Attitude of Gratitude

By Jill Russo-Downey
August 12, 2007

The idea for this service has been brewing in my mind for quite a while. It is a synthesis of my life experience, books I’ve read (specifically The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, the Seth Speaks series by Jane Roberts, and various texts I had to read for my favorite college class, Physics and Buddhism) and simple observation of the world.

Gratitude. We talk about it a lot. We have a lot of cliché’s about it. You hear people talk all the time about being “blessed.” We make it a focus of a major holiday, Thanksgiving. But I have come to realize that we don’t really understand what it means to be grateful, or the immense, transformative power that it has. We say we’re thankful, but what does that mean? What does it look like? How does it feel? What can it change? I believe it looks, feels, and acts totally different than our society is selling it to be, and I believe it can change absolutely everything.

Gratitude as contentment. Some people understand or treat gratitude as contentment. But I don’t agree. Contentment can imply inaction (“I am grateful, I’m content, therefore I am”), but I would argue that true gratitude is anything but inaction. Gratitude, true gratitude, is a dynamic thing. To “be grateful” is a verb. Therefore it is action by definition. To say, “I am grateful for my health”, imparts an enormous responsibility for action. To practice preventive medicine, to choose traditional or holistic treatments, choice of a diet, etc. All these are action items. To say you are grateful for your health, then not act responsibly, or sabotage it….well that isn’t gratitude. That’s lip service. The examples could go on…”I’m thankful for my family”. Are we? Are you? LOOK at your life. Really dissect it. Make a list of the four most important things or people you are grateful for in your life. Now conjure up an average day in your life. Itemize your time as you would an expense account (because it is). How much time do you allot to certain things: your job, errands, childcare, housework, correspondence, etc. Now match those up with the four things on your list. How do they correlate? What does your time budget say about your priorities, about what you claim you are most grateful for? For example; one of the first things a parent might list is, “I’m grateful for my children.” Yet we can look at a statistic such as a recent study that shows children spend, on average, approximately 1680 minutes a week watching TV, yet only 3.5 minutes a week conversing with a parent in a meaningful way. Does 3.5 minutes a week really say we are grateful for the time we have with our children? Who are only children for a short period of time in the big picture of life? What are we doing with the other hundreds of minutes in the day? What do they say about our life, our priorities, what we are grateful for? After last week’s service it occurred to me there is another thing we often express thanks for, but rarely act upon – and that is our gratitude as American Citizens for our freedom. It only takes hearing a story like the one our guest speaker told of the 21 people brutally killed in his family, and the ongoing genocide in places like Darfur, to remind us how fortunate we are to live in this country, with all its flaws. Our guest speaker was insistent that we need to back our gratitude with action, and that every voice can and will make a difference in Darfur. So if you are grateful for your freedom, as Nike says, “Just Do It.” Write your representatives, tell your neighbors, organize a petition. Do what you can.

Gratitude as a lens. Gratitude is how you choose to look at your life and the world around you. But it’s more than the common idea of a half glass full vs. a glass half empty. I would say it is a life lived with the belief of abundance, not the fear of scarcity. Let me say that again (as Rev. Crestwell would say). It is a life lived with the belief of abundance, not the fear of scarcity. There is enough for you. There is enough for everyone. Jealousy, greed, environmental scourge, human conflict – these things are based, and draw their power from, the idea that everything is limited (money, resources, status, emotional security) and that you have to fight for your piece of the pie, to protect yourself from the other guy who is trying to take things away from you. There is a phrase “Death by suburbia” which came from a book by the same name. It speaks to the competitiveness and consumerism that has infected our communities slowly and quietly killing us morally and spiritually. We are encouraged by the media, seduced even, to NOT be grateful for what we have, but to strive for more, better, faster, newer, what everyone else has. Marketers use this fear of scarcity to sell things and to sell this “ideal” of a “Successful life” and lifestyle all the time. Limited time offer, first come, first served, biggest sale of the season, did you see what the Jones’s just bought?? Don’t believe it. Don’t buy what they’re selling (as I like to say.) David Strong ,a Professor of Technology and ethics, , has a powerful statement that is, “We are confusing a goods life with a good life.” You have enough. You have exactly what you need already. You are enough. Teach your children (and grandchildren) the same, so that they will never feel that who they are is inadequate. That they are not enough.

Gratitude when everything is going well. Every experience is a lesson, every person you meet a teacher. It’s easy to talk gratitude when things are going well, but it becomes truly necessary when things are going badly. I chose the colors for the “Attitude of Gratitude” bracelets to represent the yin and yang of gratitude. (Explain the symbol). Again, it’s more than the cliché of finding the silver lining. It’s being grateful for the lessons you have been shown in life. Bad and good. Joyful and sorrowful. Equally. Like the symbol, there is an element of each in the other, and only together do they form a whole, complete and sacred circle.

