1.
“Would you be willing to speak at our Stephen Ministry meeting?” Linda’s message on my voicemail surprises me. “We’d like you to talk about gratitude.”
I have a testimony to prepare for the whole congregation. I have blog posts to write, not just for my site but for Tweetspeak and Deeper Church and Godspace, maybe even The High Calling. I’m finally getting some traction in my writing life. Maybe I should say no.
When I ask Susan, she says, “You could talk about gratitude in your sleep. It won’t require much preparation. You should say yes.”
So I do.
But most of the women at this meeting were also at the women’s retreat in the spring, where I also talked about gratitude. I don’t want to simply recycle that talk. Teaching is an opportunity to learn. And I want to go deeper. I want to speak new words.
2.
I pick up Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, which I’d read when it came out in early 2011. I skip the brutally sad first chapter and head straight for the second, where hope begins to seep through the edges of Ann’s life.
She reads the Gospel of Luke, and I read it, too, read again the words that changed her life—and, through her, mine.
When the hour came, Jesus took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”
Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves; for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”
Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
She discovers a word. Eucharisteo. It’s hidden in this passage, twice: once before Jesus passes the cup and once before he breaks the bread. It’s the word that gets translated here as “giving thanks.” It’s where we get our word Eucharist, which we usually think of as Communion or the Lord’s Supper, but really it’s the Giving Thanks or the Thanks Giving.
Embedded in this Greek word is another Greek word: euCHARISteo. Charis means grace. Ann points out that it’s related to yet another Greek word: chara, which means joy. Grace and joy are hidden in thanksgiving!
In my experience, this is exactly true. The more I give thanks, the more gifts and graces I see, and the more joy I experience.
I look at those words in my notebook. Gift. Grace. They’re related in Greek, too. Grace is charis; gift is charism. The Greek word for gift is derived from the Greek word for grace!
I think about the Latin Jack and I are learning together. We just learned the phrase Deo gratias, thanks be to God.
Gratias means thanks. It sure looks a lot like grace. I think of Spanish, in which folks say gracias to thank one another. That looks even more like grace. Then I think of French, where the word for thank you is merci. Mercy. Grace. Forgiveness.
But gratias and gracias don’t just look like grace. They also look like gratitude.
Holy cow. It’s everywhere, these connections between thanksgiving and grace. It’s all tied together: grace, gift, mercy, joy, thanks.
I bubble over with giddy joy, eager to share my discoveries with the Stephen Ministers.
3.
The Sunday before my talk, as my friend Cara and I talk in the Fellowship Hall after church, she shares her frustration with the constant emphasis on gratitude. (Does she mean my constant emphasis on gratitude?) I cringe.
“I feel like it’s not okay to be sad or angry or afraid,” she says. “I feel frustrated that I have to be up all the time, that any voicing of grief or anger is bad, like it shows I’m ungrateful.”
I shake my head. “Gratitude doesn’t negate pain, Cara. It doesn’t cancel grief. They exist together.” I pause a moment, gathering my words.
“I was grateful all through my depression. So so grateful, and I still couldn’t shake the darkness and the fear. Gratitude doesn’t deny the darkness. It just looks for where God is present in the midst of it and says thank you, God, for being here.”
I want to say I see this in her, how she lives with chronic pain and still smiles and laughs, still counts her blessings, still lives.
4.
Two days before my talk, when I look again at eucharisteo, at the word we turned into a proper noun, Eucharist, I realize that, for Christians, inherent in that word Eucharist is what comes after: our Lord’s betrayal, crucifixion, death. I don’t see Eucharist and think thanksgiving. I see Eucharist and think sacrifice. I think pain. I think death.
And this is as it should be. The Psalmists said it many times, like here in Psalm 50:4: “Make thanksgiving your sacrifice to God.”
The Psalmists understood that sometimes thanksgiving is a sacrifice. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it costs us something.
But, at least so far in my life, it always returns more than it requires.
Giving thanks helps me see what I have, all the gifts and graces of my life (there’s that connection again: thanks, gift, grace). Giving thanks puts whatever is making me sad or angry or overwhelmed into perspective. Giving thanks provides a much-needed counterbalance for my tendency to focus on all I lack, all that’s wrong. And giving thanks makes me strong, makes me able to do the work that is needful without self-pity, with a thankful heart, and sometimes even with joy.
