Gratefulness: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
Grace begets gratitude, which, in turn, widens our hearts toward greater goodness and love.
—Diana Butler Bass

Tuesday
The simple act of practicing gratitude disrupts negative thoughts and changes our mindset to see the world in a positive way.
—Doug Good Feather

Wednesday
We are to be grateful not just in the good times, but also in the bad times; to be grateful not just in plenty, but also in need; to maintain thankfulness not just in laughter, but also through tears and sorrow.
—Brian McLaren

Thursday
In the Eucharist, we are making a choice for gratitude, abundance, and appreciation for Another, which has the power to radically de-center us. Our lives and deaths are pure gift, and must be given away in trust, just as they were given to us as gift.
—Richard Rohr

Friday
This capacity for grateful perspective is a muscle I needed to build and use, and it is still something I need to nurture and tend daily.
—Kristi Nelson

Giving Thanks

Father Richard reminds us of the simple yet powerful practice of “saying grace” or a prayer of gratitude at mealtime:

Many cultures and religions have a beautiful tradition of saying a prayer before or after a meal, expressing gratitude and asking for blessing. If we are accustomed to praying over our food, it may become a rote, almost thoughtless gesture. Yet it is another opportunity to intentionally open ourselves to receive and participate in Love. The food is already blessed simply by its existence. God doesn’t require our words of thanks. But it does us good to “say grace,” to verbally acknowledge the giving of life—plant and animal—for our sustenance.

If you have a practice of saying grace, bring greater awareness and presence to it. Find or create a prayer to voice your gratitude. This Hindu blessing, from the Bhagavad Gita, is said before meals:

This ritual is One. The food is One. We who offer the food are One. The fire of hunger is also One. All action is One. We who understand this are One.

Indeed, it is all One in the immense and undiscriminating Love that is God.

Experience a version of this practice with video and sound.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 150.

Explore Further. . .

Read Franciscan sister and Seneca elder José Hobday on “praying always.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2022, United States, photograph, Unsplash. Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, Laughing Nuns (detail), 2018, Italy, photograph, Unsplash. Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2022, United States, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Gratitude is a Practice

Kristi Nelson is the director of A Network for Grateful Living, founded by Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast and friends. She shares her own story of learning to embrace gratitude as a way of life:

At 33 years old, I was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma that had metastasized to my spine. After going through 18 months of hospitalizations, surgeries, chemotherapy, and treatments, I asked my oncologist, “When will I be out of the woods?” He answered, “You will never be out of the woods.” Having worked so hard to stay alive, I had not grasped the degree of uncertainty and struggle that would come with being a survivor. Understanding that my life would only ever be lived with the caveat of “for now” was sobering. I wondered so many things: How do I continue to live this way? What am I able to count on? . . . How do I live while expecting to die?

The first few years of uncertainty and remission put the blessings of my life in sharp relief. I was in super-soak mode—every experience was saturated with new meaning, and I was absorbing it all fully. I did not know any other way to live the moments I had than to greet each one as gratefully as I could. Not sure how much more time was mine, I was awestruck by every moment, every person, and every thing. Being grateful the first few years was relatively easy and revelatory. I would wake up in a room bathed in light, hear birds singing, and notice I was still breathing. . . . I could put both feet on the floor and walk freely to a kitchen where I could make a cup of tea. It was enough to make me start each day with tears of joy. Being alive was enough.

Perhaps like many of us, as her health stabilized, Nelson became “immune” to spontaneous daily gratitude:

But over time, all those amazing reasons to feel grateful joined the ranks of the taken-for-granted. I got healthy and busy. I began chasing goals and the fulfillment they promised. I martyred myself to a job, complained about things like traffic, my weight, and colds. I ruthlessly compared myself to others, succumbed to retail therapy and debt, and suffered from stress. Each year that passed, I built up a kind of gratitude tolerance—what used to be enough got left in the dust in the pursuit of having more. Having cheated death, I began cheating life.

