"The root of joy is gratefulness. We notice that joyful people are grateful, and we suppose that they are grateful for their joy. But the reverse is true: Their joy springs from their gratefulness."
These are the words of the Benedictine monk and teacher, Brother David Steindl-Rast.
I have been asking myself some questions recently as I go about my days and my life, and so I will share my inquiry with you, and if you wish, you can ask yourself these questions:
How much attention and time did you give today to genuinely giving thanks? Have you given yourself over to the joy of appreciation, to recognizing how you are blessed, to experiencing the gifts you receive from life? Have you paused to drink in the sky with your eyes, to draw in the raw, spring wind with your breath? Did you listen to the birdsong this morning? Were you happy to wake in a warm bed, under the shelter of a sturdy house, and to be able to sustain your body with food? Do you appreciate the ones you love and the way they enrich your life? Did you tell them? Did you notice your health—the extent of all you can do?
Jane Kenyon's poem "Otherwise" comes to mind:
I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been otherwise.
I ate cereal, sweet milk, a ripe, flawless peach.
It might have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.
All morning I did the work I love…
The essence of the investigation is this: Do you realize how much you already have of what you love? Do you see how much is already available, rather than perpetually desiring it as if it were not there?
This has been an illuminating inquiry for me personally. I am coming to see how much of my psychic energy and internal dialogue, if not my outer words, are devoted to noting the scarcity or inadequacy of conditions rather than their abundance, or at the very least, their sufficiency.
It can be subtle, but when we really observe our own minds, our emotions, we may have to admit to a fair amount of grousing. The more we grouse, the further it takes us from joy and delight, from fullness and peace, and from enthusiasm and the spirit of generosity.
One of the troublesome attitudes that springs from a sense of lack is that of waiting to live, an attitude of postponement—the belief that only the future might bring the completeness one longs for, only the future might offer fulfillment, or at least relief from the lack we now feel.
"Tomorrow, when conditions improve, I might be able to be what I want to be, I might be able to do what I want to do, I might be able give of myself the way I want to give, I might be able to start fully enjoying my life—but not now, not with the way things are."
According to a study from the National Opinion Research Center, American happiness peaked between the mid-1960s and 1973. Other studies have shown that happiness rises along with income, but only up to the point at which basic needs are met. After that point, happiness stagnates. Even as we become wealthier, happiness tends to languish or decline.
Why is that? Because as our income or standard of living rises, so do our aspirations, our desires, our expectations of what we should be able to have, our notions of fulfillment. This has been called the "hedonic treadmill." We run faster and faster trying to grasp the things we believe will bring us happiness, but they remain ever beyond our reach, because happiness is not in things, but in the self—in our capacity to enjoy what we have, and enjoy being in relationship with others.
This is perhaps the fundamental pathology of our materialistic society. We live in a culture in which the seeds of wanting are cultivated at every moment. Our whole economy depends upon it. The sense of lack has burrowed deep into our minds like a worm. For being one of the world's wealthiest nations, with one of the world's highest standards of living, we are among the world's most psychologically unhealthy, medicated, and unhappy people.
"Tomorrow I might be able to be what I want to be, I might be able to do what I want to do, I might be able give of myself the way I want to give, I might be able to start fully enjoying my life—but not now, not with the way things are, not until I have…such and such."
But that tomorrow never comes. That's the nature of "tomorrow." It never arrives, because then it would be today—the only time and place we actually live. There is no enjoyment in the future. Enjoyment is possible only in the present.
I was reading Eckhart Tollë's book, A New Earth, early one morning. Tollë was a pretty normal but deeply unhappy man. In his late twenties, he took a downward spiral into despair. But like Alice falling into the rabbit hole, instead of hitting a bottom he fell through to another state of being altogether. He broke through the barriers of his mind.
He describes falling down a collapsing whirlpool of despair, but just as he is swallowed, he comes out into something like blue sky, into infinite spaciousness, into unconditional bliss—what he calls the state of Now, which could be called enlightenment.
He spent about two years being unable to function in the world, sitting on park benches in a state of total bliss. But gradually he began to integrate his experience back into a more grounded life. He became a spiritual teacher and author of The Power of Now and other books. He travels all over the world now, teaching. It may sound implausible, but I think he is the real deal when it comes to teaching about the essential nature of consciousness.
Anyway, I was reading his book, A New Earth. And toward the end he talks about how "the 'waiting to start living' syndrome is one of the most pervasive of delusions of the unconscious state." As I was reading along, I came to these lines:
"You cannot manifest what you want. You can only manifest what you already have."
Remember in the reading earlier we heard about Buddha's teaching: that we can at every moment cultivate the seeds of peace within ourselves. We do this by choosing to direct the nourishment of our attention to those seeds, rather than the other ones.
Attending to the seeds of wanting cultivates wanting, and that is how it becomes an endless treadmill. We grow "want" in the garden of the mind, our living becomes an expression of it, and as Lynn Twist says, we end up calling others to that experience.
Cultivating the seeds of appreciation and gratitude increases the experience of sufficiency and plenty. Our cup overflows, and the future enjoyment we have been waiting for flows into the present moment and is realized.
Now, this morning is the beginning of our annual pledge drive. And, to be totally blunt about it, we are all going to be engaged in a conversation about the church's very real need for money in order to sustain its existence and activities.
So, if I'm here saying that we already have what we need, am I not undermining the motivation of this community of people, myself included, to give very, very generously?
Somehow we need to explore that paradox between the reality of the church's need for money and a confidence that we have, already within us, the capacity and the resources to be what we want to be.
This church is not a building. This church is a people. This church is a people with a purpose—the purpose of loving, the purpose of serving, the purpose of celebrating, the purpose of creating beauty, the purpose of bringing more hope and more life and more peace and healing to the world around us.