Yes, it’s often been a sacrifice of thanksgiving, a “hard eucharisteo” as Ann Voskamp calls it.
But how else to learn to see that God is present in the midst of grief, pain, fear? How else to learn to find the grace God gives in the wilderness? How else to learn to trust that no matter how deep the darkness, God is deeper still?
This is what I want to say to the Stephen Ministers, who come alongside people in our community who are in transition, in grief, in pain. I want to say: this life is our cross to bear, and sometimes the cross feels too heavy to carry. I want to say: maybe you should be called Simon Ministers because when life gets too heavy to lift, you come alongside and help others carry their cross, and I am so grateful for the community of Christ’s body.
But mostly I want to tell them that transition and grief and pain can coexist with thankfulness, that in the lives of thankful people they do coexist. Thankful people aren’t always happy, their lives are still hard sometimes, but they look for the gifts, the grace, the light in every situation and return thanks to God. Often, it’s a sacrifice of thanks, just as it was on the night Jesus was betrayed, when he took bread, broke it, and gave thanks.
photo of window by Susan Forshey via Flickr
Your turn: Where do you see God or grace or gift in the hard places?
Please list one or two (or ten!) things for which you’re grateful down in the comment box. Let’s lift up a hymn of grateful praise to the Giver of all good gifts, the God who is with us in the valleys of shadow.
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Linking today with Ann Voskamp, who inspired the gift list in the first place.
Kimberlee, I have been praying this week for people and families walking through impending death, families struggling with a child’s debilitating illness, someone who is lost and does not want to be found…pain and stretching and struggle that seem endless. And these are people close to God. It’s been hard to reconcile my joyful, happy, ‘up’ self with God’s command to ‘be thankful in all things.’ But the Holy Spirit keeps reminding me as I pray, that ‘all things work together for the good for them that love God.’ I don’t feel it but I can pray it and trust my Father. What am I thankful for? God’s word……especially the Psalms.
This piece gives the practice of gratitude such a rich perspective. Perfect
Jody, The Psalms are the best prayer book, yes? Such honesty there, such permission to be honest with God in the midst of the stretching and struggle.
The ELCA presiding bishop, Mark Hanson, says that “it is among those voices that we choose not to hear that we most clearly see what God is up to.” I don’t think I could express it any better: I see God so clearly in the sacred space of trust with the middle school girls I nurture and mentor, in the rebuilding after destruction, in people realizing that in the midst of everything we are called to do God’s work with our hands–to live in the light that the darkness cannot overcome.
Rachel, thank you for this. I love hearing testimonies of God’s faithfulness and care, especially through the body of Christ, in places where most would think God is not.
Interesting developments in your life, Kimberlee. I’m glad for the writing opps! And I must also nod my head in agreement with your friend who gently spoke back to you about gratitude – about the ‘big push’ for it everywhere, much of it coming from Ann’s lovely writing. I hope there will always, always be space for people to say, “This is really hard right now and I’m struggling to find even one thing to be thankful for.” Because sometimes life is like that. Yes, it is good to encourage folks to look for the blessings – absolutely. But also, to give them room to breathe out their sorrow and their struggle. Because that, too, is reality and sometimes we need to know that it’s okay to feel sad and alone…and to say so, safely, with no sermon coming back at you! Sometimes what is needed is a hug and a soft word of blessing in the middle of the pain rather than an admonition to ‘look for the silver lining’ Gratitude will come – it always does. But when it’s dark and when it’s hard and when it feels claustrophobically overwhelming – it should be okay to say so, don’t you think?
I am grateful for the swift arrival of true fall weather today – for coldness and clear skies and stiff winds. I am grateful to be back at home after a terribly sad two days with my aging mom. I am grateful for a son who lives near enough to play tennis with his dad. BUT – I am not grateful for the dementia that is eating my mom’s mind. I am not grateful for her terror and confusion. I am not grateful for that at all. I am grateful for her, for her life, for her love for me. But I HATE what is happening to her and there is no way that counting blessings makes that go away. I am so glad I have such wonderful blessings to count – believe me – and I say so frequently. But this heaviness and grief? It stinks. Pure and simple.
