December 2007
It was a few degrees above freezing and still dark when we gathered in front of Seattle’s Space Needle last week, the first blush of dawn appearing in a brilliantly clear sky. When the siren sounded and six thousand of us began the first slow, uphill mile of the half marathon, I found myself fighting back tears. Perhaps it was the largely sleepless night before, perhaps the culmination of months of training, but my sense was of simply enormous gratitude for being able to undertake this challenge, gratitude for the beauty of this morning, for Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, and gratitude for so many people back in Middlebury, particularly those teaching me and forming me as they face illness and loss and pain with such dignity and gentle humor. I carried their names and faces with me as the course ran south east on the I-90, north along the shoreline of Lake Washington, then west through park trails and suburban streets (and up and down some truly terrible hills), finishing in Memorial Stadium. And perhaps not so surprisingly, crossing the finish line, tears came once again, but I was perspiring so much I don’t think anyone noticed.
Probably the first spiritual lesson we were all taught as children was to be grateful, to ‘count our blessings’: my mother led each of us children through lists of gifts as she knelt with us next to our beds. I think it was also the most important lesson: the basis for learning to live our whole lives out of a sense of gratitude. We cannot help but be indebted to each other, for encouragement and support and generosity, easily and wordlessly given, for lives that model faith and principle and discipline, and for those who bring Christian dignity and wisdom to ageing and frailty and diminishment. We are even indebted to those who teach us difficult truths, who lead us to discover our own flaws and limitations, so that healing and growth can continue. Living out of gratitude binds a community together more powerfully than anything else: I think that’s why New York was such a holy place in the aftermath of September 11th, because we were filled with such a profound sense of gratitude for so many things, so many people….. That’s also why the central act of our common life is an act of thanksgiving – the meaning of ‘Eucharist’. Week after week we re-gather to simply give thanks: this is the source of who we are, what we are, our very identity: a community which lives from and in gratitude.
In feasts and seasons, the Church invites us to enter more deeply into lives of gratitude, and nowhere more clearly than at Christmas. This invitation is not meant to lead to self-congratulation – “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like the rest of humanity …” – but to a deeper sense of gift. Becoming more mindful of how our lives are immeasurably enriched by one another, and of the comfort and security and convenience which characterize so much of our lives, reconstructs who we are from the very core, transforms us and our relationship with all creation. And so instead of thumbing through magazines looking for ideas about ‘gracious living’ this Christmas, perhaps we should just look around us, and within. It could save our souls.
I had carefully programmed my i-pod for the Seattle run: David Gray’s strident “Say Hello and Wave Goodbye” for the start, Shania Twain’s encouraging “Up!” for the worst of the hills, and, as I crossed the finish line, Joan Armatrading’s “Blessed”:
For all the things that I can do, how could I complain?
I’ve got no broken wings,
I’ve got a heart that sings,
and I fell blessed
TPG+