And there is not a thing in the world that can prevent us from being that people, from being a people with a purpose. We do not have to postpone that for one moment.
And in fact, the more that we live it, the more powerful and generative a community we become. The more we come together in the energy of mission, each of us embracing that sense of purpose and expressing it in our own way to our own capacity, the more we are able to meet the needs of those who come into this place, and the more visible and effective we become in the larger community.
It is by living this way, now and each day, that we will find the resources to create what we want to create, and accomplish what we need to accomplish.
A Bible story that I have always loved is the story of the invalid by the pool:
Jesus traveled into to Jerusalem for one of the feasts of his people. There was in Jerusalem, near the Sheep Gate, a pool which in Aramaic was called Bethesda ("house of mercy"). The pool was surrounded by five covered colonnades, and in these lay a host of people who were sick—the blind and lame and withered. They waited for the waters of the pool to swirl and move, which they would do periodically. It was believed that a divine hand would stir the waters, and whoever could enter the pool when the waters were moving would be healed.
There was a man there who had been an invalid for 38 years. And when Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for such a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?"
"Sir," the man replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."
Jesus said to him, "Stand up! Pick up your mat and walk." And the man picked up his mat and walked.
We can call this a miracle story, but according the gospels, Jesus was always teaching that "it is your faith that has healed you." The capacity to be whole was already there, within the person. And so the most important line in the story is, "Do you want to get well?"
Our question is, do we want to be a thriving, healthy, generous, serving church? We do not need to wait to be put into the waters first before we can walk. So let's stand up, pick up our bedroll, and walk: walk together, walk out into the world, walk in a spirit of love and joy and service—giving thanks ever for the gifts that we enjoy and are able to share.
Allow me to tell you another story. I went to a workshop a couple of years ago presented by Historic Boston's Steeples Project, which gives grants to churches to restore their facades and offers various services and networking opportunities for churches with historic buildings.
We met at the Roxbury Presbyterian Church to hear the amazing story that that church had to tell. The Roxbury Presbyterian Church, like its surrounding neighborhood, had , over the decades, fallen deeper and deeper into poverty and disrepair, until the church stood sadly on the corner as an expression not of hope and resurrection but of decay and despair.
The people realized that the physical presentation of their church was not serving their community but mirroring its poverty. It was the epitome of dreams—and maintenance—deferred.
They realized that they needed to really start finding a way to lift up their community, not only through stronger outreach projects but also by improving the physical plant, and that the two went hand in hand.
They decided to try to open a computer lab in their basement to help the local kids develop their computer skills. But before they could do that, they had to have someone come in and take a look at the place and tell them what they would need to do to bring it up to code.
Well, the basement was a disaster. After a thorough assessment, which uncovered one structural problem after another, they were told it was going to cost them a few hundred thousand dollars to do the necessary work—a completely impossible sum.
But instead of bagging the idea, they began to focus intensely upon their desire to be of service to their community, and with that mission they began to raise money.
The pastor of this church, Rev. Herman E. Hamilton, spoke at this workshop. He was a very charismatic guy, a wonderful speaker, whose stories of their renovation journey were infused with the colorful characters and stories of the Bible, and he frequently invited us listeners to call out "Amen!" when something important had been said. This is the African-American worship practice—you respond to the speaker, and that's how he or she knows you're alive and engaged. And so he wouldn't let us just sit there passively.
He told us the incredible story of how they went from this fairly humble intention of opening a computer lab in their dark, moldy, crumbling basement to raising, over several years of intensive communication, $3.3 million to totally renovate their historic building from the bottom up. They now have all manner of outreach programs running out of that basement, which has undergone a miraculous transformation, and they are fully handicapped accessible, including an elevator.
That poor little church in Roxbury raised $3.3 million. The only way they were able to do it, was—well, Rev. Hamilton would say, "by faith." He said, "this work is only possible by faith—faith in the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen," quoting one of the letters of the apostle Paul.
But next to that, they accomplished what they did by witnessing very powerfully to a mission of service. No one was going to give big bucks to a church that wanted only to help itself. They could not raise that money by communicating their neediness, but by communicating their own generosity, their conviction about what they wanted to give freely to others.
He talked about how people are gathered to a church by a universal power that wants to work through them to bring more love and light into the world. To accomplish something of that magnitude, they had to get past the notion that it was only their church—the limiting perceptions that this is my church. They had to let go of thinking they could or would have to do it all themselves.
They had to know that the church belongs to that larger power of life, not to them, that the resources were already out there, and that those resources also belong to that larger power of Life that wants to infuse the world. Someone else may be holding a resource, but it does not belong to that person either. All resources are part of the larger Life that wants to flow and create.
And he said, "You can't figure it all out before you start." You just have to start. Like the invalid at the pool, they had to just pick up their beds and start walking.
We have great resources already within this community of Theodore Parker Church. I dare say we have many more resources than the Roxbury Presbyterian Church congregation had when they started.
Whatever challenges we are confronted with in the coming year, we don't have to figure it all out before we begin. If we have a sense of mission, and we are publicly passionate about that mission, we will find enough resources (in people, time, and money) to express that mission. Developing a culture of abundance means knowing that there will always be enough to be what we want to be.
It is not joy that makes us grateful, but gratitude that makes us joyful. It isn't abundant conditions that will make us generous, but our generosity can transform our conditions into a shared experience of abundance.
Let us never stop celebrating both the generosity and the abundance that we enjoy now. Let us celebrate the powerful Life that already moves in us and through us, and desires only to infuse the world with more life.
Tomorrow does not exist. Only today exists. Only today can we live. Only today can we share. So let us not wait one moment to live, to share, and to be what we are called to be.
May it be so.