Breathing Gratitude
Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 30 December 2021.
Good morning, Friends. My name is Lisa Graustein, I use she/her pronouns.
When the hosts met last week to plan worship for this week, we were talking about some different ideas, and what it means to be between Christmas and the calendar New Year, and the intensity of the current moment of the pandemics that many of us are feeling and living with. And we came back to something that we had heard in a message in November, that in preparation for the Day of Mourning we had listened to excerpts from the All My Relations podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene. And in talking about the many myths and lies of Thanksgiving, one of the things they talked about was the ways in which white settler culture centers all gratitude on this one day of Thanksgiving and one big meal as part of this bigger denial of genocide and harm. And that in indigenous cultures across this hemisphere gratitude is a regular practice. And part of what we heard in their podcast was an invitation for all of us who don't currently have a regular gratitude practice to step into that. And that one of the many, many ways that we can begin to shift our relationship to each other, to the land we are on, to spirit, is to step more fully into gratitude. That resonated with a lot of us.
I also know for myself, in a season where I have lost a significant number of people in the last month, each day is just feeling like a challenge. And that gratitude for me feels very different than putting on a smiley face, or just focusing on the positive. That gratitude invites me to go to a deeper place of holding on to what is sustaining me, at a time that feels somewhat unsustainable. That gratitude is a way to acknowledge that God walks with us no matter how hard or rocky our path is, or even those moments when I know I have felt like, wait God, are you there, for real, this? And that gratitude is a practice that brings me back to remembering that I am not alone. That together we can create what we need to sustain ourselves and to thrive.
And so this morning our invitation in the small groups and throughout worship is to share moments of gratitude, to share gratitude for things that are sustaining us, that are helping us to thrive and to be. We also wanted to acknowledge before we do this process, however, that for some of us what I might express as a gratitude might be a particularly painful or tender place for you, and we're not going to know what those things are. And unlike being in person when we might lean over and pat someone on the arm, it's just different in Zoom space. And so we want to acknowledge that some of the things some of us might express gratitude might be really sore or tender places for others of us. So we invite you to care for yourself first and foremost. That if I express a gratitude that is a soreness for you, you don't have to take that in or listen to what i'm saying. That if you want space to connect or talk with others, you can reach out to David as our tech host, and he can move you into a breakout room with me or Kristina, or Callid, or Emily, and we will happily just sit with you, if you want sitting with, talk with you, pray with you, that none of us has to be alone this morning in the things that are hard or sad. And collectively we can meet each other in our gratitudes, but no one of us has to hold any particular piece of that.
So I just invite everyone to take a deep breath, to take a moment to just be with yourself for a moment. And before we move into small groups, to just notice your body, notice your breath, notice your being. And when you hold gratitude for a moment, what rises for you, as something that you have gratitude for this morning.
