God Loves Broken Things
Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass
I don’t know if I would describe myself as a grateful person. My husband often teases me that one of my talents is complaining, which I don’t think is exactly congruous with gratitude. He lovingly teases me about how much I complain when I’m mildly uncomfortable. I whine about the heat or the cold. I misplace things pretty easily, so I complain about not being able to find my keys, my sunglasses, or even my pants. Needless to say, my husband is often much more patient than I am.
And I’m grateful for his patience. I try to tell him about his patience with me pretty often.
When I first picked up Diana Butler Bass’s book Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, I knew I had some skepticism that I needed to keep in check. Being grateful for most of my life implied being grateful for challenges. Latter-day Saints excel at toxic positivity. It’s built into the framework of the Latter-day Saint Plan of Salvation in ways that make it difficult to reconcile an all-loving God and the human condition. Once at a funeral, a relative of mine tried to comfort another relative by telling him to “Don’t be sad! He’s in a better place.” Needless to say, the mourning person did not appreciate being told how to grieve the death of a loved one.
Not all Latter-day Saints fall into this trap. Some recognize that mortality is complicated. As I heard many times in Thailand, เกิด แก่ เจ็บ ตาย: We’re born, we grow old, we hurt, and then we die. It is the circle of life. Although I’m not a Buddhist, I do believe there is value in recognizing the ebbs and flows of the human experience. Thais didn’t tell me this phrase because they were nihilistic; Thais were often more present in the moment than I was as a missionary at 20. They were grateful for their families. They were grateful for community, little acts of kindness, and even grateful for what we were doing: teaching about Christianity. Of course, they were not interested in our beliefs to convert in many cases, but Thais were exceptionally kind and tolerant towards missionaries of other faiths.
I decided to give the book a chance in hopes of reframing my former beliefs about toxic positivity and gratitude. Immediately, I found myself delighted at Butler Bass’s approach to gratitude. She admitted from the start of the book that she was, perhaps on some level, like me. She wasn’t a naturally very grateful person. She saw acts of kindness or compassion as a series of quid pro quos, or “tit for tat.” I had a little too much experience with “tit for tat” scenarios for my tastes. It poisoned gratitude for me for many years. If you’re a person of faith (or not), you may have similar experiences.
As a Latter-day Saint, I was taught that it was my duty to serve a mission and my duty to attend church every week. If I did my duty, I would receive an eternal reward. At 20, the rubber started to meet the road and that reality came crashing down. I had come out to myself in the Missionary Training Center, but I wasn’t ready to be authentic with myself at that point. I had internalized a lot of messages about LGBTQ people. And many of these messages still haunt so many queer people from my religious background.
I looked around in Thailand and saw so many different people leading wonderful lives. They were happy Buddhists, and here I was, the American peddling a religion with men who told me time and time again that my sexuality was chosen or a mistake. If I was such a mistake, how could I love Thai people so deeply? I would pray every day for the strength to love Thai people, and I was blessed with so much love that I refused to manipulate them like I saw other people do on my mission. I was often punished for my lack of assertiveness and reverence for Thai culture.
In this, my dark night of the soul, I knew I was gay, but I was keeping every commandment in a context that was supposed to be close to the apex of my Mormon experience: a mission. Why would I have to wait for an eternal reward in the midst of such suffering? Some mornings, I would wake up, exhausted from the day before with intense shame about my sexuality and my own abilities. But I put on the toxic positivity mask the best that I could. I tried to grin and bear it. I believed in a God who would give me a long-term reward for “short-term” suffering. There were some challenges in that mindset. Eventually, I came home in a state best described by myself as “broken.”
One of my dearest friends from BYU took me out to Thai food shortly after I got back from my mission. Her compassion towards me overwhelmed me. She had a small child at the time, and her life was by no means perfect. She was poor, overwhelmed by the demands of a young child, and exhausted. But she took the time to hear me out in my anguished letters from Thailand. The day we met up, we ate delicious Thai food. But she knew I needed to cry. I cried to her in a park telling her that I felt so broken. She simply looked at me with a look of compassion that I will never forget. She knew I wasn’t broken; I was just wounded by so much intense anxiety, traumatic life experiences, and internalized homophobia. Her compassion was a step on the way to healing.
I’m grateful for this friend. Our friendship saved my life.
