The Gratuitousness of Absolutely Everything

READING

With a disarming smile, this little jingle by Piet Hein lays bare the gratuitousness of absolutely everything. The universe is gratis. It cannot be earned, nor need it be earned. From this simple fact of experience springs grateful living, grace-filled living. Gratefulness is the heart's full response to the gratuitousness of all that exists. And gratefulness makes us graceful in a double sense. In gratefulness we open ourselves to this gratuitous universe and so we become fully graced with it. And in doing so we learn to move gracefully with its flow, as in a universal dance.

from Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer
by Brother David Stendle-Rast

SERMON

The other evening at a meeting Pat Hardee greeted me by saying, "I hope you'll finally say something nice about Florida now that we're having this gorgeous weather!" So let me begin this morning by saying something nice about Florida: I LOVE this weather! I laugh out loud every time I hear the weather report on the radio or TV. I NEVER expected to be walking outside in my shirt sleeves in November. In fact, I've delivered all my ratty old long sleeved shirts to the C.A.L.M. clothing drive. I saved one or two for the few really cold days we may have or for trips up north.

Pat's challenge took me off guard. I shared with her the fact that I don't feel negative about Florida. I just feel constantly surprised! Sometimes I feel nothing is the way I'm used to. I figure by the time I've lived here a full year and experienced the full cycle of all the seasons as they express themselves here in this particular corner of Florida, then I'll know what to expect in the next year and won't be so surprised all the time. She laughed and commiserated, saying she imagined it must be challenging to come to Florida from such a different place as I did.

Surprise, says theologian Stendl-Rast, is one key to a grateful heart. As I am constantly surprised here in Daytona Beach, I am also constantly being given the opportunity to be grateful. Since Thanksgiving, the day that reminds us to be grateful, is approaching, I'd like to talk about ways to develop a grateful heart that can last beyond Thanksgiving.

I have had to learn how to be grateful. And the way I learned was quite a surprise.

Some of you know that I am in recovery for substance abuse. Gratitude has been an important part of my recovery process ever since I listened to a Boeing line worker talk about his recovery at a meeting one early morning in Renton, Washington. I had just moved to the area, and as with this move, I was finding myself a bit off kilter because of my new environment. I had come from an upper middle class suburb, with classy boutiques. I was living in a working class small city, quite rough around the edges. When I went to this daily weekday meeting, not only was I the only woman present, I was the only person GOING to work, and, I was the only person who worked in an office ­ as a professional. I blush now to admit I felt superior to the men who were just getting off from work on the assembly line. Because I felt superior, I always had a hard time listening to what they had to say, identifying with their situations, and getting anything out of the meeting.

Then the month of November rolled around, and our discussion frequently turned to gratitude and learning how to be grateful. One morning Sam, who was usually a quiet man talked about his "gratefuls." He said that every day of his life he made a list of things for which he was grateful on a 3-by-5 card which he kept in his shirt pocket. To illustrate, he pulled that day's card from his pocket and started reading. "Marje fixed mashed potatoes for dinner. (We've been on a diet for awhile and it's been awhile since we've had any.) I found the wrench I thought I'd lost. The telephone bill wasn't quite as high as I expected it to be. My dog, I'm always grateful for my dog."

His list went on like that, a litany of quite simple things ­ maybe a dozen. He said he always ended it when he went to bed with these words, "my meeting." He said this daily gathering of others who shared his affliction was something for which he was most grateful.

I was dumbfounded. Although I usually had something to say at this meeting, I couldn't think of anything to say for the rest of our time together. The spell lasted the rest of the day, and that evening, when I was writing in my journal, I found myself making a list of "gratefuls."

It was hard to do. I was not feeling very grateful. Falling back on advice from Sam, my tutor, I put down things I knew I ought to feel grateful for, even if I didn't at that moment "my children, a roof over my head, a good job, friends, my health, the fact that I now live ten minutes from work instead of an hour."

After awhile my list began to have more surprises on it: "the peace of the neighborhood as I walked in the early morning, the fact that I'd heard my favorite violin concerto on the radio that evening, the friendly conversation I'd had with a co-worker that day." At the same time that my list grew more diverse, less obligatory, I began to feel gratitude ­ truly FEEL it, instead of faking it. What a blessing! So I learned about gratitude from an unexpected role model and then worked to make his process my own.

David Stendl-Rast discovered an unexpected sense of gratefulness from a close brush with death.

