particularly difficult person or situation to deal with at work.  A family member I was having trouble forgiving. A bill out of the blue I hadn’t expected and now needed to pay. A new ache or a pain I’d discovered that week.

Manley would patiently listen, and then look around at the setting we were meeting within.  A big house with a nice car in the driveway, surrounded by the green grass and the soaring trees and the sun beaming down upon us, each of us healthy and well fed and overall, doing ok. Then Manley would say to me, half seriously, half mockingly.

“Yup…you got a hard life, John. Just look at this house and this yard. You have a safe place to call home and a job that takes good care of you and stuff like health insurance and enough food and lots of family and friends who love you.”

He’d wait a beat or two and then declare….

“Yes, you sure have it hard!”

And then he’d smile, and I’d grin too, maybe even chuckle and realize how right he was about my one life.  How by focusing on the few things in life that were a challenge, rather than the many things in life that were a blessing, I’d forgotten how to be grateful. Grateful to God for all the good gifts of life. Grateful for a job in which I got to make a difference for the good every single day. Grateful for his friendship and how much we each loved one another and taught each other. Grateful for sunlight and hot coffee and one more day as a gift from God.

Manley did not ignore the hard stuff of life, mine or his.  We both had lots of life baggage. We came from families that had gone through hard emotional times. We both faced into addictions and recovery, both had the ups and downs you expect from any human life. Gratitude doesn’t deny human suffering. Instead, gratitude acknowledges that all of us walk down into deep valleys, all of us hurt, and all of us lose people we love and yet, we can still make the courageous choice to look for the good. To see the good. To thank God or the universe for that good.

Manley’s wisdom about gratitude was always clear and simple.

Gratitude is often about the perspective, the attitude we adopt each day, each moment. Where are we standing, in a way, and what are we choosing to see in this life?  Do we see and give thanks for all that we have, all those precious things and beloved people? Or do we see and worry about what we do not have. What we lack. What is hard. What we have yet to realize or achieve.  

Gratitude intentionally chooses to focus upon the gracious. The beautiful. The kind. The hopeful. Places where our hearts are full and our lives are abundant and rich in the deepest way, beyond mere money or material goods. Gratitude revels in the simplest of gifts.  A beautiful sunrise or sunset. A big bear hug from a friend.  A thank you card from a grateful grandchild. A full plate on Thanksgiving. A slew of football games to watch from the couch. The yearly game of Thanksgiving Scrabble where everyone laughs so hard and plays, plays a game. For fun.

This is the second Thanksgiving I haven’t had my friend Manley around and that is sad, and I still miss him so. I could focus on that grief and would be excused for this but instead, today, I remember him with deep and profound gratitude.  I remember all the time we sat and talked about life and God.

And then I thank God in gratitude for Manley. For everything. From where I stand today, it is a very good life. I pray you might know this gratitude too.

Happy Thanksgiving Day. Every day.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

    

 

Feeling Fragile In This Life and On This Planet? Join the Club.

“To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell.” --Marina Dyachenko, Ukrainian author

Ok. I’ll confess. Tell the truth.

I’ve been feeling vulnerable lately, fragile even.  Like I’m coming to realize that more and more, my body is fragile and the world I inhabit, that we inhabit—that’s fragile too. In a real way, to be alive is to be breakable and that’s a good thing and that’s a not so good thing.

So, at age 62, the birthday I just celebrated, I’m very aware that there is more life behind me than in front of me. Folks my age who claim to be middle aged? If I was middle aged, I’d hope to live to 124 I suppose. Nice try. Unless we live to be a record setting age, people at and above my time in life are definitely on the back nine. It’s the seventh inning. You know, the fourth quarter. The autumn of life. Standing in that place on the human timeline absolutely makes me feel vulnerable. Makes me want to appreciate more deeply the time that I have right now and the days that I am living right now. I want to be more grateful for this moment. It never was before and never will be again.  

Time is fragile too. There’s only today. It’s gone before we know it. So, how well are we living? Through the good times and the bad times and the times in between? Vulnerability pushes me to ask those questions.

We are all fragile.   

Take my still much of the time healthy, but sometimes creaky, body. I think my physical slippery slope started when I found out I needed a new hip, a little more than three years ago. From that fateful November morning when I awoke with a pain that I’d never felt before, well, things began to malfunction more and more, body wise. Weird aches in the morning. “What is THAT!” Where once long ago the party was just starting at midnight, now that’s when I am fast asleep or visiting the bathroom. It’s all the stuff that begins to happen when you hit your seventh decade.

Thank goodness I received a replacement hip in June of 2020. Doc told me the old one just wore out. The warranty on it from God expired. Now I now have a piece of hardware in my body that absolutely will outlive me. The great news is I can now walk and bike and jump and run without pain. The amazing fact is that while my body will take something like twenty years to fully go back into the earth after my death, that piece of titanium nested in my fragile body can theoretically last forever. It never rusts.  

Maybe God should have made us out of titanium. Just a thought.

I’m feeling vulnerable about the vulnerability of the natural world in global and local ways too. A week ago, a deer rushed out of the woods and ran in front of my car as I was driving at dusk and I struck it, really hard. It ran off, injured, I am sure. I’ve no idea what happened to that poor animal, but it was definitely fragile, like all things flesh and blood are.

Then there was that string of seventy degree plus days we recently “enjoyed” in early November. For upwards of a week the weather felt more like mid-spring or late summer, not the cusp of winter. I know lots of folks who liked that blast of balmy air, but me? It kind of freaked me out, reminded me that our fragile climate is starting to go haywire.  If it was thirty-two degrees in June for a week or so I’d also freak out. It’s not supposed to be t-shirt weather right now. 

