Spirituality & Religion
by Phil Fox Rose
A helpful tool to encourage gratitude for this Thanksgiving season
leaf photo: ©2009 Phil Fox Rose
This is the last What Works column to run before Thanksgiving, so I want to talk to you about gratitude. I could write a dozen columns about gratitude in various forms; for this column, I’m going to focus on one simple tool: the gratitude list.
When you find yourself feeling particularly ungrateful about your life — or your spiritual director or friend points out to you that you are — you can stop and remind yourself of all the things for which you can be grateful.
There are some obvious things. You often hear people say, “at least I’ve got my health.” That might sound trite, but if you have ever experienced a serious loss of your own good health and then gotten it back, or if you or to someone close to you is deprived permanently of good health, you will know that good health is a great blessing. Another common item is family — partners, parents, children: whoever loves you unconditionally and gives you sustenance and support.
Not half full or half empty — just half full
Gratitude list items can also be seemingly trivial things — or at least things that might seem so to someone else. And many things can be seen as blessings or negatives. For example, I do not live with anyone else. I could focus on and feed feelings of loneliness. But I can also be grateful for the control I have over my environment and how easy it is to meditate and have silence when I want it. (Ask anyone with a big family about how precious that is!)
It’s important, even though this is a list, to not fall into thinking of it as a two-sided ledger. It’s … Continue reading What Works: The Gratitude List
Politics
by Phil Fox Rose
For families divided by politics, gathering together this holiday season provides both challenges and opportunities
I worry about the holidays this year. My relatives are an eclectic bunch, pretty evenly split—to use crude and somewhat useless political labels—between the Left and Right; our religious diversity includes a Catholic (me), Mormons, evangelicals, United Church of Christ members and a few who are unaffiliated. Throw in my surrogate family (that’s a story for another time) and you add Presbyterians, Jews and Buddhists. As we gather around our family table and share letters and cards this post-election holiday season, I will be looking for opportunities to be a healing force.
My family is like millions of others in the United States who come together this time of year for the holidays and struggle to put their passionate differences aside for a few hours. This Thanksgiving will find supporters of McCain and Obama—and a fair number of Clintonites whose Obama support was begrudging—gathering to share a family meal.
Of course, every election has winners and losers and there is always disappointment for some. But this election has been different for two reasons. First, it’s a major shift—generationally and ideologically—that has left many feeling left out of the party, so to speak. Second, this has been one of the uglier presidential campaigns in modern history. There are plenty of hurt feelings all around. A lot of fear got stirred up.
In couples counseling, it’s an axiom that the most toxic thing to a relationship is not when the partners disagree, or even fight, but when they stop respecting each other. For several generations now, there has been little trust and respect in the political sphere. Both sides have demonized the other, have assumed ill motives on their opponents’ parts.
But of all relationships, the deepest and oldest, next to … Continue reading Forming A More Perfect Union
