Saditude

In recent months I have shared with some people what I call my four D’s for 2024. 

Last year on New Year’s Eve as my wife and I were getting ready to say farewell to 2023, I told my wife that I was entering the new year with apprehension at what the year would hold.  And my concerns centered on my Dad, my Dog, my Denomination, and the Democrats (if not Democracy generally). Those are my Four D’s.  

As some of you know, in August we lost my Dad after a rather long and slow decline that turned into a very rapid decline in the final months. Dad experienced an acceleration of dementia both cognitively but even more significantly physically. My once strong and hale father was reduced to someone who could not do anything anymore without the help of at least two and sometimes three aides in the Assisted Living facility into which my brother and I had to rapidly move our parents across a stress-filled three weeks in June.

Two weeks after his death we had to put our dog Chester down after having enjoyed his delightful canine companionship for just over fifteen years. He lived a good and full life but had lost his hearing, was rapidly losing his sight, and he was often disoriented and seemed confused. It was time but it hurt. 

In the midst of all that I attended the Christian Reformed Church in North America’s meeting of Synod in June as a Seminary Faculty Adviser. This year’s Synod made it clear that there is no room in the denomination for questioning or hesitancy on matters related to human sexuality. Since June a growing number of congregations have made moves to disaffiliate from the CRCNA, including a congregation I served for a dozen years as preaching pastor. No one is totally sure what the CRCNA will look like within a year or two but everyone I know acknowledges it won’t be the same.

And despite a mid-summer burst of hope for anyone who shuddered at the thought of a second Trump term, the Democrats did lose the White House. In the weeks since the election there have already been dark hints at efforts to subvert the Constitution and go around Congress, even as significant agencies that oversee public health in this country are being put into the hands of bunglers, con artists, and conspiracy theorists who very simply are a threat to the health of our children and possibly to the medical insurance and care that millions of our senior parents and grandparents rely on.

Can I get someone to second my motion to make 2024 an annus horribilis?  

This blog may be the last RJ blog for 2024 but I started writing it 48 hours before Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day kicks off the larger holiday season during which we look for things for which to be thankful. Although I know there is still much for which to be thankful, I generally don’t feel like a lot of us have been riding the crest of some big gratitude wave of late. Yet I know that I need to work to cultivate thankfulness even in the midst of so much that has gone wrong this year.

Ironically this past summer four weeks after we moved my parents into Assisted Living and four weeks before my Dad died, I co-led along with colleague Neal Plantinga a week long seminar for fifteen pastors on the Calvin Seminary campus. The theme of the week was “Gratitude in Preaching and Worship.” Neal’s new book on gratitude was a key text as we spent five mornings pondering both how gratitude fuels preaching and how preaching ought to help people feel and express more thankfulness for God’s rich panoply of gifts in this creation and in our redemption in Christ.  

A key insight we learned from those who study gratitude—including another colleague Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet who led one of our sessions—is that people who consistently feel and express thanks are healthier. Grateful people have lower blood pressures, they sleep better, they get sick less often, they have lower stress levels overall. As Neal observed, it is not only fitting to be grateful people before the face of our gracious God, it’s also good for you as it turns out. No doubt God has known this all along, which is perhaps why in the Book God inspired there are so many calls over and over again to be thankful.

But for many of us just now as this year closes we need to learn how to be grateful and sad at the same time. If it seems paradoxical to have both of those emotions up and running simultaneously, then this may be a juxtaposition we need to learn to live with for a time. 

Technically speaking the Psalms of Lament in Scripture are in a different sub-genre than the Psalms of Thanksgiving.  Yet we know that in the Lament Psalms there are also flashes of gratitude even as in some Thanksgiving Psalms there are due acknowledgements of things that are properly distressing.

Psalm 9 opens with “I will give thanks to you, Lord, with my whole heart.”  But then only a few verses later the psalmist writes, “Lord, see how my enemies persecute me!  Have mercy!”  Psalm 22 begins with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” and yet later in the same song we get, “You who fear the Lord, praise him!”

Sad gratitude.  Grateful sadness,  (Saditude?)  It may not feel like a normal pairing of sentiments. But for now in these abnormal times and as tomorrow we enter 2025, maybe Saditude is exactly the combination required of us.

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