Reading: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-9
Years ago in
another life a group of us attending a half-day team-building retreat were
advised by an ex-monk (“ex” because he fell in love and married, and had to
find another line of work) – that something we should never do if we want to feel
positive and grateful is start the day reading the morning paper or watching the
news on TV.
It’s mostly bad
stuff that makes the news and who needs to start their day with a negatively-skewed
view of the world? To get our attention,
it’s often sensationalized and made to sound so apocalyptic that before we’re
even out the door we feel we’re under a cloud of doom. Plus, a steady diet of bad news over-stimulates
our moral sense – our capacity to form judgements between right and wrong, and
good and bad; hearing bad news we automatically think we have to decide who or what
is right or wrong, who’s to blame, and whose side we need to be on.
Our ability to
make moral judgements is one of our gifts.
But our moral capacity is also a curse.
Too constantly it pushes us to draw hard and fast lines in life between
what’s right and wrong, between who is good and bad. The things we see wrong or bad in the world and
in ourselves often lead us to despise rather than to prize others, and to feel angry,
bitter or rueful about ourselves and our own lives, instead of grateful.
A number of years
ago the Thanksgiving issue of the New York Times featured an essay titled
something like “Today I Give Thanks for my MS”.
It seemed odd I had to read it. In
it the author wrote – as expected, about how devastating the initial diagnosis
of her MS was, and how hard it was and still is to live with a number of the
symptoms.
And then she
wrote about how having to live with MS forced and invited her to live with a
greater intentionality about herself, her overall health and well-being, and
the meaning of her life than she ever had before. Without her MS, she said, given the way she had
been living, by the time she was writing she might very well have been dead from
a lifetime of bad decisions, and it was mostly living with MS that drove her to
make something good of her life.
And she’s not
alone. I googled “MS Thanksgiving” to
find her essay and I couldn’t find it because there are too many essays just
like it written by others who have found the same thing – that having a chronic
disease like MS, or having an addiction, or suffering a major life trauma is no
barrier to a life of gratitude, and at times is exactly what they are grateful
for because of what it made them take responsibility for, and all the good
stuff it helped them become aware of.
Pinball Clemons
spoke at the CityKidz Banquet one year.
Beloved athlete, icon, community leader, effervescent inspiration to
many, Pinball began life in the care of a poor single mom in an inner-city
ghetto that could have been the death of him – if not physically, at least
spiritually. All that stuff in his past,
though, he said several times through his speech, was “just information.” It was neither fate nor the ultimate
definition of who he was. It was only
information and it was up to him, with whatever support and help he could find
along the way from other people and from his God, to do what he would with it and
to move from the given inf0rmation to being able to give inspiration.
Jully Black – a
Toronto R and B singer says she learned much the same thing from her mom who is
Jamaican, lived much of her life as a servant and suffered a lot of unfortunate
circumstances and choices. She was never
defeated by them, though, and didn’t fall into self-pity, bitterness or shame because
her motto was “We don’t make mistakes; we make decisions.” When things go badly by circumstance or by
our own choice, rather than dwelling on and sinking into the judgement of how
bad, wrong and wronged we have been, we decide what the present moment requires
to be good, and to become something to be grateful rather than ungrateful for.
This is not to
say there is no evil in the world to stand and fight against, no wrongs to be
redressed, no hurt to be healed, no bad choices to be made amends for, no sin
to be confessed, repented of, and in need of being forgiven. But it is to say that beyond all that there is
usually more to life than can be grasped in any human judgement of right and
wrong or good and bad.
Diana Butler Bass
writes in her book Grateful: The
Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, that “every day there are reasons
not to feel grateful and not to practice gratitude. Terrible, distressing, painful, awful things
happen all the time…and it is easy to choose ingratitude. Yet when I watch the news and fear grips my
heart about whatever comes next, when a friend is diagnosed with cancer, or
when a loved one dies, [I am called towards a better way by that Bible verse I
memorized as a child: ‘In everything give thanks.’
[Note, though, she
says, it] does not say … for everything
give thanks. Gratitude never calls us to
give thanks for anything that is evil
or unjust, never for violence, lying,
oppression or suffering. Do not be
grateful for these things [that we know
are wrong.]
“The Greek word
is en, which means ‘in, with, within,
throughout’ [because] gratitude is an
emotion, [a thought, an intention, a disposition or a choice we bring to any
situation we are in, and that we pour into any moment we inhabit:] in the here
and now, in the past, and in the future; in happiness, in despair; in all
things, in all times, in all situations.”
But how do we do
this? By the power of positive
thinking? By closing our eyes to anything
bad? By looking at the world only
through rose-coloured glasses? By
changing our name to Pollyanna?
Or maybe by
remembering and recovering what the story of Genesis 2 says we too quickly lose
in our obsession with knowing right and wrong, which is the goodness and
gratefulness of simply walking daily with God in and through whatever is.
Recently Ernie
Aumais passed away. It was mentioned at
the celebration of his life that as a child he suffered deep loss, sorrow and
hurt. He suffered a lot as an adult
including ill health and debilitating arthritis. But instead of becoming embittered, angry and
ungrateful, he was an encouraging, helpful, happy, grateful person who helped anyone
who knew him also to see and give thanks for how good life can be and how well
it can be lived.
I wonder if part
of the reason is that in the midst of whatever came his way, no matter what
anxieties, doubts or hurts he felt, no matter what he knew to be wrong with the
world, other people and himself, he made sure each day to be in touch with God. One thing he used was the simple little
readings in “Our Daily Bread” – a daily devotional book that a lot of people
use, to remind him of God’s goodness and God’s love for him and for all the
world no matter what. When he and Dixie
helped out with the monthly prayer service at Orchard Terrace, he always
brought a reading from “Our Daily Bread” to share, and it was clear in the way
he offered it that it was something he himself had found helpful in whatever he
was facing and feeling.
I wonder, thinking
about Genesis 2 and the way the knowing of right and wrong makes the first man
and woman go hiding in the trees and away from simple walking in gratitude with
the God who has given them all things, do we sometimes let our own unsteady
knowledge of what’s right and wrong, or good and bad about the world, other
people and ourselves become a poor substitute for a daily walk with God and a
more steady knowledge of how good God is, and how deep, creative and faithful God’s
love and good will really are for us and for all the world?
I wonder if for
life – the life of the world and our life in it, to be truly right and good and
something we are deep down grateful for, there is simply no substitute for that
daily walk with God – for daily contact with whatever reminds us of the
essential, enduring, sustaining goodness at the heart of all that is. And if the question of growing in gratitude is
simply, what’s my back toward that daily walk?
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