Genuine Gratitude or Sunny Spin?

Our discomfort with disappointment might be the problem.

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to break down and a time to build up;
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek and a time to lose;
a time to keep and a time to throw away;
a time to tear and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace. — Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

To survive my life, I had to be an optimist.

I don’t know if this was a natural disposition I inherited at birth, but I know for sure it has helped me live through circumstances and events most people find unimaginable. This optimistic nature is what fuels my work as a soul care practitioner, as I usually operate from (mostly) unshakable hope that God is active and present in our lives, even when it looks and feels as if that isn’t true. It’s the foundation of my work as a spiritual communicator, ‘finding God’s gold in every story’ being the tagline for my podcast. Heck, it’s the reason I named this Substack ‘The Golden Thread.”

I believe everything that happens to us is also happening for us, when we allow God have room in the story.

This optimism is genuine, and I believe it enables me to see truth that can sometimes be hidden from more incurious or cynical minds. However, there’s a steep downside to this sunny lens. I’m becoming more aware of the hazards of immature optimism as I sit and sort through this season of mid-life disappointment. One of the biggest problems with relentless optimism is that it sometimes requires me to pivot from honest discovery of the good, to shallow spin which plasters a pretty interpretation on things when they are too confusing or painful or complex to fit in easy categories.

This is a form of intellectual and spiritual dishonesty.

When I engage in this spiritual or emotional or narrative spin, I’m almost always doing so subconsciously. Like I said, optimism is my conditioned (and maybe natural) bent. It’s what I reach for reflexively, before my intellect even has a moment to engage. Yet, whether I’m consciously engaging in it or not, this kind of spin is nothing more than me acting as a Public Relations Manager for God, pulling out the propaganda to infuse sunny simplicity into an otherwise problematic situation.

A faith that requires optimistic spin is a fragile faith indeed.

One of the surprising outcomes of sitting with disappointment, as much as I have lately been, is that my conception of God and connection with God has not suffered in the slightest. In fact, I’ve remarked to several people that naming my disappointments in the presence of God and others has been almost…well…fun. It’s been freeing to just sit with a situation and admit that it sucks, with no qualifiers. It’s opening a new vulnerability within me to bring my disenchantment to God and admit that I wanted things to be a certain way and, when they didn’t present the way I desired, I felt crestfallen.

As raw as this is to say, I’ve often felt like a little girl crying to my parent that everything is unfair and mean and too hard. And I’ve experienced God, my parent, holding space for me to be raw and immature and unformed. And, you know what else? I am experiencing a newfound sense that not only is everything going to be alright, but it’s also going to be better because of this process. It’s important to note that I don’t mean better in the sense that my circumstances will change or that I will be able reinterpret past events in a way that makes me more comfortable.

As a result of being held through this disenchantment-with-everything, I feel a new and powerful gratitude emerging. It’s a gritty gratitude, not fragile at all, and one that has me wondering about the connection between disappointment and gratitude.

The old wisdom has been to direct an ungrateful person to count their blessings so they will see the abundance all around them.

This wisdom is often dosed out with impatience. We don’t tend to take kindly to ungrateful people. The ancient philosopher, Seneca, proposed that the ingrate was worse than a rapist, thief, or liar. He argued that forgetting the benefits one has received from someone else is the worst kind of ingratitude because recalling acts of beneficence is the easiest part of being grateful. Like many people then, and now, Seneca believed gratitude to be a virtue that could (and should) be cultivated because it is the right way to live. Thus, the old wisdom of counting blessings is meant to counteract ingratitude, and we’d prefer that folks do it quickly.

Yet, people don’t usually arrive at ingratitude for no reason. More than likely, they have experienced disappointment and disenchantment that has led to a sense of not-rightness and discomfort. The foundational soul movement toward gratitude is acknowledging that something of personal benefit has been given to you or done for you. And herein lies the rub for many of us.

While gratitude might very well be a virtue, it is also an emotion and a reactive attitude.

In other words, it’s a feeling that we can’t necessarily conjure up just because it’s the month of November, or because other people demand it of us, or even because the Bible tells us to ‘give thanks at all times and in all circumstances’ (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).

Perhaps fast-forwarding to gratitude, at the expense of absorbing the impact of disappointment, is counterproductive. How can we experience genuine gratitude by ignoring the not-rightness in our lives? This kind of cognitive dissonance is the reason many of us struggle with feeling, expressing, and being sustainably transformed by gratitude. We haven’t processed our disappointments sufficiently and, therefore, the waters of our lives are often too murky to discern what has been genuinely beneficial to us.

We don’t know how to hold creative tension in what Parker Palmer calls the ‘Tragic Gap,’ which is the gap between what could/should be and what is. This gap breaks our hearts, so we want to escape it by any means necessary. Yet, listen to how he describes what is possible about the meaning of our broken hearts, our crushing disappointments, our wounds, and suffering:

“Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart ‘broken open’ into largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy.”

We are shaped by the disappointments and heart breaks of our lives, whether our sunny optimism wants to admit it or not. The question is whether this shaping is expanding our capacity to hold pain and joy or if it’s de-forming us in a dark corner because we’re busy forcing false, obligatory gratitude so that we don’t have to look at it?

In my next post, I will examine the connection between disappointment/heart break and genuine gratitude a little more deeply. Until then, I invite you to consider some rather unusual questions for this first full week of November, a time in which we are being bombarded with gratitude messaging.

What has been the greatest disappointment(s) in your life?

What has broken your heart most deeply?

Describe what it feels like, in your mind, heart, and body, to experience that level of disappointment and heart break. What comes up for you as you use these words?

As you consider these questions, I leave you with this unorthodox Thanksgiving season blessing:

May you open to the humility of becoming a child again.

May you experience the vulnerable joy of crawling into your Divine Parent’s lap and crying over all that is unfair and mean and too difficult.

May you allow it all to flow through you – the anger, the regret, the memories, the longings, the anguish, the dashed hopes. May it all flow through you and out into the loving and welcoming arms of your Creator.

And after you’ve wept every tear that needs to be wept, may you allow yourself to relax into being fully witnessed, fully known, and fully treasured as your Divine Parent’s precious child.

Amen.