All I want for Christmas

All I want for Christmas is a grateful heart. Not something that occasionally spills out in spontaneous feelings, a thank you note or an act of generosity, but a day in, day out ethic of gratitude. An ethic that leads me to intentionally seek the best in every situation or person, an ethic that allows room for “the other,” an ethic where the God of my understanding is not something or someone out there waiting to trip you or me up, but that divine source that creates everything and everyone for good, that source which loves everything and everyone, unifies everything and everyone, whose creative impulse is not to divide choosing some and rejecting others, but whose ultimate design is to bring us together as a unified whole.

All I want for Christmas is a grateful heart, each beat reminding me that our lives are not our own and that life is a precious gift, that the driving goal of life is being gratefully aware of all that is given to us lies outside of our ability to create or control, or even deserve. Gratitude feeds gratitude thus creating this wonderful spiral of abundance and joy.

An ethic of gratitude increases my awareness of all that lies outside my control allowing me to exist and be: the trees that give me the oxygen I breath, the streams and rivers providing the water I drink, the plants and animals that feed me. An ethic of gratitude allows me to care about all those hidden people whose work allows me to be relatively safe, secure, and comfortable, who create the clothes I wear, the cars I drive, the food I eat, the energy I consume, the protections I enjoy. All those who both past and present, living and non-living, remembered or forgotten have gone before. For me, Advent and Christmas is not about shopping or parties or baking or decorations, it's about being intentionally grateful, of using less so that others might have more. The shortened days and longer nights remind me that each of us is born with the same promise and potential as the Christ child who did not come to validate shopping sprees or greed but to bring peace on earth, good will to men. We are each born to love and be loved, to give and forgive, to live lives of quiet, profound grateful integrity.

It's easy to lose sight of the many gifts each day brings, especially when things don't go the way we've planned. But when one intentionally seeks the good in life, each day brings multiple reminders of what is transcendent and positive allowing us to see the reality of a wider world and our connection to everything, so that we become aware that not only is something better possible, but we are each called to help make it so. Fortunately we don't have to understand this mystery we call God, life, hope, gratitude. We need only embrace it. So this Advent season, liturgically a time of waiting for the hope to come, I already have everything I need; I have a heart opening to gratitude.

Joyce Shutt is pastor emeritus of the Fairfield Mennonite Church. You can read her blogs by going to 606 thanksliving.blogspot.com