Choose to Give Thanks

Matt Alspaugh

Please join me in singing just the first stanza of Hymn #128, "For All That Is Our Life"[1]. We've been using this hymn in most of our services over the last month, so many of you will find it to be familiar.

For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.

I was in Ottawa last week for a ministers meeting they hold every seven years. There were nearly five hundred ministers present. Jason Sheldon, a premier choir director, had organized a choir which was going to sing at the closing service. I did not sign up, thinking most every minister has a far better voice than I do.

On the second day, the choir director put out a request for basses and tenors, so I felt obliged to help out.  My contribution was small, my range is limited, but I felt great joy being part of this one hundred person choir. I had forgotten how much fun such singing can be. There's something empowering about finding your musical voice.

So first a pitch. Marcellene is organizing a choir for our Christmas Eve service. Our group, the Sometimes Sunday Singers, will meet for the first time on Sunday December 6, at 10:15. I encourage you to join us, even if you think you're not a strong singer.

So let us sing our thanks and praise! It sounds so much more joyful than when we merely speak our thanks and praise.

Many of us are ambivalent about the hymns we sing. The old joke goes "why do Unitarian Universalists sing so poorly? Because they are busy reading ahead to see if they agree with the words."

Many of us, including me, have thought that our hymns are just revisions of old Lutheran hymns, many of those which were just old German drinking songs. This may be true for some of our hymns, but not all. This particular hymn, "For All That Is Our Life" was written just a couple decades ago by a British Unitarian minister, Bruce Findlow, near the end of his own life.[2]

Findlow served as head of Oxford University's Manchester College, which has historically been a hot-bed of British Unitarian nonconformist thought. Among Findlow's books are Religion in People and I Question Easter.

The tune was written by Patrick Rickey, a composer and organist in Oakland California.  The tune is named for Sherman Island, which is one of Rickey's favorite places for windsurfing.

So let's continue in our journey through this hymn. Along the way we'll give voice to those things for which you are thankful, and I'll offer a few thoughts and stories. On to sing the next stanza.

For needs which others serve, for services we give, for work and its rewards, for hours of rest and love; we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.

When Liz and I lived in Denver, we had a small vegetable garden at our house. It was small because our house was blessed with four ancient and huge elm trees, and so most of the lot was too shady for a garden. But there was one bright spot beside the garage, so we grew peas, and squash, and herbs, and raspberries, and lots of flowers.

I tried to grow tomatoes. I remember the joy of tomatoes from my dad's garden when I was growing up, so having tomatoes from the garden was important to me. And I learned that in Denver tomatoes are an exercise in misplaced hope, a study in chance, a lottery with nature with long, long odds.

The first year, we planted after the last frost, and this was too late. A cool summer meant the tomatoes were still green when the fall cold came. And these are those green tomatoes that you can't get to ripen indoors - they just stare at you from the window sill in bright light green defiance.

So we learned to put them in early, and take a chance on the last frost, sometimes losing that bet. Then we tried the 'Wall of Water', a contrivance used in the mountains to try to prevent plants from freezing. No success here.

Then there was a wet, rainy summer, where few tomatoes set. Then there were those giant nasty green tomato worms that did the plants in.

Finally one year, all was coming together just right. Lots of tomatoes on the vines, big, beautiful, unblemished. Enough summer heat and sun that they were nearly perfectly ripe. The early ones tasted great. Then the hail came. Golf-ball sized chunks of ice. Ok they were small golf-balls, not quite regulation size, but they were enough. There was nothing left, but a few bare, broken stems.

We give our thanks and praise for services we give, for work and its rewards. Too often, we get focused on the rewards of work or of service; the outcomes. We expect our labors in the garden to literally bear fruit. We expect our hard work, our nights at the office to lead to a promotion or a bonus. We expect our efforts helping the homeless or teaching in an after-school program to yield housed, educated, and grateful recipients of our service.

Sometimes, none of this works out like we hoped. The people we help never get their lives together. The career languishes. The garden whispers to us, 'maybe next year'.

Like David Budbill, in the poem "Sometimes" [3] we still feel a sense of gratitude.  He tells us, "I've got to say, right now, how beautiful and sweet this world can be."

Our gratitude can emerge from what we have accomplished, our achievements, but it can be so much larger than that. We can give thanks for that which is possible, even if it does not play out exactly the way we hoped. Our gratitude can emerge, when we realize how beautiful and sweet this world can be. Even with agony, and dying, and torture, this world still can be beautiful and sweet. Can be -- that's the operative phrase here. We find gratitude in what can be. We give thanks and rejoice in  our efforts, our work and service, as we strive to make a world that can be. Let us continue:

For sorrow we must bear, for failures, pain, and loss, each new thing we learn, for fearful hours that pass: we come with praise and thanks for all that is our life.

People move quickly through the hospital these days, from unit to unit and then to rehab or home care.  As a hospital chaplain I saw many people just once. But a few people I saw many times over the course of weeks or even months. You see, one of the units I served was Psych, and I cared for people both in the locked units and those who participated in our outpatient group therapy. In this 'day treatment program' I'd both lead groups and meet with people for individual pastoral care.