Poor mother earth. She’s so fragile.

I wonder if the spiritual key to facing into this reality is to make peace with our fragility, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities as children of God, and as a planet. I can’t change the state of my body for the most part. Yes, I can eat lots more vegetables and walk more than 7,000 steps a day and keep riding my bike long distances and get enough sleep. Those things will probably help my longevity, my physical humanity. 

But the hard truth is that every day is finally a gift from God, from the universe, with no guarantees that we are going to get another day. Stuff happens. Deer run out in front of cars. Hearts skip a beat. A cell splits one way instead of the other and it is cancer. All the things we cannot predict or prevent. So, what I need to remember is that the most important time in the fragile place called my one life is right now. NOW.

Not a past I regret nor a future I fear. No. NOW.  

The way I live on this fragile earth matters too, right now. How all of us live. Climate scientists report in we have crossed a line and there’s no turning back. Seventy degree fall days will become “normal”. But we’ve also backed away from a doomsday apocalyptic scenario for the planet by beginning to make healthy and wise lifestyle changes. Making different choices about the energy we consume. Maybe we are starting to better respect the vulnerability of our God given natural home.

I hope so.

Fragility—it is who we are. It is hardwired into creation.  God made us this way for a reason and our job is to figure out why. Our job is to live into fragility without fear. Our job is to live with joy and thanksgiving even as the clock keeps ticking away and our planetary home struggles so.

Fragile. Handle with Care. Yourself. Others. The earth.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

     

 

     

   

 

  

      

Is It Too Much to Ask That We Elect Decent Human Beings?

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” --Joseph Welch, United States Senate Hearings, 1954

Truth be told he was kind of a nerd. 

Black rim glasses framed an unremarkable face and a head topped with a shock of shaggy white hair, and ears that stood out.  He spoke with an earnestness that today might be mocked as pollyannish. But he was one of the most decent, honest, and competent public servants I’d ever met and heard speak and so I cast my vote for him in my very first presidential election, in November of 1980.

His name was John Anderson, a name, and a man whose story is now mostly lost to history.

In 1980 many Democrats and political liberals and moderates just could not get excited about a second term for President Jimmy Carter nor a first term for Ronald Regan. As the pundits exclaimed then, who’d elect an ex-actor President? Anderson ran in the Republican primaries but didn’t gain traction. Yet he so wanted to serve his country with his mixture of homespun Midwest politics, pragmatic ideology, and a college professor persona. Hence the nerdiness. He was also known as incorruptible and a person of character and integrity.  Back then that actually meant something when it came to running for office. 

Candidates were at least expected to be, or at least act, like decent human beings.

As an idealistic nineteen-year-old and political science major at the University of Massachusetts, I so wanted to find a candidate I could believe in, whose campaign I could volunteer for. That’s why I fell for John Anderson. I helped to organize his fall 1980 visit to our campus and on the first Tuesday in November of that year I walked into a voting booth in Amherst and cast “yes” for the first time for a commander in chief. 

Anderson lost, coming in third and garnering 6.6 percent of the national vote. Later analysis showed he’d taken votes away equally from both major party candidates.  Anderson then went on to teach political science and American studies at many colleges and universities, including my alma mater.  He continued to work for civic engagement and as a public servant until his death in 2017 at 95.

I wonder if Anderson would have been even a blip on the current political stage if a person like him decided to run for President or Congress or local office in 2022.  His credentials as an essentially decent human, one not in politics for self alone, nor a rabid ideologue; these days, that does not seem to be important to many of my fellow Americans. And that is a real shame.

Instead, we elected an ego driven, philandering, failed casino mogul, reality TV star and real estate developer and we may do so again. We run candidates that lie and then lie about lying and then lie about lying about lying.  The nastier the rhetoric of a candidate in many places the better it would seem, for more votes. Or consider the many candidates in this election who outright deny that the 2020 election was fair and square and legitimate. These election deniers who continue to believe their own delusional rhetoric have already won 161 races nationwide.  What other truths will they deny? The roundness of the earth?

Where have you gone John Anderson?

Or Charlie Baker—there’s someone I will absolutely miss as will millions of other folks in the Bay State. Charlie was not perfect as a governor, made his mistakes, but he never an ideologue. He was not in the work of government for his own power or ego or for the money. He was a policy nerd.  Wanted to get things done. Watching him campaign he looked like he was suffering through a root canal. During the worst of COVID Baker stood up every day before the cameras and answered all the questions with calm, competence, and steady leadership. 

He was a decent human being, a person of character who stepped up to lead and now he returns to the life of an ordinary citizen.  If only we could get our reps and senators in Washington to do the same. They get elected and never leave. At present members of the House of Representatives have served on average for 8.9 years and counting, with Senators clocking in at 11 years and counting. That’s the highest number ever since 1789. And when most of them finally do leave Congress, they slide right into even more lucrative work as lobbyists or corporate board members or overpaid public speakers.

Here's one truth we can’t deny. The essential decency of the people who lead us (or the lack of essential decency) reflect who we have become as a country. I know as a person of faith, I want the person who speaks for me to be kind and merciful, to seek to understand others and be open to working with the opponent across the aisle. I’d like a leader who I trust to be honest and moral.  

Is that too much to ask? In 2022, maybe. Or perhaps it is time for more and more of us to demand decency in our politicians or maybe even have the courage to run for office ourselves.

Have we no decency? God, I hope we still do. I really, really do.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.