The next step on the way to healing came in an unexpected place. After experiencing the best and worst parts of my young adult years in Thailand, I went to LDS Family Services to seek additional counseling and assistance. The counselor who I saw there is a story for another day, but the psychiatrist who helped me manage my medication for the first time as an adult shocked me. As I was telling him a little bit about myself, he told me something that I never thought I would hear from a Latter-day Saint working for LDS Family Services.
“You know you can be gay and live an open, happy life, right?”
My recently-returned missionary mind couldn’t handle the possibilities. An employee of the LDS Church was telling me that I didn’t have to be a Latter-day Saint! I’ve reflected on his words frequently over the last decade. I don’t even remember his name. I don’t even remember why he told me that, as I’m sure it could have placed his employment at risk.
But I’m grateful that he did because he saved me a lot of grief after my mission.
These experiences aren’t to say that I’m grateful for my trauma. I don’t wish my trauma or my experiences on anyone, and I definitely don’t wish them to be repeated for myself. My mind returns to the circle of life for Thais: we are born, we get old, we hurt, and then we die. I think sometimes I got stuck on the hurt that I’ve experienced. With these intense traumas, I often framed myself as broken. Broken is an interesting word choice that I used to describe myself. People often use the word to talk about something that is damaged. Broken people have given up all hope. There’s almost always a negative connotation with the word broken.
Many years ago, I heard a song by Kenneth Cope, a practicing Latter-day Saint, who mused that God loved broken things. While I don’t ascribe to the substitutionary atonement in this song anymore, I find comfort in seeing how the word broken can mean something more than simply despair and disorder. To plant something new in your garden, you have to break the soil. We call it daybreak when the night is finally over. Admitting a broken heart is an important milestone on the path towards healing.
As I’ve developed more self-compassion, I’ve discovered something interesting. I may have said that I was broken, but the people who loved me (and love me still) have never seen me as broken with all those negative connotations. They saw me as a person to love, not simply a problem that needed to be solved. Their kindness to me was not a simple case of quid pro quo. It was them perpetuating an ancient cycle of kindness and compassion. I look back at these experiences, particularly the most intensely difficult times in my life, with much more compassion, but also with a sense of gratitude. I was never grateful for what happened to me but for who was there and how I survived.
It was gratitude that saved me all along. Not the gratitude to a God who would watch me endure my trials, but to the God who recognized my humanity. God was there with the actions of friends, family, and even strangers. Mercy flowed from the most unexpected sources in my life.
God didn’t watch my trials and say, “This is your ticket to the celestial kingdom, Jacob! Just grin and bear it to the end. They never said enduring to the end would be easy!”
God sent me other people who affirmed me. God sent me people who loved me. God showed me the beauty in Thai temples, a good plate of somtum with extra peppers, mangoes and sticky rice covered in sweet coconut milk, and Preparation Day activities to appreciate Thai culture more fully. God didn’t want me to endure. I realize now, looking back, that God was calling me to live. I’m glad I have many more years to appreciate the gift of life.
I don’t want to spoil the book for people. Needless to say, gratitude isn’t just something that we should add to our to-do list and check it off every day because we feel guilty about not being grateful. Gratitude is a life-giving, transformative power in our lives. When we take the time to be grateful, we will be surprised how much better we can handle stress, unexpected challenges, and change. I relish change and challenges, but I also fear these parts of the human experience. I get stuck on the "pain” part of the cycle of life and forget to fill in the blanks in between each stage of life that Thais would repeat to me: joy, happiness, contentment, grit.
There are practices of gratitude that can work for some people. Others may not work. But the idea isn’t to feel shame over the practices of gratitude that don’t work for you. Finding “spiritual practices” around gratitude can relieve anxiety and encourage positive action. Even if you’re not a religious person, you can still find value in gratitude! I even recommend this book to my non-religious friends. Ancient humans have all seen the power of the practices of gratitude. We can all draw on these strengths and experiences to make the world a better place.
Gratitude grounds me, and sometimes I forget about its transformative power. I can still confuse toxic positivity and gratitude at times. Toxic positivity encourages people to find the silver lining when there is none; gratitude urges us to ground ourselves in what we can control and the gifts that we have received. Gratitude is a solemn reminder that God and so many other people in our lives love broken things.
Thanks be to the friends, family, and strangers on my journey. I am grateful for all of you.