One woman I met first in the locked unit, and I saw her for several months.  I've of course changed some of the details of her story to respect her anonymity here.  I learned of all of the troubles she was having, a marriage on the rocks; a job that was once creative and satisfying was now dry, dull and repetitive; serious problems with teenage kids. On top of all this, she was a deeply religious woman, involved in her church, and the church was blowing up, coming apart at the seams. It seemed that she had run up against the shadow side of synchronicity, that life seemed to have dealt her a lot of bad cards at once.

She progressed in our treatment program, which was most satisfying for me to watch. It was almost as if the color came back in her life.  We had many conversations, often about God. Why was God distant, wrecking her life, and on top of that, wrecking her church? Now, you need to know that as a professional chaplain, I do not try to evangelize, but I tried to stay with her as she worked through this.

In the end, her understanding of God deepened. It moved from the big Daddy guy in the sky kind of God to something much deeper, a mystical companion who accompanied her and suffered with her. In this new understanding, she found a deep sense of thankfulness. She told me that while she would not wish this experience of depression on anyone, that she was able to look back on it with a sense of gratitude for the growth that emerged from it.

If we choose to live full lives, we will bear many sorrows. It is how we deal with them that frames our lives. I don't want to suggest that we can simply "look on the bright side" whenever something bad happens.

But we can begin to reframe the stories we tell ourselves about bad things that happen. Are they always someone else's fault? Do we always get the bad deal? Or do we make the attempt to see if there is another way to tell the story, that makes bearing the suffering easier.

Maybe fault and blame are not helpful ideas. My patient stopped blaming God. Maybe some bad deals are just bad, but some are opportunities for a new thing. My patient concluded she needed to leave her church and find a new religious home. That was sad, but necessary.

I never saw this patient again after she left the hospital, which is good, as it means she did not return to the psych ward, as many do. I don't know what happened to her, but I like to think she's doing well and finding a life of balance. It's part of how I remain thankful that I could be of service to this patient in this hospital.

Let's sing the he final stanza:

For all that is our life, we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.

There is a relatively new field within psychology called positive psychology. It's only a couple decades old, and developed when some researchers noted that all they focused on was disease and disfunction, and that no one was studying the psychology of healthy, flourishing people.

Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at UNC Chapel Hill, recently published a book called Positivity [4], which explores the benefits of positive emotions; emotions like awe, compassion, joy, amusement, contentment, and gratitude.  There is plenty of evidence, based on controlled scientific studies that increasing these positive emotions does improve overall physical health, for example.

Fredrickson then suggests what we might do to have more of these emotional experiences. Again, studies point to the effectiveness of things like walking in nature, meditation, losing oneself in an activity all can contribute to positive emotional states. As an aside, I'd note that these sound like spiritual practices to me!

What doesn't work is trying to think our way to an emotion. We can't say, "I am now going to be joyful" or "I am now in awe".  But it does turn out that the easiest emotion to access consciously is gratitude. We can intentionally think of things for which we give thanks, and gradually the feeling of gratitude comes to us. Just the act of thinking about people you love, the good in the life you live, the small gifts and graces in your life, can bring on this feeling of gratitude. It's no wonder many religious traditions include gratitude practice as part of their overall spiritual practices - it is not difficult, and it is effective in raising our spirits.

So as part of my spiritual practice, I found myself walking the trails of Mill Creek Park earlier this week, enjoying the now bare trees over me, noticing the bits of green that remained: ferns, with their jade green, willows with their faded leaves. It was early evening, and crows were beginning to settle down in trees above me, calling to each other, caw, caw caw.

I thought about how this earth has a thin veneer of life overlaying its surface. The bulk of life extends not much farther down than the roots of the trees around me, nor much higher than the crows above me. A thin layer, on a small planet. The only place we know in the universe that life exists. I felt connected to those crows, not crow by crow, but to all of them together as a combined presence. A field of crow energy that enveloped me and held me. An embrace of crow, with all of that black fluttering, calling, cawing, crying vitality.

I have been told that birds are the most direct descendants of dinosaurs, so I imagine the crying of crows to be a primeval sound. I hear dinosaur words in their voices, as they fluttered around warning or gossiping about my presence. I felt connected in crow song, these powerful throaty voices, deep into the history of life here on earth. I felt completely contained and held, fully part of of life, woven into life's past, and into the vitality of the present. I walked in gratitude. I gave thanks.

All life is a gift, I am supremely grateful, I give thanks, and I am glad.

Let us, everyone, choose to give thanks. Let our words and our songs flow, "let us sing with thanks unto the end."  Let us all be grateful for these gifts of life.

Notes:
1."For All That Is Our Life", Singing the Living Tradition, UUA, 1993, #128.
2. Jacqui James, Between The Lines: Sources for Singing the Living Tradition, 1998. p. 36.
3. David Budbill, "Sometimes", http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/11/17
4. Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive, 2009.
see also, "Gratitude, Like Other Positive Emotions, Broadens and Builds", Barbara Fredrickson, in The Psychology of Gratitude, Chapter 8, ed. by Robert A. Emmons & Michael E. McCullough, 2004, p. 145.