Habituation

 Habituation

A paraphrase of my closing from last week is that “ . . . hindsight begs honesty / trust begs humility.” I was writing about how we can move forward with gratitude and want now to describe how we might avoid slipping into what looks to me to be a kind of self-hypnosis. (I’m remembering the “little engine that could” puffing its mantra “I think I can, I think I can.”) 

The Deacon’s Prayer (DP), “Lord, I thank you for getting me up this morning” is a great way to start the day but it also serves to promote an ease of spirit when we speak it at the end of the day.  In short there’s never a bad time for the Deacon’s Prayer.  

If seen with honesty, our hindsight can admit a whole day’s worth of things hoped for AND things unexpected.  Closing with an acknowledgment of one’s reliance on God continued from the morning sets the frame and makes it possible to include “all sorts and conditions” in one’s accounting of all which God tends for us in love and mercy.

Because our God is a also God of surprises the humility implied in the DP allows us to make room for God’s time and expects us to give God as much credit as possible for all that has transpired or not in our day.  

Hindsight and humility can be partnered to protect us from a kind of magical thinking that would prefer incantation to prayer, superstition to self-examination, control of outcomes to adaptation. Magical thinking abhors surprises, avoids innovation, and slips into the stubborn insanity of repeating the same action while expecting a different outcome.

Gratitude can be expansive for others as well as one’s self.  But like agape — the New Testament name of “self-sacrificing love for the sake of others” — gratitude does not press itself across boundaries, even those made from fear or hatred but it waits, even persists in confidence to be  recognized by its honesty and humility.

We all know that person and we all remember how we felt when we saw them seeing us struggle.  Our breathing changed, became more prayer-like and our pride no longer prevented us from accepting the company and help of another. 

That’s how gratitude can work and become a way of living.  We practice, evaluate, adjust, and practice some more, so that one day we are “habituated.”  We can inhabit gratitude. 

FrDann