Grateful for Everything?

It’s difficult to describe how liberated I felt parking my car the other Sunday morning and walking to a church door with no Bible in my hand. The white clapboards and four windows on the Friends Meeting House in San Jose can remind any viewer of an old country church with no steeple. There were wooden chairs inside, and wooden benches along the walls with embroidered pillows and cushions. If I remember right, each of the four windows had a little potted plant in its sill. I spent most of my time looking at the shapes the sun cast through the trees and windows onto the floor in front of me. The people there, who all looked like – well – Quakers in the San Francisco Bay area, didn’t do remarkably better than me at sitting still for an hour on end.

They don’t call it “silent worship” for no reason. I’ve been through a meeting in St Andrews where the whole hour passed without a word (not that that’s a bad thing). In this meeting, though, someone did stand and say something. A short-haired white lady about a decade older than me talked about gratitude. She mentioned that Faith and Practice describes the feeling and expression of gratitude as something that can add value and perspective to one’s life. She went on to say that there are two ways to be grateful. One way is to pick out the bright shiny happy things in life and give thanks for those blessings. The other way, which she learned from her yoga partner, is to be thankful for the whole of one’s life, even and especially the end of it. Her recent experience of losing a loved one gave her the opportunity to think about death and be grateful for it. Now that she is at peace with death, she can be at peace with herself in a way that she wasn’t before. She can even find comfort in the belief that here and now isn’t everything there is for us, that there is something “beyond this” that we can value.

I spent the remainder of the hour still looking at the light on the floor as before, but now with questions blazing through my head. Isn’t this what religion does in general? Doesn’t it tend to make us embrace all the world’s shortcomings? An infamous man once called religion the “opiate of the masses”, and for good reason. Not only does it tend to justify presently-existing power structures and property relations, it tends to justify anything and everything that makes a sentient being flinch. Religion, ideology, and philosophy make us view the killing of innocent beings not as murder, but as God’s will, or as the greatest good for the greatest number, or as Nature’s course. They discourage believers from following those very normal gut reactions that offer moral direction and say these reactions get in the way of a “bigger picture” understanding.

What good is Conscience, if everything under the sun and stars should be embraced?*

Now, hardly anyone in the Friends Meeting would say that this woman’s words are official Quaker thought. There is very little that Quakers call official Quaker thought. The Quakers’ liberalism is very conservative. When a woman feels moved to stand and speak, her words are understood as the words she felt moved to say, and no one immediately jumps onto the bandwagon of “God must’ve said so!”ism.
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*Our revulsion at death shows us that we intuitively hold life dear; and were we to think honestly about it, we would be compelled to accept that life’s value comes in the opportunity it brings – the opportunity to enjoy. Different people seek to enjoy different things, but we all seek to enjoy. And when a man’s life ends, so does his opportunity to do what makes his life precious to him. He no longer has that opportunity to do what he as a breathing, touching, tasting, gazing, listening, lounging, soft-bodied being finds value in. Death is when the sacred is snuffed out. It is the avowed enemy of the sacred, and so – except for when a man’s death is his value in life – it is evil, whether brought on by intent or by accident.