Gratitude is Healing

Will you pray with me? Gracious God, you gift us with your word, which teaches us how to live and how to appreciate life. May these words, and our reflections, deepen our understanding of our selves, each other and you, praying in the name of Jesus who healed those of his time, and us today, Amen.

From the time that we begin to talk, we are instructed to say “thank you.” When a child receives a gift, a parent willl prompt:  “now what do you say?” and the child soon gets the hang of it: “thank you.” 

And so it should be, because thanking someone is the essence of  good manners and makes social relations smoother and more pleasant.  So much so that when we encounter people who lack  the thank-you reflex, we are disturbed.  Thank you's are  necessary, and to be encouraged.

Just as our society teaches the importance of  please and thank you, it  also encourages the exact opposite, which is dissatisfaction. We live in a world where almost anything we want is available to us 24/7.  With so much information about goods and services, so many reviews on yelp or tripadvisor or other websites, it is easy to get overwhelmed. We are always looking for the next best deal, and find it difficult to settle for what is average or good enough. That would be practically un-American.  But it seems that the more choices we have, the less happy we are.

Having too many options may make it harder to be happy with the one that we do choose, since we  know that so many others were left on the table, so to speak.  In one social science experiment, psychologists from Stanford and  Columbia Universities  asked some people to choose one piece of chocolate out  of six and to taste that piece.  Another group of people had a choice of one piece out of 30. Those with more choices reported being less happy with the chocolate they chose.  When choice was limited, people were more satisfied.  It seems that the ancient wisdom “moderation in all things,” still applies, even to chocolate. 

Our cultural conditioning is pulling in two ways:  giving thanks is a good thing,  but sometime a bit routine. Yet, with so many choices, we are learning the opposite of gratitude,  a nagging dissatisfaction with what we do, possess, and even with ourselves.

But being truly grateful is different. Being grateful comes not from the learned response of childhood, but from the mature response of a child of God.  Being grateful is a radical action which exhibits what we really believe about life and our place in the universe. For only one who understands that he or she is a contingent creature in relationship to God will give thanks, as did  the Samaritan in today’s story.

Our gospel today—as so many gospel lessons do—cuts through cultural overlays on gratitude and brings us back to the basics: showing us an example of radical gratitude and relationship to God which is healing in the largest sense of that term. There is a healing miracle in the story,  but it is not only about a physical healing from leprosy. The story shows us that healing continues for the man who comes back and thanks Jesus, and by extention, healing will continue in our lives as we practice gratitude. We will be healed from false ideas about our place in the world.  We will be healed from excessive pride, and greed. We will be healed from indifference to the beauty around us and we will be healed unto joy and even outgoing love to others. Gratitude is healing of many things that aile, and brings us to experience life in new ways. Gratitude helps us thrive.

In our story, we see that Jesus heals ten lepers and tells them to  show themselves to the priests. They depart to do so. We don’t learn much about them, but they seem to have an almost matter-of-fact response to this miracle.  It doesn’t seem to impress them. But one man returns, to say directly to the Healer, how glad he is for the miracle.  He says a true “Thank you.” 

This person is the Samaritan, the outsider.  As we know, in those days, Jews and Samaritans did not have direct relationships, so it is doubly important that he was healed and grateful—indicating to Luke’s first listeners that Jesus came not only for his own people.  Indeed, the outsider acts in an even more righteous way than the insider.  Another story–like the Good Samaritan–which tells us that being an outsider is more than acceptable in the realm of God.

When the Samaritan returns, he makes an extraordinary gesture—he prostrates himself.  He gets down on the ground and gives thanks. This is a radical act of offering of himself and of his heart, a surrender of love, using the body when words are insufficient.

Some of us are familiar with the child’s pose in yoga.  You begin by kneeling and then lean over, extending your hands in front or keeping them to your side, and putting your face down on the floor. In this position you, are not working at anything but acknowledging mentally and emotionally that you are not in charge right now, but receiving, resting and releasing, relaxing.  This kind of body-on-the-floor position is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, in which the practitioner is enjoined to repeat hundreds of prostrations to learn how to be present and awake.  In Muslim prayer, five times a day the faithful also use their bodies to show their submission to Allah, kneeling and lying on a prayer rug. 

In  Christianity, we tend to use the body less, although in Catholicism there is genuflecting upon entering a church pew and kneeling during a communion prayer.  Our Protestant traditions did away with much of these bodily movements in worship, holding to the  theological idea that once saved by Christ, we could stand upright before God.  We do not kneel at communion, for example, but we stand at many points in our service to show our agreement with what is being said, and to participate more fully, and to free our voices to sing more expressivley, singing being a way to enbody our faith. 

Yet, whatever our denomination, we all understand, and have perhaps experienced those moments of great need of God.  Moments of  being on our knees before God, when only the posture which reflects Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemanie will do.

