I have long maintained that from among the plethora of words within the 16 documents from the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962-65), perhaps the most important words were four that are found in the first chapter of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium). They are: full, conscious, and active participation and they are used to describe the ideal way to be involved in worship. The primary emphasis of the authors is that during the Sunday Eucharistic liturgy, the community is not intended to be mere spectators or onlookers of a religious ceremony performed by a few sacerdotal elites from a special caste, but rather engaged participants. In worship, the people gathered are not an audience watching but an assembly joining in a Christic, communal, and cosmic action, the paschal mystery of life and death and new life, the antiphonal rhythm of divine gratuity and human gratitude.

Although these four words as used in the document on liturgical renewal mentioned above were meant to describe the attitude proper to worship, I have always encouraged a more expansive understanding and embodiment of them. This quaternary is instructive not just for how to engage in the Sunday Liturgy but how we are to enter into the “quotidian mysteries” of everyday living and to participate in the liturgy of life. In the realm of human living, the charge to full, active, and conscious participation is a transpersonal, transcultural, and transreligious invocation.

Within Catholic and some cognate Christian spiritualities, these four words find a kind of kinship with what Buddhist’s mean by mindfulness. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh encourages “keeping one’s consciousness alive to present reality.” Jews capture a similar prayerful disposition as the four words from Sacrosanctum Concilium with the word kavanah which refers to intent, a direction of the heart, or inner participation. The inference is that prayer without kavanah is like a body without soul. The quaternary of words are kin to what French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil meant by “attention” or what the Quaker Thomas Kelly called “continually renewed immediacy.” A former teacher of mine, the late psychiatrist and spiritual guide Gerald May described it as “a conscious willingness to fully enter into life just as it is.”

Whether it is partaking of Sunday communion, working for justice, listening compassionately to a discouraged friend, playing the violin, studying for a test, offering hospitality, wandering in nature, sobbing after a deep loss, baking bread, visiting someone in the hospital, planting bulbs in our garden, or indulging in cheesecake (I am tempted to say especially while indulging in cheesecake) “full, conscious, and active participation” is an integral part of joyful, significant living. The key is to take what seems so simple — being present in the moment — and consciously infusing that into a given action or mode of being as a regular and intentional spiritual practice.

The Eucharistic action is a good example since like cheesecake, compassion, friendship, and loss, it is both a mystery and a practice we enter into. The word Eucharist comes from the Greek eucharistia meaning “the giving of thanks.” That the Eucharist is at the heart of many Christian communities’ Sunday worship, and is often used as a synonym for the liturgy itself and the core movement of it, reminds us that there is no time of year when gratefulness is not in season. We never abstain from giving thanks. The Eucharistic life is the life regularly punctuated with gratefulness whether our lives feel barren and cold as winter or alive and bright as spring. What once seemed so simple — giving thanks — is in actuality a radical way of being when we refuse to practice it only when things are going our way.

Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast emphasizes that while we are, of course, not expected to be thankful for everything (for example, personal violations, horrific tragedies, or communal injustices), it is possible and encouraged to be grateful in all moments. We are called to be people whose hearts and minds are trusting in the fullness of grace that perpetually undergirds and penetrates all life.

Brother David who is the co-founder of A Network of Grateful Living suggests that it is our surrendering to this undergirding of grace that is really at the heart of practicing gratefulness until it becomes an integral part of our daily life regardless of the circumstances. He states:

People usually think that gratitude is saying thank you as if this were the most important aspect of it. The most important aspect of the practice of grateful living is trust in life. Every human being every day has to make a practical choice between trusting life or not trusting life. Again and again in life, one is tempted to distrust and fear. Fear and distrust—this is the same.

He continues:

If you try out distrusting life and always questioning life, you find that it makes you absolutely miserable. Or you can try trusting life and whatever comes up, saying, “Well, maybe I don’t like it but I trust that life gives me good things—that life is trustworthy.” To live that way is what I call “grateful living” because then you receive every moment as a gift. And really the gift within the gift is opportunity. This is when you stop long enough to ask yourself, “What’s the opportunity in this moment?” You look for it and then take advantage of that opportunity. It’s as simple as that.1

In her book The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice Cynthia Bourgeault says that what makes centering (or contemplative) prayer so difficult is not that it is hard but that it is so simple. It requires letting go. That’s all. But that is all. Gratefulness requires a similar difficult-simple. In order for us to be grateful, we can’t be full of ourselves. In addition, gratefulness that is seasonal, or merely situational, given or withheld on a case-by-case basis, is self-serving and a charade. True gratitude is rooted in faith, which involves radical trust. It is countercultural and counterintuitive because the radical trust is not in the fact that we will never have to face sickness or struggle or disappointment or death but rather in the awe-filled awareness that all life, no matter what, is sheer gift. The reason our rejoicing at the birth of a child is so naturally unrestrained and yet, from the beginning filled with hidden pathos, is because every child born is born covered with the vernix of contingency just as sure as every exquisite sunrise becomes one more heartbreaking sunset that slips into darkness. But the inevitable presence of tragedy or dying or mourning does not eliminate gratefulness. It accentuates it.

In this season of Advent when we engage in a wintry spirituality, when the nights are long and the daylight short, when the principalities and powers that be seem more interested in power than being, when the labor seems endless, the birth pangs intense, and the nativity of life and joy and love far off or a cruel hoax, we bolster one another by choosing to practice gratefulness, that is, to fully, consciously, and actively trust in life and in the source and giver of life.

1 from “The Gospel of Gratitude According to Brother David Steindl-Rast.” Found here.