Sunday
All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Nothing has humbled me more than to be on the receiving end of someone’s gratitude. At that moment I truly understand the power of gratitude. The recipient has been blessed, and their expression of gratitude humbles and blesses the gift giver.
—Yolanda Pierce
Tuesday
Even in pain, we can find a place of gratitude, a place where alongside the agony of loss we still count and appreciate what remains.
—Brian D. McLaren
Wednesday
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.”
—Christine D. Pohl
Thursday
Gratitude is not a form of passive acceptance or complicity. Rather, it is the capacity to stare doubt, loss, chaos, and despair right in the eye and say, “I am still here.”
—Diana Butler Bass
Friday
The only way to increase authentic spirituality is to deliberately practice actually enjoying a positive response and a grateful heart.
—Richard Rohr
Week Forty-Eight Practice
Praying with Ordinary Things
Episcopal priest Laurie Brock invites us to reflect on our relationship with the things we use every day and how our gratitude might help us discover the sacred significance they hold:
We humans need things. We need items, objects, and belongings that we can grasp and touch and grab and even fearfully hold to remind us. We need reminders that we are here and that God is here. Things are always things, and they are also rarely just things….
Most of us would do well to have fewer things, but perhaps we’d be better off investing more meaning, rather than less, in those items. Because some things are more than things, aren’t they? They hold something of our feelings, our hopes and expectations, our grief and remembrances, even our faith. [1]
Brock offers this prayer and reflection:
Almighty God, who creates all that is and gives us all that we possess: I thank you for the objects of our daily life. Grant that I may see in them your holiness, often present in the ordinary and common. Allow me to treasure the things that I forget to notice because they are so present in my daily life. Give me the grace to appreciate them, to see them, to treasure them. Amen.
What are the ordinary things in your daily life that you often overlook? Sitting in a quiet place in your home, office, or even outside, let your gaze wander, noticing a few items. Slowly allow your attention to rest on one. What task or chore does it help you accomplish? How does it help you in your daily life? What challenges would appear without this item?
Turning your thoughts toward your faith, what parts of your faith are easy to overlook? Perhaps it’s a prayer you’ve said over and over or a hymn you’ve heard so many times you don’t pay attention to the words anymore. Maybe it’s a routine like seeing the candles lit before worship. How might the object you’re seeing now remind you of the value of the ordinary and routine in your faith? How does ordinariness help you experience God? How might you offer gratitude for this object? [2]
References:
[1] Excerpted from Souvenirs of the Holy: Encountering God Through Everyday Objects, by Laurie M. Brock. Copyright © 2025 Broadleaf Books. Reproduced by permission. Page 4.
[2] Brock, Souvenirs, 187–188.
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.