But the Samaritan in the story did not prostrate himself out of supplication, but out of gratitude. The motive is different. We know to kneel when we need something from God.  But it is even a deeper expression of love of God, I think, when we kneel in thanks.

A friend told me this story recently:  One day, when her children were little, she left the three-year-old in the house when she went to put the garbage on the curb. Coming back into the house, she could not find the child. She ran out the back door and again to the front, calling his name, but he seemed to have vanished. Suddenly, she remembered hearing a car go by,  and was convinced that someone had kidnapped the boy.  Frantic now, she ran to the neighbors, and asked for help. They looked around, but he was nowhere to be found. She was going back to the house to call the police, when in the kitchen, she saw her son in the corner, calmly munching on a banana.  He had been there all the time. She was so grateful that all she could do was to get down on her knees and thank God that her son–who hadn’t even been really lost–was now found.  A moment of  total of gratitude, expressed through her whole physical being.

It is at these moments when we recognize our dependence on God and our utter thankfulness for what we have received, just as the Samaritan  in the story. We see our right place in the world. We are creatures. God is Creator.  We are dependent. We are not ashamed to be on the ground, touching our hearts to the humble earth and giving thanks.

It is at these moments of radical gratitude that we recognize that all that we are,  and all that we have,  comes from God.  We are also able to find more pleasure and joy in what we do have.  For as my friend in the story realized, she loved her son before she thought she had lost him, but she was ever so more grateful for his very being when she found him again.

Sometimes it is just this contrast which will jar us out of complacency. Anyone who has ever sprained an ankle is very aware of the miracle of being able to walk without limping or hopping.  Anyone who has ever lost electric power during a storm finds those first few days of electricity to be startlingly precious.  But soon we get back to taking things for granted. It takes a particular practice of beginners mind, to re-mind us that all that we have is gift, and miraculous in itself. It is not easy to maintain the perspective that the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel speaks of as he writes: “just to breath, just to live, just to be is holy. We are on holy ground and should live in deep reverence to life.”

This is why meditation, silence, time away on retreat or anything that breaks routine can be so helpful in awakening us to the continuous miracles around us. And why counting your blessings is not only a good theology, but healing as well.

Because as we list these blessings, as we savor them, we appreciate anew the gifts we have been given.  And we are more satisfied with life as it is, and don’t have to acquire or demand more than we have.

Finally, gratitude and giving thanks can move us to act in more  loving and virtuous ways that we might not, if we were feeling shortchanged or dissatisfied.  Gratitude encourages our generosity.  As we see that we have been gifted, and we want to pass it on.

One day, on his way to work, my husband Patrick approached a four-way-stop intersection in our town.  He looked around and saw that no one else was at the other three corners, so–let’s put  it this way—he kind of rolled through without really stopping. You know how that goes, perhaps.  Just slow down enough to look like you are stopping without really putting your foot on the brakes. Just as he went through the intersection, a policeman pulled up behind him with lights flashing. Uh Oh.  He expected to get a ticket and was very apologetic to the officer. To his glad surprise, he was only given a warning,  and was able to avoid a large fine.

He went on to the office, reveling in his good luck.  Later in the day, someone knocked at the door.  A stranger asked  if he could come in. The gentleman looked a bit bedraggled and tired.  He  was carrying a large bag filled with boxes of cookies.  He began a spiel, telling Patrick that he was selling these cookies to put his granddaughter through college.

Now,  normally, my husband would have been sceptical about such a story.  He might have bought one box of cookies from such a solicitation, and sent the man on his way. But, filled with the joy of having escaped the penalty of an expensive traffic violation, Patrick  took out his wallet and and bought all the cookies from the man.  Needless to say, the man was happy and my husband too.  His gratitude had allowed him to expand beyond himself and his routine reactions to people who are selling something door to door.  His gratitude allowed him to be moved by the man’s story, and he decided to help that fellow,  realizing in some small way the interconnectedness of all of our lives. The kindness of the policeman resulted in a kindness to a cookie seller, flowing through. When we ate those cookies, they tasted even sweeter. 

Gratitude expands us, it opens us, it works through our bodies to help us become more humble. When we practice gratitude, we find that we love more fully what we are given, and hanker less for what we don’t have and usually don’t need. We pay more attention and look twice at the world as it is marvelously constructed, and are aware of our own small, and precious part in it, and aware too of the overwhelming beauty in which we reside.  And the persistent dissatisfactions of our cultural conditioning are less oppressive.  We are free to enjoy our lives more. These fruits of gratitude bring us to our knees sometimes or cause us stand up and shout for joy.

May we, like this Samaritan, be filled to overflowing, grateful for the small and larger blessings that God sends our way.

And may we thank God for gratitude which heals.

Amen