Gratitude as Practice

 Gratitude as a Practice — The Deacon’s Prayer and more

I closed last week’s writing with “ . . .  Let’s let gratitude be its own improvable characteristic, its own practice that we can use Lent to refine, take root, and continue throughout the rest of our lives.  

The changes we are hoping for are gifts from God.  Let’s start with gratitude and then ‘do Lent.’”

So how might we improve our practice of gratitude?  First we could acknowledge that gratitude can be adopted.  We need not wait on some rush of inspiration — although God’s spirit is involved — as if gratitude only happens to us not from us. 

We can discipline ourselves, even set our clocks to remind us when to be grateful.  It will not take very long at all for your focus to shift as you repeat your list and acknowledge those gifts of relationship and circumstance in your life for which you are thankful.

Minus acknowledgment, everything — even someone we love — can shrink and settle into fixtures or obstacles to our preferred intentions.  That’s why “the Deacon’s prayer” is best said as we wake and with these words, “Lord I thank you for getting me up this morning.”  

BTW, if you forget to start the day with gratitude, just be ready to be grateful after you realize you missed the start.  Gratitude begun at noon is still gratitude.

As your practice develops you’ll start to prepare for the moment.  Your “inventory” will grow and change. Soon gratitude will become more than the act of acknowledgement.  It’ll eventually become a lively part of how you meet new people and circumstances.  

I’ll admit that if you put me in a room full of horse manure I’d start looking for a pony.  But you don’t have to be that crazy to be grateful.  Just allow the possibility that something good is waiting to be found.  I’ll bet you’ll find your anxieties decrease and your blood pressure go down, too.

I’ll have more later but to close let me say that my practice is not some post-new-age-meme-based- self-hypnosis. It is an attempt to be faithful to a God who has allowed us freedom for the sake of love.  A God who has all bona fides of which my life enjoys only a fraction and understands first hand what it means to choose and to act for the benefit of others, to see the potential for good in everything and to give thanks for the calling to serve. 

This season of Lent is going to help us to see Jesus’ journey to the cross as a labor of divine love and we can make our way — one Deacon’s pray at a time — onto that path to follow him with our gratitude. FrDann

Gratitude as a Beginning

  Gratitude as a Beginning

Most of us begin our season of Lenten practices with something other than gratitude as a motivation for acts of penitence, spiritual discipline or nearly all of the gains, personal or otherwise we hope will at least accompany our efforts.  Certainly we do not want to presume an outcome prematurely or lose track of that humility we nearly all agree to be an intent of these forty days.

Many of us try to get too quickly to the humility part — or at least think we are — by disliking or even hating ourselves, by finding faults of many kinds or at the very least places for improvement. Think “our weight.” Not all of this is bad but from where will gratitude emerge if we take to any sort of discipline or devotion with this sort of beginning? It’s almost as if we want control more than change, reward more than relationship or status more than duty.

And so I am suggesting this alternative, to begin with gratitude because I believe there is even more to be gained of exactly those lesser categories of self-discipline along with a way to proceed once we pass the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

We are such quaint creatures always looking for a restart, a return to default settings, a second chance, a do-over.  We look as if that is yet to be granted, as if it is waiting on us to earn it or deserve something that God is withholding.  But it is 2023 and we are sharing in a story that already has death and resurrection in it.  

We are quaint but fortunate inhabitants of a time and place that is after that fact.  I remember Bishop Alexander’s preaching this to us on a Trinity Sunday years ago.  He asked us why we — he meant all christians not just Advent-ers — act as if the “jury is still out on the matter?”  Why do we let our particular life’s difficulties out weigh the gift of salvation — we can call it “life” — won for us and shown to us 20+ centuries ago in the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?

Let’s remember as we turn ourselves toward Calvary’s cross that the kingdom of heaven has been made manifest already!  We just celebrated that fact, that very gift for several Sundays beginning January 6, 2023. And this was not our first trip around the liturgical calendar.  We’ve been here before, as many times as we can count back to our baptisms.  

