"Gratitude Intergenerational Service"

Story for All Ages: The Grateful Statues, from the Buddhist tradition.           

Reading: excerpt from: “Writing Thank-You’s” from Are You Quite Polite by Alan Katz

Writing thank-you’s

Really is important

Mom says thank-you’s

Show your gratitude.

Kate gave me a pair of skates

I use them as paperweights

They’re too small

Still I’ll scrawl

Thank you.

Writing thank-you’s

Is still what I must do,

Though my party

was in two thousand two.

I’ll write to my pal Paul

He gave me a basketball

Won’t inflate

Still I’ll state

Thank you

Writing thank-you’s

Really is exhausting

Hand is cramping

Fingers are all numb.

Mom, if you would

Let me skip my thank-you’s,

I would write a

Thank-you note to you!

Homily: Gratitude

            Thank you cards. I am sure on some level we can all identify with that poem. There are times when we receive gifts we just don’t like, that don’t fit, or don’t work. 

            We start teaching our children about gratitude at a very young age. One of the first phrases we teach our kids is “thank you.” Most of us teach this to our children as something we do for other people. We do it because saying thank you is a way to show others we are grateful for them and what they did for us. It is also a way to show respect.

            When we thank others for their gifts of items, time, or talent, we are recognizing the intention behind the gift. We are not really thanking them for a material object or the specific thing they did, but for the compassion they have shown us.

            Why do we write a thank you card for that ugly sweater our aunt gave us? Because she was trying to show us how much she cares for us. We are thanking her for her love, not for the sweater.

             However, writing thank you cards and being grateful is not only something we do only for others, but something we do for ourselves as well. It is a spiritual practice. It gives us time to pause and reflect on what is important in our lives. It gives us a moment to remember why someone cares about us. Expressing our gratitude is a human emotion and it makes us feel good to do it. It even helps in hard times.

            Each night at dinner my family and I each say one thing we are grateful for. This allows us to realize that even on the hardest of days, there is hope and beauty in the world.

            There have been times in my life when I have been in a deep depression. On those days, months, sometimes years, I often question the meaning of life when there is so much pain in the world. It is at that time when our evening ritual of gratitude makes the most difference.

            One night all I could say I was grateful for was that I was able to brush my teeth that morning. Really, that was all I had in me. And it still made me feel better. It let me know there was hope. If I could brush my teeth today, I might be able to do it tomorrow. And naming just one thing I was grateful for made me see other things I was grateful for.

            We were at dinner and I realized I was thankful for my family. I was thankful for my father who cooked dinner because that was certainly something I could not do that day. I realized I was also thankful for my mother who played go-fish with my son earlier in the day because I was too tired to play. 

            I understand sometimes we literally have to force ourselves to see something we are grateful for, but that spiritual practice of gratitude can bring comfort, hope, and sometimes joy into our lives.

            Expressing our gratitude is essential on a daily basis because thankfulness is one of the things we most question, but also what we seek most in hard times.

            When I was in college, away from home, my Dad got cancer. The first thing I thought of was not how angry, sad or scared I was, that all came later. The first thing I did was try to remember if I had told my Dad how much I loved him the last time I saw him. Had I thanked him for being a wonderful father? Would he die without ever knowing how grateful I am for him? 

            This experience taught me to daily say thank you for the beauty in life because you never know when you will lose it. Now I try to remember as often as possible to thank my Dad and those around me for the gifts they bring to my life.

            I admit that after the shock of his diagnosis, during the surgery and treatment, the anger, sadness and fear set in and I often lost that initial spirit of thankfulness. It was not easy to be grateful for anything at that time, yet the one who often told me there were things to be thankful for, was my Dad. He knew that anger, sadness, and fear crush our spirits if we let those overtake us. Those are all normal emotions and are part of the grieving process, but when we do not get past those stages in our grief, then we start to harm ourselves. 

            We practice the spiritual practice of gratitude in good times and bad because it is essential to our spiritual and emotional well-being, and the well-being of others.

            What I hope for each of us today is that we find something to be grateful for. Maybe write that thank you card we have been meaning to send for months. There are people here in great pain and others with great joy. Recognizing all the feelings here today, may we all seek to practice gratitude for it will help feed our spirits and heal our hearts.

            Amen and Blessed Be.