Suppose your spiritual life was a ball team. Who would be your starting five?
For all that has been—Thanks!
To all that shall be—Yes!
~ Dag Hammarskjold
“Dear old world’, she murmured, ‘you are very lovely,
and I am glad to be alive in you.” ~ L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
As mentioned in a previous post, Rabbi Heschel believes wonder is not only the beginning of both happiness and faith but also the line of demarcation between humanity’s flourishment or demise. And yet, as important as it is, Heschel claims there is something even more important than wonder, namely, what we do with our wonder. The remaining players on my Dream Team for an authentic Christian spirituality represent three essential responses to this urgent question.
The first thing we do with our wonder—or rather, the first thing we do immediately after our spontaneous oohing and aahing or standing still and silent in reverent, rapt attention trying to take it all in or experiencing ourselves as taken in by the evocative moment or encounter—is to allow it to walk us home to GRATEFULNESS. Though not the only impetus to gratefulness, wonder is certainly one of the most luminous and enchanting.
I find it much harder as a writer and teacher to approach the topics of love and gratefulness than death and dying. Regarding the last two—unless we are a case for science—none of us can say “been there, done that.” So, ironically, even if we have suffered alongside dear ones who have made the short or steep trip Home or personally experienced our own litany of little deaths while living, saying anything fresh or substantive is a taller order when it comes to love and gratefulness which is why they have been taken off the menu of most sensible writers and speakers. Saying something significant about love and gratefulness is a daunting, if not an altogether foolish, endeavor given the amount of ink that has dried on paper and oxygen that has been sucked out of rooms by others who already have tried to recognize and celebrate these two guests of honor without or while embarrassing themselves in the process.
Given that these two words point to lived realities so essential for human flourishing and a vital spiritual life, it is worth the risk of embarrassment, instead of just leaving them either to be twisted, prettified, diluted, or posterized by marketers and merchandizers of our dominating consumerist culture. And, as usual, I will pass on the wisdom of the sages, in this case, regarding gratefulness.
One bad habit of humans, especially those of us who understand our humanity from a spiritual or religious perspective, is the tendency to focus on our differences, allowing these differences to divide rather than intrigue or teach us. We need to break this bad habit. When we look for universal convictions among the world religions, gratefulness is on everyone’s roster. There is no such thing as Catholic or Lutheran or Mennonite or Buddhist or Hindu or Jewish or Muslim or agnostic or atheist gratefulness per se. Granted, there are a plethora of ways to express it, and certainly different targets for its reception. But it’s still the one same experience. So gratefulness—at least our capacity for it—is common to all humans.
Gratefulness is a sure sign that we’ve owned up to the fact that none of us are self-made men or women, that we acknowledge even can-do self-reliance has a shelf life, that we realize all life is interdependent, and that of all the things that reality is, it is first and most of all, relationship.
Gratefulness is the first step of the heart’s dance immediately following appreciation. It is born in the imperceptible space between spontaneity and choice. It is the leap from the mind to the heart over the runnels that line our days like ties on a train track. It is both a posture one hold’s in life and a way of engaging in life. It is at once a gift and a practice. Being grateful completes the loop that begins with giving. Gratefulness—to borrow Matthew Fox’s definition of prayer—”is a radical response to life.”
Gratefulness is what humility looks like after a few drinks. First, a sense of wonder that there is anything at all, then, what Heschel calls “existential embarrassment,” and “indebtedness.” We don’t so much own our lives, as owe them. But the Holy One takes the greenback of debt and exchanges it with the coinage of grace, and says, “It’s on the house.” And only the severely wounded, self-absorbed, or those sleepwalking through life would be so disrespectful as not to respond graciously to this divine gratuitousness.
The word humility finds its way back to the Latin humilitas which means lowly or, as Thomas Aquinas says, from humus meaning the earth beneath us. The grateful person is not an airy-fairy ebullient sort. The grateful person is down to earth. Grounded in humility, gratefulness flowers from within with a sense of inner permission and response-ability. Gratefulness acts on the desire to give expression and is moved to complete the loop of grace by choosing freely to reciprocate. For those who are consciously moving toward wholeness, selflessness, and wakefulness, gratefulness is our instinctive response. It does not need so much to be learned as to be practiced. Genuine gratefulness is not intended to draw attention to the grateful person but rather to whatever or whoever evoked the gesture in the first place. In the Magnificat recounted in the Gospel of Luke 1:46-55, a new mother offers a prayer of thanksgiving saying, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” The giver’s generosity, mercy, and kindness are magnified as they should be. Both the giver of thanks and the receiver of another’s gratitude are participants in the ongoing spiral action of grace since with gratefulness it’s not merely what goes around comes around but what goes around expands our hearts and deepens our love.
When Spanish or Italian speakers say thanks—Gracias! Grazie!—they are invoking one of the meanings behind the word grace. That’s because grace, gracias, and grazie all descend from the same Latin word, grātia. So do the English words gratefulness and gratitude which, therefore, are intimately related to grace. In Luke, the pregnant Elizabeth greets her cousin Mary of Nazareth who is also with child saying, “Hail, Mary, full of grace” which in shorthand means “the Lord is with you.” To be full of grace, to be grateful begins with the awareness that we carry within us the presence of the Holy One as a mother carries a child ready to be birthed forth into the world as a blessing, as the fruit of love.
