The Good Table At Home: Not Exactly Grateful

by Rev. Dr. Melinda V. McLain

Spiritual Touchstone

On Thursday, we will celebrate Thanksgiving. And I don’t know about you, but for me, I find myself practicing a form of white-knuckle gratitude. To be sure, I am painfully aware of how lucky I am to have a wonderful job, a beautiful home, and a loving spouse. For so very many people, those things are missing or are hanging on by a thread. And as a white person in a society deeply polarized by race, I have the luxury of choosing how I will respond to the insistent and righteous cries for justice happening right now. Unlike our siblings of color, I can focus on something else and not have to worry about my safety or the well-being of my immediate family. So I recognize that I don’t really have a right to feel anything other than grateful for all the privilege I have in my life. And yet . . .

I’m also profoundly aware that when I contracted the coronavirus at the end of October, my experience of being infected by this life-threatening virus unfolded as the very best case scenario. I never felt sick in any way and more importantly, every person I might have inadvertently infected — including my beloved wife, Colleen — has tested negative and never got sick. We’re also done with all the self-isolation and quarantine periods. But if I’m truthful, I’m more relieved than grateful. While it wasn’t physically challenging for me personally, the emotional impact of living with this virus and the possibility that I could have infected others who might become gravely ill was awful and terrifying.

As a spiritual leader, I believe that choosing to live a life of unfettered gratitude is a noble way to deepen and develop our souls. Cultivating gratitude can also heal us from both the petty and profound traumas and wounds that we have experienced. And more and more scientific research shows that gratitude is a milestone in our development as a species and, in my own view, is essential to creating strong and healthy communities. Gratitude, as the Roman philosopher Cicero once wrote, is the “parent of all virtues”.

So what can we do when gratitude doesn’t come easily? The first factor in choosing gratitude is to look for the good in our lives in the world and then to realize that the gifts and benefits we have do not come from our own labors. We cannot do good by ourselves, nor can we recognize what is good and worth being grateful for without seeing our relationship to others. Robert Emmons, a scientific expert on gratitude writes more about this in an intriguing essay written for the Greater Good Institute at U.C. Berkeley.

If Emmons is right, perhaps the reason that feeling grateful feels a bit forced this year is because the now-surging pandemic, coupled with an unbelievably toxic political climate, has made most of us feel socially isolated and disconnected from one another. This is not theoretical or just emotional — it is real and it is hard for almost everyone. So if you too are feeling not exactly grateful, or perhaps not even one bit grateful this year, please know that you’re not alone: I see you, I am you.

What then to do to be more grateful? If you’re of a spiritual bent, you may find that your connection to a higher power that you may call God or a thousand other names such as Divine Love or Holy One helps. Or, if you aren’t sure about whether there is some force beyond the natural world, most spiritual practice — especially in community — does serve to help us live better, fuller, more grateful lives. If you don’t currently have such a community, please consider yourself warmly invited to join The Good Table UCC in our weekly interfaith meditation group on Thursdays at 6p or our Sunday Gathering at 12n. Both are free and easy to access via Zoom or phone. Send an email to me to receive credentials for either gathering or to just connect one on one.

May this Thanksgiving, however you celebrate it, be a blessing to you and may we all find ways to get reconnected to one another, so that we may remember that when we work together for good, “nothing is impossible”.