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| A member congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America | ||
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November Garrison Keillor, the host of the Prairie Home Companion and most famous son of Lake Wobegon, published a few years back a book entitled Good Poems. The first section has poems, mostly, of gratitude for sheer existence, and in an interview Keillor was asked if he thought gratitude was the fundamental religious dimension of life. His answer is well worth repeating here as Thanksgiving approaches. Keillor responded, “Yes, indeed. Gratitude is where spiritual life begins. Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for those black slacks and this black T-shirt. Thanks for black, and for other colors. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the wherewithal not to fix a half-pound cheeseburger right now and to eat a stalk of celery instead. Thank you for the wonderful son and the amazing little daughter and the smart sexy wife and the grandkids. Thank you that I haven’t had alcohol in lo! these many months and thank you that it isn’t a big struggle to do without, as I had so feared it might be. Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.” And then Keillor went on to say, “I could go on and on and on. One should enumerate one’s blessing and set them before the Lord. Begin every day with this exercise. List your blessings and you will walk through those gates of thanksgiving and into the fields of joy. It is to break through the thin membrane of sourness and sullenness — though we should be thankful for that too, it being the source of so much wit and humor — and to come into the light and enjoy our essential robustness and good health.” And he is right: gratitude is the fundamental dimension of the religious life, where it begins. And it is the best way to start the day, especially if our tendency is to start most every day with thoughts about how much we don’t have to be thankful for and go through a litany of complaints. We just might be surprised if we started with a list of all the blessings we in fact still do enjoy, even in the midst of trouble of illness or grief; the friendships, a nice chewy granola bar, a wondrous fall day, someone’s love, God’s love, trees on fire with color, a sky so blue it hurts your eyes, that strength or hope that came from somewhere. Such a daily exercise is truly the way to break through the thin membrane of sourness and sullenness and walk out in the fields of joy.
God be with you, Jeff
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