After some challenging years, dramatic wake-up calls, and my share of spiritual suffering, I came to realize that maintaining a grateful perspective is a true practice. . . . This capacity for grateful perspective is a muscle I needed to build and use, and it is still something I need to nurture and tend daily. . . . The practice of looking at the world through grateful eyes and with a grateful heart is an exquisite end in itself.

Reference:

Kristi Nelson, Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2020), 1–2, 3.

Explore Further. . .

Read Howard Thurman on surrendering to God.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

Now in my eighties, I am slowing down. Recent heart problems have made me realize how I have taken this faithful servant for granted. Recently, when I experience heart palpitations, I pause to thank my heart for its long service. I tell it I would understand if it wants to stop now to rest. This practice makes me value each moment. I find I am full of gratitude and quiet joy. —Diana L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Take, Thank, Break, Give

Thanksgiving Day (United States)

The greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving. In giving gifts, we give what we can spare, but in giving thanks we give ourselves.
—Brother David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer

Father Richard shares how the sacred ritual of the Eucharist participates in the flow of gratitude and generosity:

At his Last Supper, Jesus gave us an action, a mime, a sacred, communal ritual that would summarize his core and lasting message for the world—one to keep repeating until his return. It’s significant that the meal and the metaphor are based in physicality; the incarnation continued in the elements of the universe. Good stuff, and yet it has always been a scandal to overly spiritual people, starting at the very beginning: “This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?” (see John 6:60).

The Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving,” has four main aspects. In our conscious participation, we become more like the one we follow:

First, we take our whole lives in our hands, as Jesus did. In very physical and scandalously incarnational language, table bread is daringly called “my body” and wine is called “my blood.” We are saying a radical “yes” to both the physical universe itself and the bloody suffering of our own lives and all the world.

Second, we thank God (eucharisteo in Greek), who is the Origin of all that life and who allows and uses even death. We are making a choice for gratitude, abundance, and appreciation for Another, which has the power to radically de-center us. Our lives and deaths are pure gift, and must be given away in trust, just as they were given to us as gift.

Third, we break it. We allow our lives to be broken and given away. We don’t need to protect them. The sharing of the small self will be the discovery of the True Self in God. “Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12:24); the crushed grain becomes the broken bread, the whole and newly connected “Body of Christ.”

Finally, we chew on this mystery! This truth is known by participation and practice, not by more thinking or discussing. “Take this,” “eat and drink this”—not alone, but together, “until I return.” There we have the heart of the message, a “new covenant” of indwelling love that is not grounded in worthiness in any form, but merely in a willingness to participate and trust. Our drinking and eating are our agreement to “do what I can to make up in my own body all that still has to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his body the church” (see Colossians 1:24). Eucharist is a risky and demanding act of radical gratitude for, solidarity with, and responsibility to the work of God—much more than a reward for good behavior or any “prize for the perfect,” as Pope Francis says.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 295–296.

Explore Further. . .

Read Robin Wall Kimmerer on the Thanksgiving Address.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

School of Gratitude

Brian McLaren writes of gratefulness as a primary theme of the gospels:

Jesus makes it clear that a life lived to fulfill God’s dream for creation will involve suffering. But even here, Jesus implies that there is reason for gratitude. You see it in the Beatitudes, Jesus’s eightfold way of happiness (Matthew 5:3–12). There is a blessing in poverty, he says; to the degree you miss out on the never-enough system, you partake of God’s dream. There is a blessing in the pain of loss, because in your grief you experience God’s comfort. There is blessing in being unsatisfied about the injustice in our world, he says; as God’s justice comes more and more, you will feel more and more fulfilled. . . .