When my daughter was somewhere between ages one and two, we went as a family to Weston Priory, a Benedictine community tucked into the Green Mountains of Vermont. Gathered in the small stone chapel with its characteristic Benedictine ambiance of simple elegance or elegant simplicity, we joined the brothers, a handful of retreatants, and a few regulars from the nearby hills and town for night prayer. In a prayerful pocket of silence between chants, my daughter who was sitting on her mother’s lap—perhaps inspired by the beauty of the monks’ chant—offered one of her own. With the help of the exceptional acoustics, her words carried easily throughout the entire space: “Tank you, God. Tank you, God, Tank you, God, oh,” she sang. The faces of the monks were no more successful at stopping their wide smiles from lighting up their faces (in unison, of course) than my wife was at stopping the spontaneous song that wafted through the chapel like a ribbon riding a warm breeze. It is no surprise that tune and those words are still from time to time what we use—with the same original pronunciation—as our table prayer of grace. It brings a smile to our faces as gratefulness tends to do and it keeps us young at heart.
As this child’s spontaneous version of a semi-glossolalia melodic prayer painted the summer air of Compline, two truths became immediately apparent to me: first, that our capacity and impulse to give thanks—like wonder—is indigenous to the human person. Julian of Norwich wrote, “Thanking is a true understanding of who we really are.” Second, being grateful is good for our body and soul, lifts up and renews both giver and given to, and enlivens, delights, and plays a small part in repairing the breakage in all those close enough to feel the vibrations of its grace.
If Rabbi Heschel is the apologist for wonder par excellence, then Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk now in his mid-nineties, is arguably the world’s most esteemed and trustworthy spokesperson for gratefulness. Acknowledging the human person’s universal longing to be happy, he stresses that it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy. More so, living gratefully with the awareness that life is a gift not a given, gladdens the heart. “Gratefulness,” says Brother David, “is the key to joy.” It unlocks in us the joie de vivre. The loop-de-loop of the movement of grace invites us into a worldview and way of life characterized by a spirit of rejoicing, literally, to be in-joy again and again and so forth and so on ad infinitum. As poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, gratefulness is especially accessible on those days when we sense that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” when it flames out, “like shining from shook foil” and when “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed.” It is activated by a felt sense of God’s presence when the vibrancy of nature clearly lives in “the dearest freshness deep down things.”
But Brother David is quick to remind us that gratefulness is no fair-weather friend. It is on call morning, noon, and night, 24/7/365, available in the experience of the sorrowful mysteries of life no less than in the joyful mysteries of life. It is accessible in all seasons, in all situations and experiences, including dark stormy days when our spirit is taken up like paper, swirled about like Dorothy’s house in a dark ominous tornado, and we have no idea where and how hard it will drop us down to earth. In fact, Holocaust survivor, renowned teacher and writer, the late Elie Wiesel insisted, “No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.”
In an interview, Steindle-Rast responding in English with his thick Austrian accent, clarified a point he is often asked about, saying “. . . not for everything that’s given to you can you really be grateful. You can’t be grateful for war in a given situation, or violence, or sickness, things like that. So the key, when people ask, “Can you be grateful for everything?”—[is] no, not for everything, but in every moment. Brother David is encouraging us to move beyond intermittent moments of giddy gratitude or prayers of thanksgiving on bright, sunny days to gratefulness as a deliberate and constant way of being, a way of living regardless of the circumstances of our daily lives, that is deeper down than stormy winds and ocean swells that toss and turn us upside down from time to time throughout our lives. There is nothing quaint or cute or self-aggrandizing about gratefulness.
It is not surprising that the nemeses of Wonder are also rivals of gratefulness: indifference, irreverence, apathy, callousness, and cynicism. But there are other antagonists and obstacles to living gratefully as well, for example, bitterness, resentment, self-absorption, arrogance, immaturity, elitism, and exceptionalism to name the main culprits. Throughout the history of Christianity, wise men and women from St. Ignatius to Thomas Merton have named ingratitude as the primal sin because its poison spreads and impacts all aspects of our lives. The ungrateful person takes life for granted, takes people and places and things for granted. The grateful person accepts life as gift and receives people, places, and things graciously.
Finally, genuine grateful living orients us toward others. It not only draws our attention to the targets of our gratefulness but also heightens our awareness of others whose lives are difficult, those innocent victims of cruelty or circumstance who are well acquainted with grief and sorrow, rejection and malice, exploitation and injustice. The good fortune and blessings that evoke our gratefulness should make us especially sensitive to those whose lives understandably make it more difficult to experience gratefulness and yet are often the most genuinely expressive of gratefulness. ♦
to be continued . . .
O God, when I have food, help me to remember the hungry;
When I have work, help me to remember the jobless;
When I have a home, help me to remember those who have no home at all;
When I am without pain, help me to remember those who suffer,
And in remembering,
help me to destroy my complacency;
bestir my compassion,
and be concerned enough to help by word and deed,
those who cry out for what we take for granted.
Amen.
~ Samuel Pugh
NB! In 2000, Brother David co-founded A Network for Grateful Living, an organization dedicated to supporting others in cultivating lives of gratefulness and thereby transforming individual lives and society. Brother David’s TED talk “Want to be Happy? Be Grateful” has been viewed online by 8.6 million people (including a dog or two) and “liked” 259,000 times. You can find out more about Brother David and A Network for Grateful Living by clicking Gratefulness.org.
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