Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

WHAT PREVENTS OR POISONS THE PRESENCE OF GRATEFULNESS are  ignorance, arrogance, indifference, and entitlement. What seeds and supports gratefulness are humility, awareness, love, and surprise.

Ignorance is the fraternal twin of arrogance. They are the bad boys of any neighborhood. Together, they are enough to sabotage gratefulness. While not an excuse for poor behavior, ignorance means not to know better because one fails to pay attention (from the Latin ignōrāre to not know, disregard). It is difficult to see, outwardly as vision or inwardly as insight, if you ignore what is real or true. But there is a more offensive, lethal form of ignorance that is devoid of innocence. It is not ungrateful because it is unknowing but because it is unreflective, and it is unreflective because it is pompous which is the way it most resembles the twin brother. 

At first glance, arrogance is sometimes mistaken for confidence. But before long, the trained-eye of the wise-hearted recognize it is not self-assurance. It is self-absorption. Arrogance becomes so puffed up with itself that it cannot see the truth of what is through the tiny slits for eyes. It doesn’t allow space within itself for something like gratefulness. Masking insecurity, it is too interested in being fawned over to be grateful. Arrogance is what presumption looks like when it grows up.

If two is a dangerous tag team, then three is a trinity of woes. Indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Like love, hate is a dynamic energy or force. It is the fallen angel who misspent its reason for being and the motive force of love. But indifference is almost the total absence of the life necessary to love. Though a perversion, even to hate one must care about something. Indifference doesn’t care enough even to hate. What little exertion it can muster is directed toward oneself, an anemic mimicry of its running mate arrogance. Like it’s pal ignorance, indifference fails to understand that, although a gift, life asks something of us. If not for arrogance and ignorance, it might see that having something asked of us, expected from us, is not a burden or punishment but one of the great privileges and blessings of life extended to us by the Creator Spiritus.

Entitlement makes this quartet the four horsemen of ingratitude. Entitlement suffers from a sort of pre-copernican delusion that everything and everyone should and does revolve around it. Like the other three, it suffers from an inability to see clearly. When hanging out with them, it imagines that everything and everyone else, even its three cronies, were created to give all their attention to it. It fails to grasp the gratuitousness of life, fails to see that it is all grace–tout est grâce—and instead feels as if life were owed to it. Entitlement is like the slaveholder who is so self-enamored with being a master it cannot see that, like all those whom it feels are beholden to it, it too is a creature, and a free one at that, whose freedom and creatureliness were intended to serve the maker of all, the one who alone might be called master if understood as One who knows the mastery of love.

Gratefulness, thanks, gratitude, thanksgiving—however we refer to it—is one flower in the bouquet of what it means to be human, what it means to respond to the aliveness of the aliveness of God who is Life. Indeed, all is given, all is gift, all is grace. Unmerited, unearned, unwarranted, unsolicited, uncalled for, unbelievable, life is because of the graciousness and generosity of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. To become human involves consciously, intentionally, and joyfully being awake to the ineffable whenceness or who-ness of our being, intentionally created not merely caused. From this One, everything and everyone who is were born in the explosion of love, gifted with the capacity to become and to participate not only in their own sacred unfolding but in the liturgy of life as manifested in and through the unfolding of the cosmos, the evolution of existence. All this because the ineffable One we nonchalantly call God, allowed for the Not-God, desired for the Not-God, to come into being.

This awareness of the incomprehensible surprise of being, this divine desire and hospitality for the Not-God to come to be, and through time right up to today all the joyful, sorrowful, glorious, luminous, and “quotidian mysteries” of living, awakens us to reality–tout est grâce. In the struggle, disappointment, and suffering of life no less than in the beauty, wonder, and blessing of it, we awaken to reality–tout est grâce. This is the sole purpose of this day: responding to God with the only thing worthy of the original gratuitous gift of life–the giving of thanks–though the response is infinitesimal in comparison to the gift.

Today, with full hearts, we are mindful that it is from the superfluousness of this primordial divine gift that all our more immediate, personal, familial, corporate, and earthly blessings flow.

So, yes, let us count our blessings today in the spirit of humility, in the full awareness of both divine gratuitousness and the deliciousness of what life is or can be, as well as the equally incomprehensible suffering of so many in our world, in the response of love to Love, and in the daily openness, willingness, and desire to be surprised by grace and to respond with gratitude.

LET ME TAKE THIS TIME TO SAY how grateful I am for all of you who have supported me over the years with friendship, kindness, generosity, patience, and love, and for those of you who take the time to visit The Sacred Braid and to read, subscribe and/or send comments to THE ALMOND TREE. A thousand goodnesses be yours.    

ARTWORK: Gathering Love and Light, Bridgette Guerzon Mills. Used with permission of the artist. For more about Bridgette and her work, click here.