With these counterintuitive sayings and others like them, Jesus enrolls us in advanced classes in the school of gratitude. He shows us the disadvantages of advantages, and the advantages of disadvantages. He will make this paradox most dramatic through his own death; his suffering and crucifixion will eventually bring hope and freedom to all humanity, hope and freedom that could come no other way. Here is the deepest lesson of gratitude, then. We are to be grateful not just in the good times, but also in the bad times; to be grateful not just in plenty, but also in need; to maintain thankfulness not just in laughter, but also through tears and sorrow. One of Jesus’s followers says that we should even rejoice in trials, because through trials come patience, character, wisdom (James 1:2–3). And another says, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have” (Philippians 4:11), so he can instruct, “Give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

The words “in all circumstances” shouldn’t be confused with “for all circumstances,” of course. But neither should they be thinned to mean “in easy circumstances.” 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. . . .

You may lose a loved one, or facet after facet of your physical health, but you can still be grateful for what you have left. And what if you lose more, and more, and more, if bad goes to worse? Perhaps at some point, all of us are reduced to despair, but my hunch is—and I hope I never need to prove this in my own life, but I may, any of us may—having lost everything, one may still be able to hold on to one’s attitude, one’s practiced habit of gratitude, of turning to God in Job-like agony and saying, “For this breath, thanks. For this tear, thanks. For this memory of something I used to enjoy but now have lost, thanks. For this ability not simply to rage over what has been taken, but to celebrate what was once given, thanks.”

Reference:

Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 59, 60.

Explore Further. . .

Pray a prayer of gratitude from mystical writer Beverly Lanzetta.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

In January 2022, my wife of 47 years died from COVID-19. My grief has been unbearable at times. Some days seem like they last 10 years. I began to question my faith as my grief seemed to change into fear. What if I never see my family in eternal bliss? This was another loss for me [because] soon after I converted to Catholicism in 1998, I became an “uber-catholic” in my parish. I knew everything it seemed—but I didn’t know what I thirsted for. In my grief, I was reading the Daily Meditations when the image of a kernel of faith spoke to me. It was so powerful, I felt it put me back on track. It does not feel like I am talking myself into some “story” to feel better; rather, I it feels as though I was handed a map to help navigate the uneasy waters of life. I can hardly express my deep gratitude to Fr. Richard and CAC for what you do for us every day. Thank you, THANK YOU. —Jack C.

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Prayer for our community:

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Gratitude and Generosity

Thank you to all who have donated to support the Daily Meditations over the past week! Your generosity and partnership make all of this possible. If you haven’t donated yet and wish to do so, please consider making a contribution or recurring monthly gift at cac.org/dm-appeal. In gratitude for online donations of any amount now through the end of the year, we’ll send a digital version of ONEING: Nonviolence. Click here to donate securely online. Thank you!

Lakota author and activist Doug Good Feather is committed to sharing Indigenous wisdom and practices with nonnative audiences as a way to help and to heal humanity. He writes that no matter what our circumstances, gratitude is available to us:

Each and every morning offers us a chance to start anew, fresh, and to begin again. Each morning when we wake—should we choose to listen—is a message from the Creator to remember the privilege we were given of waking up. It’s a reminder to get up and prepare our self, to honor our self, to go out into the world, to connect with Mother Earth and the hearts of other beings, to inspire and encourage those who cross our paths, and most importantly, to enjoy life.

Good Feather highlights the Indigenous virtues of gratitude and generosity:

Gratitude and generosity are similar virtues, but they differ in that gratitude is an internal characteristic and generosity is our external expression of our sense of gratitude. Basically, gratitude is how we feel, and generosity is how we express that feeling out in the world. . . .

When we engage with the world from a place of gratitude, it’s the difference between trying to make something happen and allowing something to happen. The defining difference between effort and effortlessness is the virtue of gratitude. We see the quotes and memes from the sages and gurus that talk about gratitude. But why is gratitude such a core concept of joy, contentment, and well-being in our life? The ancestors tell us there are two primary reasons. The first is that a person cannot exist in a place of fear and true gratitude at the same time. The second is that gratitude is the doorway to divine intuition, which allows us to be guided by our connection with the Creator.

