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    Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death
    Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death
    Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death

    By Richard S. Gilbert

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    About this ebook

    There is an almost desperate quest for spirituality in our time. The nones claim to be spiritual, but not religious. Gurus abound; quick fixes are everywhere. In Thanks Be for These the Rev. Richard Gilbert provides a spiritual starting point for both the spiritual and the religious seeker. Here is a collection of meditations written from the perspective of a mystical religious humanist.

    Gilbert claims that gratitude is at the heart of the religious experience. It is fundamentally a spiritual act. We are grateful, in the first place, for being itself. Everything else is a bonus. This gratitude is expressed not in the philosophical abstract but in the existential concrete. It is details of the everyday which make life worth living despite our finitude and the inherent messiness of existence.

    Gilbert divides the book in two sectionsThanksliving for the blessings of being; and Gratitude in Grief, a collection of materials designed for memorial services at time of death.

    Thanks Be for These challenges us to dig deeply into the meaning of our lives. These meditations on gratitude place the responsibility of living gratefully squarely on uswhere it belongs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateJan 29, 2013
    ISBN9781475973204
    Thanks Be for These: Meditations on Life and Death
    Author

    Richard S. Gilbert

    Richard S. Gilbert is the author of books of meditations, social justice and religious education. A retired minister, he holds degrees from St. Lawrence University, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, Starr King School for the Ministry and Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. He lives with his wife Joyce in Rochester, NY, where they enjoy time with their three grandchildren.

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      Book preview

      Thanks Be for These - Richard S. Gilbert

      Copyright © 2013 by Richard S. Gilbert.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-7319-8 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-7320-4 (ebk)

      iUniverse rev. date: 01/25/2013

      For Joyce, my wife of 51 years,

      for whom I am grateful beyond all telling

      Contents

      Preface

      Thanksliving

      Thank You

      January First

      Carving Out a New Year

      The Earth Abides Forever

      Praise the Softness of Things

      Ordinary Magic in a Striving World

      The Peace of a Winter Night

      Impatient to Get Our Lives Started Again

      On Sacred Listening

      A Walking Meditation in the Woods

      Spring Housecleaning of the Soul

      Spring Won’t Take No for an Answer

      Celebrating Brave Persistence

      Easter Is Paradox

      Easter—I Hope He’ll Be Remembered

      The Cup of Beauty

      Spirit of the Wind

      On Turning a Corner

      Gifts of Necessity and of Choice

      On the Cusp of the Year

      The Freshness of a Fall Day

      The Moon Is Full— Autumn Nights Grow Longer

      Grace for Thanksgiving

      I Am Grateful

      Gratitude beyond Deserving

      Thanksgiving into Thanksliving

      Christmas: The Blessed Hush

      A Mood of Expectancy

      A Christmas Greeting

      We Are Words in Nature’s Poem

      On the Hinge of the Year

      The Earth Speaks

      In Praise of the Ordinary

      Inner and Outer Weather (of the spirit)

      Ecology of the Spirit

      Living on the Margins

      In Praise of Pain

      Love the World

      One Shining Day Makes Worthwhile the Clouds

      The Something Mores of Life

      Living in the Grace of the World

      For the Ambivalent Blessings

      The Unending Charm of Persons

      Cheerleaders of the Spirit

      Praise to the Spinning Earth

      Spirit of Compassion

      The Life Force Within

      Transcendence

      We Are Bits of Starfire

      The Gift of Today

      You Are Breath

      You Are Accepted. Accept the Fact You Are Accepted.

      Gratitude in Grief

      To Acknowledge a Death

      We Gather in Grief

      Memories Crowd upon Us

      Unprepared for Death

      Remembrance and Remembering

      Why? A Question without Answer

      Tempted by Guilt

      Reflections on Facing Death and Life

      There Is a Healing that Happens

      Reflection on Death

      Walls that Guard Our Grief

      The Universality of Death

      Life, Death, Time and the Space between the Stars

      Sometimes It Takes a Death

      Prayer on the Occasion of Death

      Prayer for a Quiet Heart in the Face of Death

      Prayer for a Person of Many Years

      We Are by Them and of Them

      Please Remember Me the Way I Was

      On the Death of a Child (for the Children of Newtown, 2012)

      Meditation on a Suicide

      The Hourglass of Time

      In the Midst of Life and Death

      Between the Rising and Falling of the Curtain

      We’ve All Come Back

      Epitaph . . . On Writing One’s Own Obituary . . . Lines for an Epitaph

      Postscript

      About the Author

      Preface

      I was sitting in a church sanctuary one Sunday afternoon listening to a string quartet. The space was spectacular, the sound was glorious, the moment was serendipitous and I jotted it down. All the rest is commentary on these four simple words.

      Gratitude is at the heart of the religious experience, fundamentally a spiritual act. We are grateful, in the first place, for being itself. Everything else is a bonus. My gratitude is for life, not in the philosophical abstract, but in the existential concrete—for the details that make it worth living despite our finitude and the inherent messiness of existence.

      These meditations share something of this spirit. While writing for public worship, I found the very act a personal spiritual practice. So these reflections are both public and private—public in our shared humanity, private in personal reflection on gratitude for life.

      There is an almost desperate quest for spirituality in our time. The nones (who claim no religious community) are spiritual, but not religious. Gurus abound; quick fixes are everywhere. There is need for us to challenge ourselves to dig deeply into the meaning of our lives. These reflections on gratitude place the responsibility squarely on us—where it belongs.

      I write from the perspective of a mystical religious humanist, seeking to merge the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual. Far from offering seven (or more) steps to internal peace, they reflect the ambiguity

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