Gratitude

I offered the meditation at a memorial service last Saturday and found myself called to use a phrase of Annie Lamott's. For her, prayer that focuses on our personal reality cries out--`Thank You, Thank You--Help Me, Help Me'. That prayer was particularly relevant for the bereaved family and all of us at the service. Annie Lamott wrote a glorious spiritual autobiography that she named Traveling Mercies. She describes some of her life struggles, her battles with addictions, and issues of body image and with poverty. Somehow, there were for her traveling mercies and her journey led to a place like home and a room like happiness.

Somehow in our culture and especially in the culture of the church, we must find our way to be touched and blessed by the real life stories of true heroes of life's journey. The questions stirs me and I hope it stirs you--who do you deeply admire? Whose stories challenge your soul?Whose face causes you to cry out Thank You, Thank You? Whose presence opens your heart to the mystery of life and opens your spirit to those moments of Presence?

Several weeks ago, I was in St Petersburg. I had chosen to study Russian in 1959, my first year in high school. I was good at it and eventually went to college with the intention of majoring in Russian and physics, so i could help save America by making bombs, better than the Russian bombs. My study of Russian fortunatley led me to Dostoevsky and in particular to his great spiritual epic Brothers Karamazov. I read it 3 times in high school and many times since. In some ways, I now realize, the book saved my soul. Besides Dostoevsky though, I am fascinated by the course of Russian history. So I had also come to see the city of Peter the First and the city of the revolution and the siege. I knew the art of the Hermitage and the Russian Museum would be glorious.

I visited the Nevsky Monastery on an unusually warm October day and felt so privileged to visit Dostoevky's grave. The spacious apartment where he wrote Brothers Karamazov and lived happily with his family is now a museum. Since I was visiting outside the usual tourist season, I was privileged to wander the apartments virtually alone. Dostoevsky's life bore the burden of turmoil. He was a gambler and so often lived under heavy debts. He was jailed by the Tsarist police and suffered a fake execution. Toward the end of his life though, his wife managed his finances and family happiness surrounded him. In the apartments, there is a display of a handwritten note from one of his daughters that says `I love you daddy.' In Russian, of course.

I am not only grateful for Dostoevsky's life and gift to the world--I rejoice that he found joy in his family as he was writing Brothers Karamazov. Standing by his desk, the visitor can imagine him writing through the night by candlelight and with his quill pens. Brothers Karamazov confronts the deep evil in the human soul and the multitude of ways that evil flows out in the world to bring torture, destruction and death to God's beloved children. Dostoevsky leads us on a search for hope. The youngest brother Alyosha adopts a band of troubled young boys and at the end of the novel says this to them:`

`You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.'


Help Me, Help Me--Thank You, Thank You.