Dear friends,
Meister Eckhart tells us that if the only prayer we ever say is thank you,
It is enough.
So welcome to this meditation on gratitude.
Let's begin by making sure we are sitting comfortably.
Feet on the floor,
Back reasonably straight but not rigid.
Try to relax the shoulders,
Let them drop and relax any tension in the face.
Some people find it helpful to close their eyes for meditation,
But eyes open is fine,
Although it might help to direct your gaze downward in order to avoid distraction.
The most important thing is to make sure you are comfortable.
Meditation is not meant to be an endurance test.
It's helpful to begin a session like this with a breathing exercise,
Breathing in and out mindfully.
Now there's no need to change the pattern of your breathing for this,
But if you try counting the breaths,
This will help you to focus.
So let's try this.
Count one on the first in-breath.
Two on the next in-breath and so on.
When you get to number seven,
Start counting backwards.
So after seven,
The next in-breath will be number six,
And so on until you come back again to number one,
At which stage you begin counting up again.
So one to seven,
Then down to one,
Then up to seven.
If you lose count,
No worries.
Just go back to the beginning and start again.
Let's give this a try for the next minute,
Just 60 seconds,
See how it goes.
And now that you are hopefully in a more relaxed state,
Let's consider this question of gratitude.
Someone might say to you,
What have I to be thankful for?
Don't I get up every day?
I do what I have to do.
I don't owe anyone anything.
But that superficial reaction misses the point.
I don't believe any of us will have to dig for long before finding very many things for which we can be thankful.
All we have to do is open our eyes and look around.
Look around the room you are sitting in.
Take it all in.
Think of the people you know,
The people close to you,
And all the people who support the life that you have.
We must be grateful for our parents,
The people who gave birth to us,
The people who nurtured us through childhood,
And the people who care about us today,
People whose love and concern for us is never in question.
Let's pause for another 60 seconds to reflect on these things.
I'll come back.
Now we have only begun to scratch the surface of the mountain of gratitude on which our lives are built.
At the end of this meditation,
I'll allow the music to continue for a little while so that,
If time permits,
If you have the time,
You can continue your own gratitude exploration.
Some people might ask,
OK,
I feel grateful,
But who am I supposed to be thankful to?
A person might say,
I don't believe in God,
So are you saying I should feel thankful to nature,
Or to the earth,
Or whatever?
Again,
Let's do a little digging.
God is a very small word for someone or something which,
By definition,
Has to be beyond definition.
Even the words he,
She,
Or it are almost rude if we try to relate them to the ultimate.
So we turn the question around.
We ask the person,
Describe the God you don't believe in.
Maybe that God is just some bigger version of ourselves.
A sort of Superman out there,
Carrying the unhappy human traits of jealousy and anger in infinite and eternal supply.
Who could blame anyone for not believing in that type of God?
The problem with God is that we are using a much-used and abused word.
A loaded word which is our feeble attempt to define something which is utterly beyond definition.
And unfortunately,
The word God has been associated with our sometimes unhappy and often too-bloodied history.
Just think,
If we cannot get a handle on the vastness of the universe,
How can we possibly hope we can understand the underlying reality that must be fundamental to the existence and to the order of the universe?
But enough of these musings for today anyway.
Let's just be thankful to existence itself.
Thankful for existence itself.
And more than anything else,
The extraordinary good fortune of you and I being here.
We can't even begin to imagine the numbers,
The numbers involved in the odds against our individual existence.
Each time we remember to close our eyes for a few seconds and realise again that we are here.
We are here.
What can we possibly do in response to this good fortune?
Accept again and again and every day to repeat the words Thank you.
