Thank Your Chickens: The Attitude of Gratitude

Jesus was thankful for the bread and wine at the Passover Last Supper. He gathered at that table as he gathered with the disciples for every meal they ate. The first thing he did was give thanks to God. It jumps off the page.

“Then he took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.”

These are a simple few words contained in a powerful passage at the very heart of our faith. These simple few words are called the words of institution repeated every time we have communion. These are the words that consecrate the bread and the wine and make them holy in the ritual of communion. We learn  in seminary that without saying these words with integrity, which can be said only by an ordained person, the bread and wine is not consecrated and communion has not happened. Now there is certainly room for theological conversation, discussion and disagreement about this in the free church, but nevertheless, we have a pretty consistent agreement that these guidelines are the container for our understanding of communion.

So these words are loaded with ritual and meaning and I want to pry them away from communion for a moment and just look at these simple words. “He took a piece of bread and gave thanks to God.” Look at this simple action, “He took a piece of bread and he gave thanks to God.”

In communion as in so many of the teachings of Jesus we learn to be grateful to God. I think Christians are especially good at being grateful and sometimes get teased about it. Remember in the Monty Python movie, The Life of Brian, which is the life of baby Brian born in the stable next to Jesus on Christmas Day. He is always being confused with Jesus and the movie is a irreverent romp through the scriptures making fun of everything. It’s my favorite movie. At the very end when Jesus and Brian are hanging on the crosses suffering and there are characters at the foot of the cross doing a soft-shoe routine singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

Another character who gets thrown under the bus of cynicism is Pollyanna, a child in a novel by the same name written in 1913 who overcame diversity by playing the “Glad Game.” Whatever bad thing befell her she found something in it to be grateful about. I guess this deserves a little fun poked at it because it is sentimental and a bit sappy, and yet, it is about the gratitude attitude.

But this brings up a good point, that the gratitude Jesus taught is not sentimental or fake. So the scriptures do teach us about right minded gratitude. Hear the words of this parable:

Luke 18: 9-14

The parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Jesus also told this parable to people who were sure of their own goodness and despised everybody else. Once there were two men who went up to the Temple to pray: one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee stood apart by himself and prayed, “I thank you God, that I am not greedy, dishonest, or an adulterer, like everybody else. I thank you that I am not like the tax collector over there. I fast two days a week, and i give you one tenth of my income.”  But the tax collector stood at a distance and would not even raise his face to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God have pity on me, a sinner!” I tell you said Jesus, ‘the tax collector and not the Pharisee, was in the right with God when he went home. For everyone who makes himself great will be humbled , and everyone who humbles himself will be made great.

Have you ever watched the Jerry Springer show? Often referred to as T.V’s lowest life-form or T.V.’s trash talk show.He interviews people who are in a dispute over something difficult and outrageous usually including the most sensitive types of dysfunction in families. It is prurient, foul and exploitive. It is a social phenomenon sharply criticized by some who think he is among the 100 people in our country doing the most to degrade and disempower us. His show is a lightening rod and when I once watched a few moments of it I was expressing my gratitude in a prayer to God, “God thank you that I am not like the idiots and fools on the Jerry Springer Show.” It was instantaneous…that is where my thoughts went.

It happened again this past week when I performed the graveside burial for my friend of 35 years who died recently of pancreatic cancer. I was with her family up on the hill at Mountain View Cemetery in Piedmont which has the most incredible view of the Bay Area I have ever seen. I sat in a wobbly chair on the grass next to the lovely pink ceramic urn of her cremated remains set upon an astro turf covered box.  I was looking out over the vista of downtown Oakland, the San Francisco Bay with the San Francisco skyline in the distant background. Just as the sun broke through the morning fog and the vista ignited with clarity and sparkle I felt tears well up in my heart and heard my inner voice, “Thank you God that I am not dead like Ellen.”

Argh, it’s like an automatic reflex to compare myself  favorably to others. To use an opportunity for gratitude as a comparison is the way my ego grabs at faithfulness like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable. It may seem a subtle difference but because of this scripture I often have to correct the trajectory of my gratitude to gratitude. So I shifted my focus and gave thanks for Ellen’s incredible life, and I filled with gratitude for my life and for my health and for an opportunity to experience more days.

