Gratitude
June is often known as the wedding month. Let’s be wedded the attitude of gratitude. It will be a faithful spouse and will not fail to bring us gifts of joy and peace.
Phrases posted on Facebook, June 2021
So many thoughtful people have shared their thoughts about gratitude. Let’s mull and muse with them. Here is one from Brother David Steindl-Rast. “In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy. Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise – then you will discover the fullness of your life.
Here’s a little quote by Nan Merrill. “Gratitude softens us.” When we are soft we are more available for goodness to flow in. Softness is not weakness. It is courageous availability.
Julian of Norwich has always inspired me. What a wonderful intuition she had that we are our true selves by being thankful. That can be a month’s worth of mulling!! Here’s her quote: “Gratitude is a true understanding of who we really are. With reverence and awe we turn ourselves around toward the work God leads us to do, enjoying and thanking with our real selves.”
Bang these two quotes together and see what informs you. The first is by Tom Andrew and the second by Faouzi Skali.
1. “Gifting is a simple way of expressing gratitude for opportunities to share. In essence, it is an act of balance. If you take something, you give something in return. What you give can be in the form of an actual gift or simply your time. It is a means of honoring that which you are working to understand. Gifting is a means of awakening a greater sense of gratitude in life and for life.
2. “First try to receive the gift you want to give.” Faouzi Skali
Evolutionarily, we’re always concerned with what’s not right. That’s what makes gratefulness delightfully subversive. Dale Biron
This is what the eminent theologian, Karl Barth, said about gratitude. “Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.” Don’t you love the simplicity and directness of this statement?
Did you ever wonder if the meaning and crown of your life might be the capacity to be grateful? A familiar biblical saying is this one: “To them that have, more shall be given”.
Do you know the old song, “Picking up paw paws; putting ‘em in the basket”? It seems to me that people who are grateful are the ones picking up the paw paws of life and putting them in their baskets. They have a lovely glow to them. Gratitude tends to make things shine!
Here is a gratitude practice that is challenging and wonder-full. At the start of your day say thank you “ahead of time” for the gifts that will come to you that are just right for your unfoldment. DO NOT decide in your mind what those will be. A necessary difficulty might land in you lap – something that asks you to become more capable than you thought you ever could be. Or something unexpected and very good will be given you to test your capacity to receive and be nurtured. A lot of people have a hard time receiving. Just say that deep and expectant morning thank you. At the end of the day, you’ll realize what you were given.
It’s hard to embrace our difficulties and to be, even a little, grateful for their hidden gifts. We can’t escape difficulties even if we try. They belong to life and are somehow necessary because they challenge us to find resources and creativity we would not have known otherwise. That’s why I love my Swedish mother’s miss spelling of gratefulness. She spelled it “greatfullness.” Everything does somehow belong to the whole, doesn’t it?
Actively noticing, appreciating and being thankful for even the smallest of things, for simple, daily events, for ordinary encounters with others, creates a spring, then a stream, then a river’s flow of more and more lived goodness.
This morning I had an image about gratitude. Imagine that you are given something that truly matters to you. It will be as if you were given a beautiful wing to fly with. But you can’t take off unless the gift is so deeply received that you naturally grow a second wing. Then, of course, you take off. You fly!!
Being grateful implies that something was able to slip past our independent self-sufficiency and established separateness. Our world-views can’t help but get bigger and kinder when we are grateful. A “grate” (as in a stove) opens inside and we can therefore be filled.
One can’t be grateful if one hasn’t received. To truly receive one needs to open. To be open is to be vulnerable. That just goes with the territory! Here’s the alchemy then. It is only in the gifting of ourselves in openness that we are able to receive from someone and therefore to give thanks. Gratitude, at its core, may be then be considered to be a process of mutual gifting.
