This Thursday, Lisa and I will round the corner of our thirtieth Thanksgiving together. With its focus on cozy gatherings, a shared table… and space for gratitude… this is about as close as our country gets to a shared sense of the sacred… a kind of national liturgy.
My decades long interest in resilience research brings me back again and again to appreciate the central role of gratitude in weathering the inevitable storms that blow through and sometimes rip through our lives. Gratitude… like resilience… like love… is a muscle that grows with exercise. My research has led me to frame gratitude as “savoring” to capture a more wholistic, embodied experience of it. Marty Seligman’s investigations on gratitude-practice demonstrates its power toimprove mood and well-being in a stable, long-lasting way. That research has been replicated in the laboratory of my clients’ and family’s lives many times over. Doctor Lucy Hone’s first person resilience research transforms gratitudepractice into something of a personal floatation device for when grief is oceanic. Like a somber ship’s captain, she instructs her readers and listeners, “if the ship goes down, don’t let go of it!” In his immensely popular Ted Talk, as well as his books, Brother David Steindl-Rast asserts that “at every moment,” you can find something for which you can experience and express gratitude. He is quick to point out that this is not the same thing as saying that you can feel gratitude for every experience. You cannot, he points out, feel or express gratitude for evil. In other words, some things just suck. However, as Lucy Hone discovered in the aftermath of losing her twelve year old daughter, grounded in horrible pain, you can intentionally “hunt the good stuff” with your gaze. Even in the midst of pain, with gratitude, comes a medicinal bolus of grace to make it through another moment. On Thanksgiving 2015, I accidentally found myself testing all of this research.
For many years Lisa and I had been hosting her family for Thanksgiving. My mother and father-in-law would take the nine-hour trip south from Medford, Wisconsin to our home in St. Louis. Their adult children and spouses would gather from the four winds into the vacated bedrooms of my children who would share basement floor space with Foosball, “Rockband,”and mahjongg-playing cousins. Over the years, Lisa and I would whisper to one another in the midst of the multi-generational Thanksgiving chaos, “Be sure to take this in!” It was a reminder for us to soak up the fleeting grace of these passing moments. Thanksgiving Eve of 2015, we were to learn the prescience of this whispered wisdom.
My mother-in-law always thought of herself as a clandestine smoker. She apparently believed that her breath mints were made at Hogwarts, providing the consumer a certain kind of invisibility that removed all traces of second and thirdhand smoke from garages and clothing! The actual power source of her invisibility flowed from her family’s unspoken pact with her to leave her practice of this dark art… in the dark. Suffice to say, that on Thanksgiving Eve, 2015, it wasn’t a surprise to see grandma exit out the garage door for ten-or-so minutes. The reverie of adult beverages, food prep, and 100 kinetic child activities covered over the fact that she had been gone a full fourcigarettes worth of time. It was right about then when I looked up from my pie-making to see an ambulance parking at the head of my driveway.
Flashing red and blue lights outlined the form of my unconscious mother-in-law, and reflected off of the pool of liquid that had exited her skull upon impact, who knows how long ago? What little hope I attempted to kindle was quickly extinguished in and Emergency Department conference room where fresh brain imaging revealed neurologic devastation. A ventilator could keep her heart beating long enough to gather the rest of the family to say goodbye. Just to be clear, there was nothing in me that was savoring any part of this event. Some experiences just flat out suck!
At some point I must have figured that my wife was squared away enough for me to seek out my kids in the ER waiting room. On a normal day, my six-foot three, skinny, teen-aged boy resembled one of those roadside inflatable tube men. On that night, when I laid eyes on him, folded into an ER waiting room chair, he reminded me more of a pressure cooker that had lost its valve. I took him out front of that huge urban hospital to let some of his hurricane out. It roared! He punched every street sign within reach. He kicked garbage cans. He painted every surface with a firehose of profanity! As the storm dissipated, he allowed me to draw him in. By-and-by, he folded his six-foot-three man-frame over the top of me. It had been many years since I held my toddler-boy. He sobbed himself to sleep in my arms. There it was. Brother Steindl-Rast, and Lucy Hone called it. I’m not saying that there was any kind of a conscious thought of it at the moment, but looking back, right in the middle of devastation, here was something to savor… something neither John Harry nor I planned for… nor will ever forget. Out of nowhere came a graced experience that turned the scalding heat of grief down a few degrees.
A night later, it was time to say good bye to Grandma. The plan was that each sibling’s family would have their group moment with her. As we awaited our turn, Dr. Lisa escorted our kids and me to the Butterfly Garden atop Saint Louis Children’s Hospital. Suddenly, Lisa became the child, and her children became the parents as they held her while she sobbed… all of us looking out over the lights of Saint Louis’ night-time skyline. In the blink of an eye, my young adults were escorted into a peer relationship with their mother. Even in the moment, we knew enough to savor. None of us will ever forget the power of that grace-filled moment. From our seat in Hell, we could see Heaven.
Something similar happened on Thanksgiving evening 2022. While voicing gratitude, my nephew, who works 100 hour work weeks wept as he shared, “It’s so good to be here. I have no way to access these parts of myself in my life.” As he sat on my couch, he was savoring the life-long sources of love, humor, and community that were seated all around him. Taking the time to savor gave him enough space to acknowledge the all-work-all-of-the-time, inhumane daily desert he inhabits. I was interested to see how this seed of insight, planted in gratitude, would change things for him as he stepped back into his work-a-day life. A year later, with a smile, I view pictures of him mugging for a camera with his new girlfriend. With some frequency, social media photos appear of him taking the time to connect with my daughter and her husband who live a Texas three-hour drive away from him. There is power in gratitude.
Questions for Conversation:
• When was the last time that you consciously took time to Stop… Drop… and Savor?
• In retrospect, can you look back on a difficult time and pull up experiences of grace that you can return to, step back into, and savor?
• Perhaps at your Thanksgiving table, or during a walk, could you and your dialogue partner take turns sharing you respective stories of a powerful moment of goodness, joy, warmth, or accomplishment, and savor those moments together?
• Do you have a regular practice of gratitude?