Theologian Christine D. Pohl describes how gratitude impacts our relationships with others:
When our lives are shaped by gratitude, we’re more likely to notice the goodness and beauty in everyday things. We are content; we feel blessed and are eager to confer blessing. We are able to delight in the very existence of another human being. In a grateful community, individuals and their contributions are acknowledged and honored, and there is regular testimony to God’s faithfulness, through which the community experiences the joys of its members. Expressions of gratitude help make the community alive to the Word, the Spirit, and God’s work.
Such a community is “a beautiful land” whose culture is grace and whose inhabitants see life as a gift. In this land, we often find abundant forgiveness and frequent celebrations. While we might assume that individuals and communities grow toward holiness and goodness primarily through the hard work of discipline, correction, and challenge, we tend to underestimate the importance of grace. The emphasis on loving God and loving neighbor … is most fruitful as it is rooted in a deep understanding of God’s prior love for us.
Pohl shares how a small Christian inter-racial community in Mississippi was able to find grace and gratitude for one another in the midst of conflict:
During a time of crisis in their community, a friend from the outside explained to them, “The way you grow into God’s love isn’t by making demands of each other…. You do it by giving each other grace.” Grace expressed as love “when it didn’t seem fair, or reasonable,” and “when others were being complete jerks.”
Their wise advisor continued,
The truth is, we can’t stand the idea of not fixing each other. But insofar as we can fix people at all, we can do it only by forgiving them, and giving them grace, and leaving them to our loving Father. Grace assumes sin. When we ask you to accept each other, we aren’t asking you to ignore hurts between you. People of grace speak the truth. But in an atmosphere of grace, truth seems less offensive and more important….
[A church leader] describes the community’s delight when it was introduced to the recipe for a “new culture of grace.” The ingredients for life in community were surprisingly simple: “It is enough to get the love of God into your bones and to live as if you are forgiven. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes.”
When we more fully understand the grace we’ve received, we are able to turn outward in gratitude and generosity. Gratitude becomes “our home in the presence of God,” or, in Henri Nouwen’s words, an “intimate participation in the Divine Life itself” that “reaches out far beyond our own self to God, to all of creation, to the people who gave us life, love, and care.” [1]
References:
[1] Henri J. M. Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal (Harper and Row, 1983), 21, 55.
Christine D. Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us (Eerdmans, 2012), 22–23.
Image credit and inspiration: Debby Hudson, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The silhouette of the person with hands open to the sky visually embodies gratitude as a recognition of life’s gift, showing how grace flows inward and outward, connecting self, community, and the divine.
Story from Our Community:
I often wish I could gather with all the Community Story people in person and tell them how their words have impacted me. This week it was Cynthia’s story about reading aloud. I’ve wept through the meditations for two days as I read aloud, hearing with new ears and a heart, soft and open. Thank you, Father Richard, for bringing us all together!
—Kate F.
