Steps of Gratitude

I DIDN'T KNOW much about sepsis until it hit me out of the blue the Friday before Thanksgiving. After working late Thursday night, I woke up the next morning shivering and shaking, with my teeth rattling and full of pain; my left leg was swollen and fire-engine red.

I was immediately sent to the hospital and told frightening things about how dangerous a septic cellulitis infection can be. The ailment is random and can strike people of all ages; bacteria gets under the skin and spreads, and if it goes into the bloodstream, things can get dangerous indeed.

I am certainly not used to lying in a hospital with intravenous antibiotics being pumped into me day and night. Fortunately, thanks to my overall good health, I responded quickly to the antibiotics, resulting in a full recovery. I’ve often visited others in hospitals and been an advocate for patients in bureaucratic health-care systems, and this unexpected visit reminded me why that is so important. It is easy to feel alone in those systems and to lose your voice. I have always been impressed by nurses, who so often bring life, laughter, and even love to health systems that so easily block out such things, and some of my nurses were the delight of my lockdown hospital time.

I grew close to my roommate in the hospital, a man who, like me, is married to an English woman, and who was clearly suffering from cardiac issues. The lack of privacy through flimsy curtains forced me to overhear a doctor telling him that he had two choices: a heart surgery that the doctor thought the man wouldn’t survive, or hospice care with only six months or less to live.

Decisions about life and death often suddenly fill these hospital rooms. My leg infection quickly shrank in comparison, and being present to my roommate and his wife became very important. Friends coming by to talk to my roommate brought tears, stories, smiles, and fears.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE entering the hospital, I had gone on a much-needed personal retreat—not to lead but just to listen, learn, and be quiet. The topics of the seminar were “character” and “gratitude.” The former was intriguing, as the subject of character always is to me. But I found the latter theme, gratitude, to be profoundly challenging—and restful at the same time. Gratitude is hard. It is especially hard for those of us who see their vocation as changing the world—seeing what is wrong and trying to make it right. We see the unjust things and want to make them just, the broken things and want to help heal them; we see the bad and want the good. It can be exhausting.

Our retreat leader talked about the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known poet and peace activist now living in France, who travels internationally and teaches meditation. We were taught his meditation of walking with steps of gratitude—each time one’s feet touch the earth, the step is accompanied by a prayer of gratitude.

Then we were sent out to walk, to feel our feet touching the ground and to remember things we were grateful for. The first things were easy for me—my boys, Luke and Jack, my wife, Joy. My mom and dad and the rest of my family. Longtime friends and companions on this journey. The community at Sojourners that carries out our mission and the extended community around the country and the world that supports us and works with us in so many ways.

Then it began to grow. Instead of thinking of the many things wrong with the world, the things I want to change, I kept putting my mind and heart on the people and things for which I am grateful. It started to relax, settle, and focus me, as our retreat director said it would.

THEN I GOT sepsis a couple weeks later. In the midst of the pain, weakness, and fear, I remembered the things for which I am most grateful. I came home from the hospital two days before Thanksgiving feeling deep appreciation for all the blessings in my life.

More and more, I am coming to see how a regular meditation of gratitude for this world and for the people in it may well be the best way of preparing and sustaining me every day to work to change the things that still must be changed. It made me realize once again how grateful I am to all the people who keep our mission at Sojourners going, each and every day.

We have much further to go, but I am so thankful that we’re on this journey together.