Diana,
Absolutely I agree that it should be okay to say it’s dark and where is God in the midst of this mess anyway? I’m sorry that didn’t come through in the post. I meant it to. Because I have been there, and it sucks. And I’ll doubtless be there again and that will suck, too. And even if I’m not, other people are. And that’s where my church’s Stephen Ministers come in: they listen, they give a hug and a soft word of blessing, and they pray.
And sometimes that is exactly what we need, simply for someone else to acknowledge that life is hard and God seems absent. But I don’t think it’s either/or. I think it’s both/and. Because life is both hard and beautiful. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of all that is not God that we can’t sense the divine presence. And sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the goodness of God that we want to fall on our faces in worship. Life is both.
I am with you: I hate what is happening to your mom, too. I hate that a young girl in our church was just diagnosed with lymphoma. I hate that even if she lives, there are children all over the world who won’t because they don’t have access to the medical care she’ll receive. I read in my journal the other day, in response to part of One Thousand Gifts (which I mostly thought was beautiful):
“God does not cause evil. And saying that our limited perspective prevents us from knowing that what we perceive as curse is really a blessing–I could not disagree more. Evil exists. And it is simply that: evil. It is constrained by God, and God can bring good out of it, but the thing itself–cancer, war, rape, death, destruction–is still evil.”
Today I went and found a quote from Jerry Sittser’s A Grace Disguised because he said something similar to what you’re saying in this comment, what I was trying to articulate in my journal. He lost his wife, daughter, and mother in a car accident (the other driver was drunk):
“The accident bewilders me as much today as it did three years ago. Much good has come from it, but all the good in the world will never make the accident itself good. It remains a horrible, tragic, and evil event to me. A million people could be helped as a result of the tragedy, but that would not be enough to explain and justify it. The badness of the event and the goodness of the results are related, to be sure, but they are not the same. The latter is a consequence of the former, but the latter does not make the former legitimate or right or good.” (p. 198-199)
You are right: heaviness and grief and heartache and fear–they suck. Jesus thought so, too: even he, God incarnate, wanted that cup removed.
I am sorry your mom is suffering so. I’m sorry that you’re suffering as you watch her. Please know that I am praying for you both.
k
Thank you for grace, Kimberlee. I’ve been feeling badly all day for commenting so strongly yesterday, when my grief was fresh and strong. And I, too, believe life is full of ‘both/and’ kinds of circumstances. I am encouraged and grateful to read that you, too, disagreed with parts of chapter 5 of Ann’s book. I was new to blogging when I read that and tried to voice some of my struggle with it over at the (in)Courage Bloom book club, but felt I was not heard at all. And I have struggled with that whole idea that we ‘cannot know what is good and what is evil because we are not God’ theology since that time. Yes, we cannot see all that God sees. But scripture tells us – and life tells us! – that evil is real and it is part of this journey. And there are some things that are just exactly that – evil and wrong. Yes, God can work redemption through all circumstances. But I am thoroughly in alignment with Sittser on this one and loved the quote you found – so thanks for that. (I gave away about 35 copies of that book in my pastoring years! I think it’s the best thing written on suffering/theodicy in the last 35 years.)
These language connections are wonderful — I’d never seen these words that way before. I’ve said “gracias” and “merci” countless times while traveling, and have never considered the roots of the word!
Of course we have permission to feel the negative stuff. The bible is full of righteous anger, misplaced anger, fear, lamentations, envy and hatred and wishing ill on one’s enemies.
Thank you for your post.
Thank you, Andrea. I’m a word nerd, so I’m particularly gratified that you liked my language lesson 🙂
I’m so glad you’re able to hold these two things in tension. I think many people have difficulty doing that–feeling the thanksgiving and joy alongside the pain and anger and fear and hatred and all the rest of it. I know I do.
This is just what I needed. Thanks. I am just sitting down to write my Thanksgiving cards for my HS girls. My girls, ha. Christ’s girls that I have the privilege of loving, too. Thanks.