We know this is not really gratitude because it is not something we can ever share with someone. Imagine visiting a friend in the hospital and saying, “I’m so grateful to God that I’m not the one lying in that bed,” or to a grieving friend, “I’m so sorry your dad died and I’m so glad it isn’t my father who died.”

This isn’t real gratitude because real gratitude changes lives.

I’ve been astonished in the literature about gratitude to learn about the positive impact it has on people. We have pioneer researchers in gratitude right up the road at UC Davis. (Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough). They have done studies in which they have a group of adults write a gratitude list every day. They were instructed to write down 5 things a day for which they were grateful for ten weeks. Another group was instructed to list 5 hassles a day every day for ten weeks. At the end of the study they found the gratitude group was 25% happier with more life satisfaction than the hassle group.

So they did an experiment with children for two weeks. They had the kids write 5 gratitudes in a gratitude journal three days a week for the two weeks. As with the adults they also had another group write 5 hassles in a hassle journal  three days a week for the two weeks. Astonishingly, that was all it took to find a measurable difference between the two groups with the gratitude kids having more life satisfaction and a better outlook on school.

In studying people who express gratitude studies find they have:

• better health
• sounder sleep
• less anxiety and depression
• more long-term satisfaction with life
• less likely to be aggressive when provoked
• more optimistic about the present and future
• more likely to be helpful to others
• increased sense of self worth
• enhanced empathy for others
• Attitude of gratitude builds psychological resilience
• generally happier with life

SIGN ME UP!!!

We might be tempted to think that there is a set point for happiness or that people can only be as happy as their parents because it is genetically determined. Research suggests that we can move the set point of happiness and life satisfaction enough to have a measurable and positive effect on both outlook and health.

I was moved by an article in the Christian Century (Terra Brockman, “Chicken Keepers” May 28, 2014) by a woman who visited her grandmother on a farm in central Illinois when she was a child. She loved going to the henhouse to collect the eggs and her grandmother insisted that every time she picked up an egg she thanked the hen. She described how that simple act of thanking the chickens over and over again informed her entire life with an attitude of gratitude. I want always to remember to thank my chickens.

I want to thank God first every time I take up food whether I’m alone or with family and friends…the way Jesus has taught me to. I want to do this as an expression of my faithfulness and also because it is good for me and everyone around me to do so. Even Albert Einstein suggested that feeling gratitude helps one begin to see everything around you as a miracle.

“Gratitude is like a flashlight. It lights up what is already there. You don’t necessarily have anything more or different but suddenly you can actually see what is. And because you can see, you no longer take it for granted.” (M.J. Ryan, Attitudes of Gratitude.) Practicing gratitude saves me from focusing on what I don’t have and it keeps me in the present, protecting me from wasting time in regret about the past.

Many of us have been stricken with the sad news about the suicide death of Robin Williams. The media has been filled with articles about depression and drug and alcohol dependence, from which he evidently suffered. Because I had a hard week myself with the internment of my friend, Robin’s death has caused me to reflect on how hard life can be and how all of us take turns in what my friend calls , being in the barrel. We can all use a bit of a lift and a reminder and some support about being grateful.

Back to the Passover where Jesus took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it and gave it to them. In the Passover meal celebrated by Jews today gratitude continues to be a central theme. They recall their hard times before God released the Jews from bondage in Egypt by eating parsley dipped in salt water to represent their tears. They eat horseradish, a bitter herb, to remember the bitterness of that time. They eat matzah crackers to remember they did not have enough time for the bread to rise before fleeing Pharaoh’s army. Then they sing the Dayenu song. Dayenu is a Hebrew word meaning “It would have been enough” and they name 15 things God did for them and after each one they sing, i”t would have been enough”. “It would have been enough that God gave us freedom from slavery but then God gave us the miracles in the desert” and they go on for 15 verses.

So, much like an altar call I invite you forward during the hymn to light a candle if you want to re-commit yourself to daily gratitude…to

 

Copyright © 2014 Gayle Madison