Growing up in Nazi-occupied Austria, I knew air raids from daily experience. And an air raid can be an eye-opener. One time, I remember, the bombs started falling as soon as the warning sirens went off. I was on the street. Unable to find an air raid shelter quickly, I rushed into a church only a few steps away. To shield myself from shattered glass and falling debris, I crawled under a pew and hid my face in my hands. But as bombs exploded outside and the ground shook under me, I felt sure that the vaulted ceiling would cave in any moment and bury me alive. Well, my time had not yet come. A steady tone of the siren announced that the danger was over. And there I was, stretching my back, dusting off my clothes, and stepping out into a glorious May morning. I was alive. Surprise! The buildings I had seen less than an hour ago were now smoking mounds of rubble. But that there was anything at all struck me as an overwhelming surprise. My eyes fell on a few square feet of lawn in the midst of all this destruction. It was as if a friend had offered me an emerald in the hollow of his hand. Never before or after have I seen grass so surprisingly green.

From that surprising experience of gratefulness, Stendle-Rast went on to incorporate gratefulness into his spiritual life and, eventually, into his book, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer.

It was not green but white which triggered Betty's Thanksgiving Day gratitude. She and Howard had recently divorced. Howard had been the one to do the leaving, however the marriage had ended long before he had moved out. She had been dreading the holidays. She and Howard had no family with whom to celebrate. Sometimes they had gathered strays to their table, and often they had shared a quiet mid-afternoon meal, just the two of them, and perhaps a movie in the early evening. So Howard's absence would make it an empty day.

Betty had not made any plans for Thanksgiving. She intended to ignore the day, to stay in bed as long as she wanted, not to get dressed, to knosh out of the fridge instead of cooking a meal, to do crossword puzzles, maybe even to start that jigsaw puzzle she bought at the thrift store. She wouldn't watch television. She didn't want to be reminded it was Thanksgiving Day.

She slept until 7:30 am and couldn't go back to sleep. Darn, she thought. When she opened the blinds she noticed a heavy overcast and sweat on the windows, indicating very cold air outside. She made herself a cup of coffee, retrieved her morning paper from the hallway, and took it to the chair by the window to do her crossword puzzle.

She found it difficult to focus on the puzzle. She kept thinking about the fact that this would be her first Thanksgiving without Howard. She missed the convenience of her marriage, as if it legitimized her somehow. If she and Howard were still together they would be doing something special today, no matter how strained their relationship was. Instead, she was looking for a Hindu four-letter word for "wields a knife," beginning with "K".

Betty raised her head and let her gaze drift up to the sky -- leaden, heavy, and dropping fat flakes of snow.

Lazily Betty watched the slushy white blobs fall, at first a few, floating slothfully, melting before they reached the ground. Then more, descending a bit more quickly, like ashes from a fire. Finally, lots, plunging down like a thick curtain, blocking her view. Looking just outside her window, to the ledge, she saw a miracle ­ a tiny drift of snow. "Snow! On Thanksgiving! It has never snowed on Thanksgiving before!" she thought. "How marvelous."

She dashed into her bedroom, pulled on long underwear, socks, turtle neck shirt, wool pants, boots, sweater, parka, mittens, hat, and scarf, and before her coffee had time to cool, she was out the door, waiting excitedly for the elevator to come. She would walk to Central Park and make a snow person! Happy day. From now on she'd remember this day as the Thanksgiving it snowed, not the first Thanksgiving she spent without Howard! Snow! What a gift! Betty's gratefulness came from a willingness to shift from mourning what she didn't have, to noticing and appreciating what she did have.

It is part of our human experience to feel grateful. David Stendl-Rast calls it a waking up process involving our intellect, our will and our emotions.

The intellect gets involved first, often in response to a surprise. It takes a certain amount of intellectual acuity to recognize the surprise as a gift. Some people go through life taking everything for granted and recognizing nothing as a gift. Betty could have had a ho-hum response to the snow, or let it dampen her spirits even further. Brother David could have been overwhelmed by the destruction around him and never noticed the small patch of green. I could have not listened closely to the Boeing line worker describe his spiritual practice and not learned how to practice being grateful.
But the intellect alone can't move us from recognizing a gift to being grateful. Instead of moving to gratefulness, some mindset or emotional state may block our path. We might belittle the gift or explain it away. Betty could have cursed the snow, another indicator the world was against her. Stendl-Rast could have cowered in fear, never recognizing his rebirth. I might have explained away the line worker's spiritual practice as something not worthwhile for the likes of me.

