Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

For years and years, friends recommended keeping a “gratitude journal” in which I could write—daily—things for which I’m grateful.

“You’ll feel better,” they promised. “It’s a life-giving spiritual discipline,” they insisted.

Nah.

My journal is for bellyaching, and I like it that way. I write a pleasant report now and then, but mostly I kvetch about what’s difficult or disheartening in my life. I reread it from time to time, which is mostly a downer, unless I can summon up some gratitude that at least I’m not that distressed nowadays.

Then a 9-year-old kid moved in with me, and I had to tuck her in every night, not just when I felt like it. It didn’t always go smoothly. I needed routines to help, and taking time at the end of the day to say our “thankfuls” seemed a good bedtime strategy.

I finally had my gratitude journal, but in a form that worked better for me than the daily journal entry that friends had so often recommended to me. That’s the beauty and the challenge of spiritual disciplines: to find ways to stretch oneself toward the divine and simultaneously to honor one’s particular humanity.

Even scientists have begun saying that gratitude is good for us. In one 10-week study, the participants who wrote in a weekly journal about gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives than those who wrote about irritations or even those who wrote about events—good or bad—that had affected them.

The gratitude-loggers “also exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation” (Harvard Mental Health Letter, November 2011).

I certainly want to reap those benefits. But it can be difficult to add activities, even such obviously beneficial ones as expressing gratitude, to one’s already busy or distracted life. A doctor’s or pastor’s recommendation only gets most of us so far—and often not far enough. We need the power of the Holy Spirit and the support of our friends, families and churches, too.

Two books have taught me well about spiritual practices of “being still and knowing that God is God.” Stillness is not identical to practicing gratitude but is the grand oak under which the redbud of gratitude thrives.

Just reading Marjorie Thompson’s Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life in a coffee shop in downtown Elkhart, Ind., for a class I was taking at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart. prompted a mystical experience of gratitude.

I was overcome by God’s love and by people’s longing for that love. In that moment, I saw that all the praying, the praising, the flirting, the gardening and the studying we do is to seek God’s love for us and for all creation, and I was profoundly grateful.

The second book is a new one by April Yamasaki that I checked out from our conference library: Sacred Pauses: Spiritual Practices for Personal Renewal.

In her chapter “Paying Attention,” Yamasaki shares an outline for the examen of consciousness that includes looking at your day with gratitude. She says this is usually easy for her, but take courage if you find it as difficult as I do.

A year after my kid and I began our nighttime litany of thankfulness, we began sharing something that was difficult in the day, too, to round out our bedtime examen. Adding a low point from the day helps us acknowledge what is life-sucking in a space where pain or fear can be held in loving prayer.

A few months later, I started writing a weekly list of kudos to my kid. After a month of this, I asked her to start doing the same, sharing at least three things I’ve done for which she’s grateful. This has added up to a wellspring of gratitude in my life.

I’m not sure if I’m exercising more (probably not) or have fewer visits to the doctor (possibly so), but I am sure that I have become more anchored in assurance of God’s abundant provision rather than in fear and scarcity-thinking that dominates much of our nation’s public conversation.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

In this much-loved verse from the Gospel of John (1:5), I hear a 2,000-year-old assurance that good will not be overcome by evil, and gratitude need not be overcome by bitterness, if only we have eyes to see or ears to hear what God is doing for us.

Sara Dick is pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, Kan.