Yes there is work to do and avoiding pride would at least suggest that we do that work first through our individual lives. And I’m thinking that gratitude — taken on as its own spiritual discipline — might be the better context than reward or self-improvement.  Let’s let gratitude be its own improvable characteristic, its own practice that we can use Lent to refine, take root, and continue throughout the rest of our lives.  

The changes we are hoping for are gifts from God.  Let’s start with gratitude and then “do Lent.” 

FrDann

From Here to There

 The View from There to Here

Two themes have traded the stage on these Sundays after the Epiphany.  The first is the “manifestation” to the world of God’s presence in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  The other is furtherance of that manifestation in the sharing of God’s presence through the Kingdom of Heaven, in Greek βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν or basileia tōn ouranōn.  As Jesus shows himself for who he is, his reach finds us and his realm extends to include us.    

So we read the stories of the Magi and their somber visitation (frankincense and myrrh are burial “perfumes”), John’s dialogue with Jesus ending in his ultimate submission to being the one who baptizes his cousin in the Jordan River and followed finally by the miracle at the wedding in Cana of turning water into wine. 

In each of these moments our focus is increasingly fine tuned and we ultimately wake to him as THE incarnate one.  Scholars have coined a term for us that names this “focus,” as the Word made flesh commits a “scandal of particularity.”  It’s not that Jesus becomes more unique — there are no degrees of uniqueness — but that his “person” increases in intensity and impact. No wonder last Sunday’s gospel had him sounding so “harsh.”

While this ”particularity” is happening in and through him, the kingdom of heaven is also “made manifest.” In the same way that a lamp lights a whole room, or salt flavors all it touches the realm of God reaches and includes us and ultimately all of creation.  

This coming Sunday the gospel lesson tells of a transfiguration of Jesus with Moses and Elijah on a mountain top witnessed by Peter, James, and John. They are enshrouded in a cloud of light that glistens and God can be heard echoing the voice from the bank of the Jordan as Jesus was baptized, “this is my Son!”

So I’m thinking that in this mysterious and powerful event Jesus view is from both there and to here and he sees something new, something different. I think he can see how far this kingdom extends from him and how far he still has to go in his demonstrating an obedience like no other on the cross of Calvary.

For us the view from there, from that mountain top was both particular: about him — and general: about the kingdom. It is a kingdom that is in him already here and by our acceptance still being realized.  That’s why we use the story of the Transfiguration to close this “ordinary time” after our Epiphany triptych.  It reminds us that the kingdom is “already” AND “not yet.”

As we make our way — soon with Lent as our season — the kingdom that is already present in the particular person of Jesus keeps being realized by us in our faithfulness.  And we affirm the already-ness demonstrated by Christ’s transfiguration and turn to acknowledging the not-yet-ness in our striving. 

FrDann

Kingdom Horizons

Kingdom Horizons

Last week we saw the broadening horizon granted to us by God’s presence.  With the Beatitudes, Matthew chapter 5 includes 5 uses of the term ‘kingdom of heaven.” In all of the gospel you can read it being said 33 times.  The Greek is βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν or basileia tōn ouranōn.  

Think less government or its subjects and more a reign or reach.  The kingdom of heaven isn’t so much an address or location but a transcendent or emergent force or affinity from and with God that is embracive such that it reorients everything it touches.  

From Morning Prayer one of the “prayers for mission” says: 

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen. (BCP, p. 101)

In that prayer we recognize that Christ’s “reach,” — born in sacrifice — is a “saving embrace” that reorients us from recipient to participant, from unknown to known, from lost to beloved to lover.  So when we are looking ahead we do so with more than ourselves in mind.  

Even our intended transitions from selling the rectory to securing an interim priest to calling Advent’s next Rector needs to be understood as about more than a “new beginning” or “fresh start” or “change of pace.”  Our work, now caught up in the kingdom of heaven is more movement than result, more becoming than arriving, more emergent than established.  

Everything we do in faithfulness extends our horizon and our work will not accept complacency or settledness.  Jesus understands this and in Matthew’s chapter 11 says:  

28 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

There are big days ahead for us and even bigger ones, . . . further on. FrDann