It has been said that if gratitude, being thankful, were a pill, everybody would be taking it. The positive health benefits of gratitude are so indisputably panaceatic, that, truly, if it came in pill form, we all would be lining up to buy it in bulk and probably trying to overdose on it if possible. (Panaceatic is a word I made up. It comes from the word panacea which means a “cure-all”.) Of course, I am exaggerating here a bit to make my point. But the fact still remains that study after study has indisputably shown that gratitude is remarkably beneficial to physical, mental, and relational health.
Chemically speaking, the science community has found that making a practice of being grateful, which is finding things to be thankful for, will cause increases in two important to feeling good brain chemicals, serotonin and dopamine. These chemicals are associated with happiness and pleasure. If the levels of either or both are out of whack low, you will be suffering some form of depression. Practicing gratitude can have the effect on us that antidepressant medications have. They’ve also found that the practice of being grateful reduces the level of stress hormones in the body.
The result of this bettered brain and body chemistry is astronomically as well as gastronomically good. Making a practice of finding things to be grateful for has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression and improve overall mood. Being grateful just makes you feel better – more energetic, positive, contented and so on. The reduction in stress hormones brought about by practicing gratitude lowers blood pressure and inflammation throughout the body. Reducing inflammation leads to a happier digestive system, less pain throughout the body, and fewer trips to the bathroom. Less indigestion and less pain and fewer trips to the bathroom would make everybody happy. Practicing gratitude also promotes better cardiovascular health giving you more energy and reduced risk of heart attack and stroke. If you go to sleep thinking on things your grateful for rather than ruminating on the negatives, your sleep is so much better. More and better sleep is a major physical and mental health benefit. Thinking of things to be grateful for before stressful tasks will increase your ability to focus on the task by short-circuiting the “stressing out over it” mental mechanism which can be so debilitating.
In the area of self-worth, being grateful and expressing gratitude when people do nice things for you increases self-esteem by helping you to realize that people care about you enough as to want to spend their time and resources on you. Being grateful makes you an easier person to be around, more positive, patient, and relaxed. It aids the formation of humility. In the long-term, the intentional practice of being grateful can rewire the brain so that you are more resilient when life makes you swallow those bitter pills. Gratitude in the face of adversity is a major component of personal strength.
So, having established that gratitude is overwhelmingly good for us, we should now wrestle with why we have to work so hard at being grateful; why it doesn’t seem to come naturally for us. Being grateful is a switch that we have to turn on. We have to discipline ourselves to be grateful - make a practice of it. All of us have plenty in our lives to be thankful for, but for some reason we have to stop and remember to count our blessings. Here’s a few reasons.
There are some negative mental behaviours that come easier to us than gratitude and they are quite soul-destroying. Envy – Instead of being satisfied with who we are and what we have, we desire the traits and possessions of others. Materialism – rather than just being satisfied with what we have, we think that having more of the latest and greatest stuff will make us complete. Cynicism – the cynic thinks that everybody else is only in it for themselves and never sees the good in anything. Finally, there’s also that rare gift called narcissism where we think we are entitled to everything. We can’t see anything as a gift, because we think we deserve to have it all.
Psychologists say we have a negativity bias which means we tend to more readily take notice of and dwell on negative rather than positive stimuli and events. We remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones. We take insults to heart and downplay if not ignore the praise receive. We think about, ruminate upon, negative possibilities more readily than focusing on the possibility of good outcomes. That’s called worry. We tend to let the negative rather than the positive events of our lives be more formative to who we are and how we see the world. We are so negatively biased that from a performance review we will remember that one negative bit of helpful criticism rather than the myriads of praises just sung about us. I don’t think I need to go into the harmful effects that this negativity bias has on mental, physical, and relational health because it’s pretty much at the heart of what’s wrong with the world today. But since we are talking about, I will say practicing gratitude has the effect of short-circuiting our negativity bias and in the long run can rewire our brains to be more inclined to see the good and be hopeful and inclined to make a difference.
So anyway, it’s Thanksgiving Sunday. This is to be an opportunity in which we take a moment to be thankful and to remember the God to whom we ultimately owe our thanks for everything. We should also note that God has called us to live in a particular way as to demonstrate our gratitude. The core message of the passage we read from Deuteronomy is simply let’s not forget the one to whom we owe our thanks and the way we to remember this God is to live in that particular way he’s given to us so that we reflect his image. In ancient Israel, that way was prescribed in the Law of Moses and for us it is the Way of the Cross, the Jesus Way.
Thankfulness is more than a feeling. It demands a response. There will probably be a myriad of articles in lifestyle sections of newspapers this Sunday morning doing just what I did at the start of this sermon in laying out the benefits of being grateful. Yet, none of those articles are going to offer a suggestion as to whom we owe our thanks. The advice is going to be to just basically conjure of feelings of gratitude and reap the benefits. Gratitude truly is a pill we should all take for the benefit of our physical, mental, and relational health. But it is also something that deserves more from us than just feeling grateful and saying thank you. It must be put into practice.
As I pondered the topic of gratitude is these last few days, one thing I’ve had a hard time coming up with is what exactly gratitude is. Most definitions I found called it an emotion. It’s feeling thankful. I’m not satisfied with simply calling it a feeling, an emotion. It’s more than that. I compare it to being sorry. One can feel sorry for hurting another, but feeling sorry doesn’t make amends. It’s not enough. The better way to express remorse is to work at never doing it again and addressing the issues of why you did it in the first place. That’s putting the feeling into practice. Example, the only sincere apology an alcoholic can give for the damage done is to never drink again, work to understand what was driving the drinking and all the while daily working to be a better person. So, it is with gratitude. It is not enough to simply feel grateful; we must strive to understand what drives our ingratitude and all the while strive to live in such a way as to ensure that our presence in the lives of others will be something they are grateful for.
A good thing to do this year at Thanksgiving in addition to counting our blessings would be doing some soul searching and asking ourselves an interesting question: Am I being a presence in the lives of others, particularly those closest to me, for which they are thankful. Usually, it is a gift of kindness that arouses thankfulness in us. Therefore, we must ask ourselves “Am I living this life that God has entrusted to me in such a way as to be a gift of kindness to others, particularly those closest to me?” To be a gift of kindness requires humility, patience, self-giving, selflessness, unconditional love, forgiveness, meekness, honesty, courage, and self-control...all those qualities that the Holy Spirit forms in us.
The odd thing about gratitude is that it is one of those things in our make up as humans that points us to God. Once you set about noting the people and things and events in your life that you’re grateful for, you soon start to realize that there is someone in your life, an unseen presence greater than yourself, who has been a gift of kindness to you. God, out of his love and kindness has given us each so much to be thankful for. It’s humbling when you realize and it leaves you feeling beloved. This God revealed himself as Jesus who has shown us the way to live in response to God’s kindness. We must at all cost live as a gift of kindness to others, live the Jesus Way. Amen.