With the help of our intellect we recognize something as a gift, but it is our will which pushes us past our habitual mindsets to acknowledge its gift character. Whether we like it or not, approve of it or not, our acknowledgement of a gift leads us to gratefulness. Acknowledging a gift may be far more difficult than recognizing it.

A gift by definition comes from another. When we admit that something is a gift we are admitting our dependence on the giver. Gift giving is a celebration of a bond which unites a giver and a receiver. Our willful leaning toward self-sufficiency tends to make us fear this bond between giver and receiver, feeling it implies obligation toward and/or dependence on the giver. We consider this obligation and dependence a threat to our independence.

Here in Daytona Beach I am not made aware on a day to day basis that there are homeless people. In Seattle there are many homeless people on the streets, yet you can still avoid them if you pick your route. There is no hope of avoiding homeless people in New York, where I recently visited my granddaughter.

Seeing homeless people on the street always raises the issue for me of whether or not to give them money. As much as I may rationalize not giving them money, I realizing that in choosing not to give money I am choosing alienation from these people rather than creating a bond of giving and receiving between us. It's as if homelessness is a dreadful disease I will catch if I get too close to them.
And there are other times when I am willing to give up controlling our relationship, willing to participate in the give and take of interdependence, willing to receive from a street person. I reach into my pocket and give what I can spare. What I receive back is the greatest gift there is ­ thanksgiving. Sometimes it's a hearty "Praise God, Hallelujah!" as from the African American man who came to the church door one day in the rain. Sometimes it's a slight flicker of recognition, as from the woman with the sun- baked skin, sitting on the steps of First United Methodist Church, having just awakened from her night's sleep on a vivid pink satin blanket stretched in the wide portal, surprised by the clink of coins in her cup. Sometimes it's a twinkling gleam in the eye as from the bag man with the shopping cart.

What I do know is that if I risk being willing to give what I can spare I risk acknowledging my bond with homeless people; and if I risk being not willing to give ­ for whatever reason ­ I risk acknowledging my alienation from homeless people. Stendl-Rast says, "One who says 'thank you' to another really says, 'We belong together.' Giver and thanksgiver belong together. The bond that unites them frees them from alienation." And he ends with a question: "Does our society suffer from so much alienation because we fail to cultivate gratefulness?"

In four days we will celebrate Thanksgiving. This is a national, secular holiday, not a religious festival. For some of us it will be a day of feasting. We'll take extra helpings of fatty and sweet foods, more than we usually eat. After dinner we may need a few Tums to settle our stomachs, unaccustomed as we are to such rich fare. My colleague, the Reverend Bill Mulford wonders how our systems would react it we made Thanksgiving a day of reflection, gorging ourselves with gratefulness rather than gravy, passing praise rather than potatoes, devouring spiritual delights rather than dangerously decadent desserts. Perhaps then we'd need Spiritual Tums for the Spiritually Timid who have overindulged. Soulfully sated with a surfeit of Spirit. Wouldn't that be grand!

What will help you be grateful, what will be your surprise this Thanksgiving season? We can cultivate gratefulness. We can acknowledge the blessing of a snow storm, the surprise gifts in almost being killed, or a great role model that rescues us from a bad case of terminal superiority to be grateful for the gratuitousness of absolutely everything. We can cultivate amazement in the eyes of our hearts by letting "the eyes of our eyes" open to everything around us. We can start where we are and notice the giftedness of everything.

As we approach Thanksgiving, if we are grieving the loss of those no longer present with us, we can use that grief to help us acknowledge our connection with others. We can learn that self-sufficiency is an illusion. None of us is self-made and none of us stands alone against all the others. We are all part of the interdependent web of life; we are in deep communion with all other beings. In acknowledging our interdependence we acknowledge the gift aspect of the universe.

We can experience the burning feeling of joy in some small area of our lives where the igniting spark of surprise catches fire. What is it that makes us feel good? In what circumstances do we feel appreciation? In paying attention to situations in which we spontaneously respond with joy, we release our feelings from the prison of independence to vibrate in the universal dance of giving and receiving.
During your Thanksgiving celebration may you find the gifts the universe offers you. May your recognition, acknowledgement and joy of appreciating the gratuitousness of absolutely everything bring you a full heart.