An ironic twist in my life is that both my father-in-law and my father died on Thanksgiving Day. The day of gratitude. Of friends and family. For some in our families it has ruined the holiday for them and they still refuse to celebrate it, or do so in a perfunctory manner. But I celebrate it even more so than I had before, and I do so joyfully, because I AM grateful for them, and for the many lessons their lives and deaths taught me. The lessons that changed me. One change is how I am much more aware of the time I spend with my loved ones. Especially my mother. My one living parent. I call her to talk often, for advice, for news, for sympathy, for nothing at all. I call her because I can. Even though she can drive me crazy. Right now the main source of stress in my life is also one of my most joyful - my daughter Jenna. A happy, beautiful, healthy baby who just doesn’t sleep. Ever. Day or night. She has reflux, and is on medication, but it causes her a lot of discomfort and sometimes pain, so she can’t sleep more than two hours at a time, at best. On the verge of being a danger to myself and others due to sleep deprivation (which is, actually, a Geneva Convention recognized form of torture) I had to call in the troops. Rally my family and friends to come and help me out. And they did. You know what family members really love you and who your true friends are when they come and walk the floor with your crying baby at night while you get some sleep. I can truly say I am grateful for the experience. And the fact that even as I cry, “Please sleep baby” by her crib at night, I know she will get better, she will sleep (someday) and for that I am REALLY grateful!

Gratitude as transformational tool. In my college class Physics and Buddhism (yes, one class taught by a Doctor of physics), I was introduced to the scientific and spiritual concepts that bind the two disciplines. Scientifically, theory supports the idea there are other realities, other probable events. That time is a human construct and that we create, literally, all that we see. There is no question we don’t understand the fundamentals of matter, from the smallest quark to the Universe’s Black Holes, we know very little, but we do know that thought has physical power (for example, the placebo effect), but only the Buddhist go as far as to say this world is but a ghost realm we have created to learn from, to eventually reach enlightenment.

As far as enlightenment, the belief is that you are doomed to repeat your mistakes, in this realm and others, to having been taught the lesson again, if you don’t “get it.” It’s like the girlfriend, or sister, who complains about the men in her life. You’ve listened to the sagas as time went on, you’ve witnessed the shipwrecks as they happened, and you hear her say, “Is it me?” And you want to scream, “Of course it’s you! You are the common denominator. You pick these guys. You let things go from bad to worse. You don’t seem to have learned the lesson form the LAST 3 boyfriends I’ve had to live through.” If you’re a good friend you actually say those things out loud. If you’re not you say the old, “It’s not you it’s them” thing. But you know, really, it’s her. In this example, your friend can turn this around. She can get out of this self-perpetuated cycle. She has to stop living out of the fear of scarcity (there are no good men left, she’s going to live her life alone and incomplete.) and start to immerse herself in the belief of abundance. She already has so much! She already is a healthy and whole person. There are plenty of positive life partner choices for her. But until she internalizes this, then externalizes this (so to speak) she will continue to attract the very things she fears. There is a semantic issue here too. How you phrase things to yourself and others is how you believe things. How you believe things is how you create them in your life. Mother Teresa was once asked if she would join a demonstration against war and she replied no, she wouldn’t, but she would be more than happy to join a demonstration for peace. Semantics, yes and no. It’s where she put her emphasis, her actions. In her world, you work for peace. You live your life acing peaceful. Then there would be no need to demonstrate against war, because it wouldn’t exist.

The Bracelets. We already talked about the choice of colors for the bracelets, but why the bracelets at all? The idea for the bracelets came from another church’s bracelets’. They decided to do one that said “No complaining.” I thought that was a bad idea. Why phrase it as a negative message on an inspirational bracelet? Instead of “No complaining” in one’s life, I thought, why not work to create an “Attitude of Gratitude”? So how can you use this bracelet as other than semi-trendy jewelry? Use it as a touch stone. Turn to it when you find yourself unhappy in your life. When you feel you are being “cheated”. When the other guy looks to have something better than you have. When you find yourself reacting out of fear rather than gratefulness. From simple things like being caught in a long line, to financial worries, to serious life events. Remember the yin and the yang. When you look at it have visualization ready. Close your eyes (No really, close your eyes.) Pick something you know, in your heart you are grateful for, or that brings you joy. A person, a place, a cause. Now really give that picture dimension, movement, details, smells, emotions. Hold it as you build it. Be there with it. When you are in the situations that cause you to look at the bracelet, bring up that image. Flood your mind with it. It will center you. Then you need to look back at that situation and find something to be grateful for. Force it if you have to at first. It gets easier as you practice. You will begin to come at things from a place of warmth and joy. THAT is gratitude, and that will change your life. Literally.

You can also use your bracelet in a more meditative way. I call this meditation “grateful in advance” Imagine something you want to have attained or acquired in the future. Use the same emotion, movement and detail for this scene as in the image we just created. My scene is me and my two girls as women in my kitchen talking and laughing. I have created this scene in detail, with a lot of emotion and I use it because I am grateful in advance of their being close to each other, and to me when they are grown. That they have each other when I’m gone. That keeps me on track in my day to day dealings with them and I truly believe it will help me reach that place.

In conclusion I want to end with a “Preacher heal thyself” moment. Lest you think I am the most perfect, grateful being, I assure you I’m not. While wearing the bracelet yesterday I came to realize that in focusing so much on my young children, I was not acting grateful towards my husband, Jim. I was taking him for granted. Well, I am going to work at that.

I hope you take more than the bracelets with you today, I hope you take something of the power of gratitude too. I hope you create your own “Attitude of Gratitude.”

Thank you for being with me today. I am grateful for this church and its people.