Readings:
Luke 17:11-19 (the healing of ten lepers)
In Jesus' day "leprosy" referred to a wide range of skin disorders and diseases, including things like eczema, boils and blisters, and psoriasis. People with such disorders were considered ritually "unclean" and were forced to live apart from others, usually outside of town, until they could prove to a priest that their disease was healed, and the priest could ritually cleanse them
In this story of ten lepers healed, one of the ten is especially aware of how gracious his healing is because he is a Samaritan -- an outsider anyway to the community of Israel, and not one of the covenant community who would feel entitled to God's blessing.
Philippians 4:4-9
The church in Philippi was one of Paul's favourites, and he is happy to write to them when he sits in jail, aware his life may soon be over. He has good friendships there (not the case in all the churches he helped start), and that church as a whole has remained faithful to what he taught them about the good news of Christ. They are an encouragement to him, and at the end of his letter he offers words of encouragement to them.
Happy
Thanksgiving!
One day last week Japhia and I had a chance to talk with Marilyn, one of our favourite
cashiers at the local Metro, and those two words were enough to unleash a veritable
explosion of delight about Thanksgiving as Marilyn’s most favorite holiday of
the year, hands down, bar none, year after year. The most rapturous
celebration of Thanksgiving you can imagine.
We hadn’t seen
Marilyn for a while. Her shifts and our
shopping didn’t coincide. But on
Thursday as we were going out of the store she was coming in, so there was an
immediate happy round of hellos, hugs, how-ya-doin’s, and haven’t-seen-you-for-a-while’s. And then the simple wish for a happy
Thanksgiving that led to her delighted explosion about loving Thanksgiving so
much because it’s a time for family to get together, just to enjoy being
together around a good meal with none of the pressure of Christmas, and all
the delight of seeing the brilliant colours outside, remembering how beautiful the
world is, and being thankful for the sheer gift of living in such a wonderful
world.
It was marvelous –
the three of us standing in the doorway of the Metro, people having to walk
around us as Marilyn spilled over in gratitude, unafraid to show it. She simply is a grateful person in spite of
all she’s had to face in life, and people like that are a delight to know.
Muriel Coker was
like that too. Every time I would chat
with her after worship and ask how she was, her reply invariably was some variation
of “Oh, just perfect!” Said with the
most genuine, generous and gentle smile you can imagine. And not because she thought she was perfect,
or because her life was perfect bliss.
Far from it. But because through
all that came – both easy and hard, over her lifetime she had grown able to
trust in and count on the unending, patient, redeeming love of God in and
through all things. So she was grateful.
I admire people
like that. Because it’s not easy. It can be really hard to be that truly and
deeply grateful all the time.
Out there – in the
world, in our culture, in the news, and in here – in our own community, in our
homes and families, and in our own hearts and minds there’s often a lot that
can, and does bring us down. That makes
us feel anxious and afraid rather than grateful. Depressed, angry, powerless and resentful rather
than thankful.
And in the midst
of all that, how do you get to grateful?
How do you find a way to a gratitude that's more than just an easy response
to good fortune, is a full way of life and a way of embracing all of life, no
matter how easy or hard?
People tell me
gratitude – that kind of gratitude, anyway – is a muscle we develop over
time, and that like any muscle it benefits from exercise. We become grateful people when over time we commit
to some kind of gratitude practice – some kind of gratitude-oriented
spiritual exercise that like any exercise we do day by day, year after year.
Like physical exercise
we tailor it to our strengths and weaknesses, our needs and schedule, our
personality. And like physical exercise
the important thing is we do it. The only question is what particular exercise will we find that will work for
us.
This week I read
about Suzanne Guthrie’s gratitude practice.
Suzanne is an Episcopal priest and spiritual guide for many through her
retreat work and weekly blog of spiritual reflections, and this week on her
blog she shared her practice. She calls
it Ten Things, and the way it works is that on her nightly walk (when she’s
winding down from the day and still not so tired that she drifts towards sleep)
she names for herself ten things from the day just done that she’s grateful for. Little things, big things, any kind of
things. Every night she names them while
she walks, and writes them down when she gets back home.
