Grateful Living

By Sister Doreen, SSJD

Thanksgiving Day, the second Monday in October, is a time for a particular focus of grateful living: usually a family gathering, in some cultural traditions with a roast turkey dinners with stuffing and pumpkin pie. It comes at our harvest time, the gathering in of the bounty of produce and it is also a time of reflection for all that the months of the year, time that has been cause for thanksgiving in our lives: food, the beauty of the earth, the gifts of life and work, the pleasure of relationships, the real unity of community, peace and interdependence. We give thanks in the midst of knowing that these things are not part of the same experience of abundance that so many people around the experience today. Our world is broken, suffering, and out of balance – homelessness, food insecurity, environmental issues. However, I believe that for everyone there are the good things that are worth celebrating and for giving thanks – it moves us to want, to help, to make happen, for everyone, that unity and interdependence – that kin-ship with the whole world – that shares the reality of the abundance of life and love and gratefulness for everyone.

Gratitude provides an opening into the potential to living fully and joyfully with the reality (the good and the not so good) of life. It opens the possibilities and opportunities for us – the gifts that we can be thankful for and the gifts that we cannot be thankful for – both contain opportunities, and it is for this opportunity that we are grateful.

What gave me pause today was the word choice – choice is the important word said that wee small voice within me. Pondering choice and grateful living I was faced with questions: How often do I feel a strong sense of gratitude or thankfulness, consciously feel it and acknowledge it ? Do moments of gratefulness bypass me without recognition? Do I find myself thinking about my experiences of gratitude, making the space, the pause to ponder? Might being more conscious of gratitude or a deeper meaning of gratitude open a way of grateful living that brings healing and compassion both for myself and for those around me? It may be an opportunity to grow inwardly, to learn patience and compassion, to forgive, to stand up and protest peacefully with determination.

The world that we live in is not shaped by this kind of thankfulness. Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship talked about living in a society that mirrored cheap grace – a kind of diminished thankfulness. He was passionate about the importance of a costly faith that was alive with the transformative practice of gratitude. He wrote: “In normal life one is not at all aware that we always receive infinitely more than we give, and that gratitude is what enriches life. One easily overestimates the importance of one’s own acts and deeds, compared with what we become only through other people.” He went on to say “For all that has been – thanks. For all that shall be – thanks.” To say this and to believe this and to live by this, I believe takes a very conscious choice – the difficult commitment to live a grateful life, to respond to God’s invitation to grateful living, in the good times and more especially in the difficult times.

I pondered what I wrote earlier – today is not just any day, it’s the only day we’ve been given, and that makes it extraordinary. And this is wrapped in that extraordinary and amazing gift – God is always with us, enjoying us! It is so true that our life is a long story made up of precious hours and days, routines and habits that are often unseen by us. To choose to pay attention to the cycle of time, the cycle of the seasons of our life, I can see how it opens such an opportunity that is so important in shaping a life of gratitude. These thoughts recalled for me Macrina Weiderkhr’s book Seven Sacred Pauses and also renewed my own source of pleasure in more faithfully following my own seven sacred pauses during the day. Hallowing the hours in the day is  one discipline and opening into choosing to live a grateful life. Somehow beginning the day with thanks sets the tone for the day, and not only for the day but for all the days that come. I know that in opening the curtains in the morning with thanks and the song “O what a beautiful morning, O what a beautiful day, I have a wonderful feeling every things going my way” – whether the sun is shining, the rain is pouring, the wind is howling – I am alive and loved, beautiful with God’s beauty! And at the end of the day when closing the curtains, smiling, because so often the day did not go my way, but the day went … and a brand-new tomorrow would be another day! Morning gratitude sets the intention for the day, and evening a time to reflect and review, a prayerful review of examen with a focus of thanksgiving and blessings and awareness of our emotions during the day, as we look forward to a new day.

A Buddha’s offer summing up the day: “Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we did get sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” (quoted in Words of Gratitude by R Emmons & J Hill)

Giving thanks in all things and at all times is the challenge of intentional grateful living. Help me God, help me quiet my noisy, worrisome mind in my ordinary world. Help me to relax in the familiar and normal and be aware of and appreciate it. I want to see the world around me more fully and deeply, to develop greater awareness, and to be grateful for what was already there. Somehow, we all know that all around us are gifts – in good times and in bad times – waiting to be noticed, appreciated, and taken into account.

David Steindl-Rast: “If you’re grateful, you’re not fearful., and if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes the power pyramid under which we live.”

Diana Butler Bass in her book Grateful writes in the epilogue: “Gratitude is defiance of sorts, the defiance of kindness in the face of anger, of connection in the face of division, and of hope in the face of fear. Gratefulness does not acquiesce to evil – it resists evil. That resistance is not of force or direct confrontation. Gratitude undoes evil by tunneling under its foundations of anger, resentment, and greed. Thus, gratitude strengthens our character and moral resolve, giving each of us the possibility of living peaceably and justly. It untwists knotted hearts, waking us to a new sense of who we are as individuals and in community. Being thankful is the very essence of what it means to be alive, and to know that life abundantly.”

David Steindl-Rast wrote: ”Joy is more than happiness. Joy is the happiness that does not depend on what happens. That is the happiness our heart is longing for: lasting happiness. Only grateful living can give you that joy because it gives meaning to life. You are holding the key to it in your own hands. Health turns into sickness, wealth into poverty, fortune into misfortune. But amid all these ups and downs, grateful living fills our heart with a steady, calm joy. You can’t be happy when you are lying in bed with a serious illness. But you can face that situation creatively: you can focus on new opportunities that this situation is giving you and so find joy. Every opportunity for which we are grateful triggers joy within us, even in the midst of misfortune.”

I believe that especially today, in the reality of today in our world, only gratitude toward the mystery of life can give us a firm centre of meaning to our culture and to our cosmos – to our kin-ship. We have lost our awareness of that centre – a conscious choice of grateful living may help us regain that centre again and self-transformation for the whole world, that mutuality that has power, revolutionary power.

A saying attributed to Rumi: “Gratitude is the wine of the soul Go on. Get drunk!

Yes! Yes! “Arise shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.” Isaiah 60:1.