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Rev. Sharon Dittmar
With Gratitude
November 21, 1999

-Jelaluddin Rumi

The great Islamic mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi, penned these words over seven hundred years ago. Rumi had an intensely sensual appreciation for Allah. He spent his life teaching and writing, growing always closer to his host, the beloved Allah. How strange for Rumi of all people to write, "For sixty years I have been forgetful." And yet, how human to never be able to fully embrace or repay all the gifts in our lives. After sixty years Rumi looks back and discovers that he is a guest at the table of life, and "not for a second has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed." This is gratitude.

Gratitude is an appreciation for the good things in our life. We can be grateful to people, to God, to circumstances, to life itself. Gratitude is also humility and vulnerability. Gratitude acknowledges a debt to someone or something, a debt that can never be fully repaid, only passed on. Gratitude is also a way of life.

Theologian Gilbert Meilaender writes, "Gratitude is finally not a duty to be discharged but an attitude which must pervade and shape the whole of life."² I agree with everything in this statement except the use of the word "must." Like hope, gratitude is a cultivated choice. We choose to be grateful. We choose to be humble and vulnerable. We choose to share gratitude with others.

In my attempts to be more grateful I have taken up a simple spiritual practice I read about this fall. My colleague Emily Gage tells of a man who, as part of a daily practice, sits and names ten things he is grateful for in his life. He says he has never run out of ideas. I was so taken with this practice that I have begun to do it myself. I especially like doing it at night. No matter how good or bad the day, and frankly, especially on bad days, I name five things that I am grateful for. This practice is having its affect on me. I’m finding gratitude everywhere.

Life continually pours out reasons for gratitude, family and friends, health and prosperity, sunshine, snowfall, clean sheets, warm homes. However, life is not all good or all happy. Life pours out sorrow and hardship as well, and circumstances can be extremely uneven. Yet, everyone has something good, something they value, some reason for gratitude, no matter how difficult their life or circumstances.

In one of his sermons, Martin Luther King Jr. tells the story of an older woman, who, during the Montgomery bus boycott walked four slow, painful miles to work every day. When a passerby asked her if she was tired she responded,

Yes, friend, my feet is real tired, but my soul is rested."³ This is gratitude. In every life there are good things that come to us, and each of us has the choice to honor what is good with gratitude.

Yet for sixty years, twenty years, forty, however long we have been alive, we have been forgetful. We’re not sure we want to be grateful as a way of life. It is easier, less vulnerable, to be continually put upon or put out. Fulfilling no, but easier and less vulnerable, yes. Gratitude requires humility, and interdependence, seeing oneself as a small part of a larger whole. Challenging qualities for a culture rooted in self-reliance and independence. Challenging qualities for people who prefer to be in control.

Gilbert Meilaender writes

It’s important to put Meileander’s words in perspective here. He does not advocate for the abolition of obligation, justice, and rights. Rather, he claims that obligation, justice, and rights must also make way for gratitude so that life does not just become a series of duties, one payback for another. As he notes, "Some gifts can never be repaid; perhaps none can be."

This is a revolutionary idea. There is no fair market value on gratitude, no easy debt restructuring system. No tit for tat. No eye for an eye. Gratitude is a different economy of scale, one of relationships and community, one of intangible feelings generosity and compassion. Gratitude enriches lives through more than money or property. It enriches lives through connection and freedom, for a gift freely given brings freedom and connection to others.

One of the most powerful gratitude lessons I learned, happened while I was a ministerial intern in Concord, Massachusetts. That year I worked full time, from September to June, as a ministerial intern. In return, the church paid me a small stipend, and there was some confusion as to my tax status. While I didn’t understand the finer points of the tax status debate, what I did understand was that I could barely make my way for a year on the stipend, and that I did not have extra money to pay self-employment taxes.

One of the members of my intern committee that year was a woman named Marie. As tax season grew closer, and

the debate on my tax status continued within the intern committee, I received a Christmas card from Marie and her husband, Tom. Inside the card was a check for $800, the amount needed to cover my taxes. I knew that Marie and Tom would have thought this over very carefully and I was overwhelmed by the fact that I knew two such generous people. Who gives $800 to someone they have known for only four months, someone who will be leaving their community within the next year?

The next day I went to my supervisor, Gary, and asked, "What do I do?" Without blinking he replied, "Say thank you, Sharon." I stared at him. It really hadn’t occurred to me that I could or should keep this gift. It was too much. How could I ever repay them? I was certain it was not professional or appropriate.

At first I wanted to pay the money back dollar for dollar, to repay my debt, my obligation, my duty. I was looking for debt restructuring, not a human economy of scale. It was also Gary who explained to me that he was certain that Marie and Tom really wanted to give me this gift and that it would be rude to return an intangible gift of love and generosity. I wanted to be self reliant, and independent, not humble and vulnerable. And part of me didn’t want to believe that such generosity existed, or that I could feel such gratitude toward people I barely knew.

When I called Marie to talk about her gift she simply said this, "When Tom and I were just starting out someone gave us money to get started. We are just passing this gift on to you. When you are able, do the same." And just as simply, this is how Marie and Tom gave me freedom and taught me about the human touch of gratitude. Now Peter and I are the

keepers of this trust, started over twenty years ago, by someone I never met. And someday we will pass it on to someone we barely know.

Financially, Marie and Tom helped me through a rocky time, for which I am grateful. But even more than that they taught me to have faith in the generosity of the human spirit, for which I am eternally grateful. Clearly this is not an eye for an eye proposition. I can only repay gratitude by naming it and passing it on.

In Works of Love Soren Kierkegaard writes, "He stands alone – by another’s help. But his help is hidden."⁵ How many hidden people have helped us get where we are today?

In my role as pastoral caretake,r I am privileged to hear your life stories. These stories are filled with both tragedy and comedy; people who were remarkably cruel, and others who were remarkably kind. Cruelty can bring us to tears, but so can kindness; the stranger who gives shelter, the neighbor who watches for the school bus every day to make sure all the children get safely home, the medical team who saves premature infants, the emergency team who extracts the injured from car accidents with the jaws of life. Through their generosity and kindness these people call us to be grateful, and when the time comes, for us to share the same with another.

____________________

⁵ Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1964), pp. 256f.

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