Reading about
that reminded me of what I once read about Red Skelton, the beloved comic who
died 22 years ago at the age of 84. For
parts of his life he made a nightly practice of identifying and writing down
lists of a few kinds of things from the day just done. I’m not sure anymore of what the lists were
exactly, but it was something like 3 gifts I was given today, 3 things I
learned today that I never knew before, 3 mistakes I made that I can make
amends for, and 3 resolutions for tomorrow.
And thinking
about that reminded me in turn of a practice I learned earlier this year called
Naikan meditation. It’s of Buddhist
origin, and “Naikan” is a Japanese word for self-reflection of
introspection. In Naikan practice, you
set aside 20 or 30 minutes once a day, preferably the same time every day, at whatever time works for you. After
settling and grounding yourself in your breath, and in your body and your place
in the world, you review the last 24 hours – the day just lived, in as
much detail and with as much simple, non-judgemental honesty as possible, through
the lens of three question.
The first
question you spend time with for 5 or 10 minutes i,s “In the last 24 hours,
what did I receive?” You answer as
completely, concretely and specifically as possible – all the things you
are aware of having received from other people, the world, creation, life,
God. Then, for the second 5 or 10
minutes, “In the last 24 hours, what did I give?” Again, as fully and specifically as possible
naming all you gave in any way to other people, to yourself, to the world, to
God. And then in the last 10 minutes, “In
the last 24 hours, what trouble or difficulty did I cause?” Yes, as non-judgmentally as possible, what
trouble or difficulty did I cause to other people, to animals and plants, to
Earth’s life, to myself, to God?
It’s an
interesting and insightful practice. All three of these practices are. And many others like them.
The question, of
course, is what comes of it? What difference do spiritual exercises and gratitude practices like this make?
Suzanne Guthrie
says because of her nightly practice of Ten Things she now more consciously
notices and “collects” things during the day that she knows she will give
thanks for that night. She is more aware
of gifts and blessings that come her way.
And being more aware of things as gifts, she looks at things more
closely than before. She sees them in
greater detail, with deeper attention to what they really are and what they’re
about.
Red Skelton in
his life faced a lot of challenges and sorrow – untimely, tragic deaths of
people close to him; a few divorces; chronic disease; drinking to
alleviate distress; and stretches of depression. I wonder if when he practiced it, his
nightly spiritual exercise was one thing that helped him cope and find a way to
the other side of these things to become the kind of person – a grateful
person, that others loved?
And myself?
When I practice
Naikan meditation -- normally first thing in the morning, reviewing the 24 hours
since the morning before, I know that through the day that follows I am aware of three kinds of feeling having been strengthened
within me.
One is grateful
awareness of being part of something bigger than myself that I don’t create and
that I am not ultimately responsible for.
That just is. A vast,
interconnected web and network of life, of love and of grace that feeds me,
nourishes me, benefits me, and holds me up and holds me together in so many ways, no matter what,
whether I ask for it or not.
Another is
grateful awareness of what I can, and do give to others as part of that
web. I am part of the network, not apart
from it. In a hundred different ways
every day, intended or not, conscious of it or not, I am not just a taker but
also a giver. The force of life and love
alive within the web also flows through me, not just to me.
And a third is humble
awareness that I’m as much a mixture of good and bad, dark and light, nice and
awful as anyone and anything else. No
better, and no worse. And surprisingly this awareness of the shadow I cast upon
life is humbling without being humiliating.
It leads to gratitude rather than guilt. It frees me to be one of the gang, and to remember on a very deep level
that we’re all in this wonderful mess together, and that we get through it
together or not at all.
And isn’t that
what thanksgiving and gratitude are about?
Isn’t that what
Thanksgiving Day is about? What beats in a
thanksgiving heart? What a thanksgiving life looks like?
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