Gratitude moves stagnant energy when we’re feeling stuck in life. The simple act of practicing gratitude disrupts negative thoughts and changes our mindset to see the world in a positive way. Not only are we more attractive to others when we live in gratitude, but the most ordinary things can become extraordinary, creating a fuller, more beautiful expression of our life.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “Things don’t happen to us, they happen for us.” Gratitude is the foundation of that adage. It means that our mindset has to be that the universe is generally conspiring and working in our favor. Frequently, when something that we perceive as “bad” happens to us, we let it affect us in a highly negative way. But if we interact with the world from a place of gratitude, when something happens that others may perceive as “bad,” we just see that experience as “interesting.” We are curious about why something happens the way it does, and in expressing that curiosity, we’re actively seeking the part of the experience that we’re grateful for.

Reference:

Doug Good Feather, Think Indigenous: Native American Spirituality for a Modern World, transcribed by Doug Red Hail Pineda (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2021), 27, 30, 31. Emphasis in original.

Explore Further. . .

Read Franciscan Sister and climate justice leader Joan Brown on living in gratitude for Mother Earth.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

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Prayer for our community:

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Sharing God’s Grace

For author and historian Diana Butler Bass, gratitude begins with awareness of God’s grace:

The words “gratitude” and “grace” come from the same root word, gratia in Latin. . . . “Grace” is a theological word, one with profound spiritual meaning. Grace means “unmerited favor.” When I think of grace, I particularly like the image of God tossing gifts around—a sort of indiscriminate giver of sustenance, joy, love, and pleasure. Grace—gifts given without being earned and with no expectation of return—is, as the old hymn says, amazing. Because you can neither earn nor pay back the gift, your heart fills with gratitude. And the power of that emotion transforms the way you see the world and experience life. Grace begets gratitude, which, in turn, widens our hearts toward greater goodness and love.

Bass explores the liberating nature of gratitude:

Together grace and gratitude form a different moral “equation.” The standard model of gratitude is a closed cycle of gift and return bound by social obligation and indebtedness, whereby a “benefactor,” a superior of some sort (someone wealthier, more powerful), provides a benefit for another, a “beneficiary,” a person in a state of need or trouble. In the closed cycle, the beneficiary is dependent on the benefactor in a way that feels demeaning or signals indebtedness. . . . Few want to be on the receiving end of an unequal transaction. . . .

If we change a closed system to an open one, banishing transaction and substituting grace, the picture of gratitude shifts. In the closed cycle of debt and duty, the roles of benefactor and beneficiary are static, and gifts are commodities of exchange, based in transaction and control. . . . But in an open cycle of gratitude, gifts are not commodities. Gifts are the nature of the universe itself, given by God or the natural order. Grace reminds us that every good thing is a gift—that somehow the rising of the sun and being alive are indiscriminate daily offerings to us—and then we understand that all benefactors are also beneficiaries and all beneficiaries can be benefactors. All that we have was gifted to all of us. There would be no benefactors if they were not first the recipients of grace. In other words, gifts come before givers. We do not really give gifts. We recognize gifts, we receive them, and we pass them on. We all rely on these gifts. We all share them.

This is not a fulfillment of duty or a single act of kindness, but an infinite process of awareness and responsive action. The gift structure of the universe is that of an interdependent community of nature and neighbor that extends through the ages in which we care for what was handed to us and give gifts to others as a response. This is not a closed circle of exchange; it is more like the circles that ripple across a pond when pebbles are tossed into the water.

Reference:

Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Giving Thanks (New York: HarperOne, 2018), 19–20, 20–21.

Explore Further. . .

Read CAC Executive Director Michael Poffenberger on CAC’s financial commitment to “living in the gift.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

I recently had an experience that reminded me of our unseen contemplative community walking similar paths. I was walking on a new trail, a one-mile loop through thick woods. I saw many other walkers going the opposite direction—so many that I started to think that perhaps there was a rule or local custom of only walking clockwise. I was about to turn around, when I realized that there could be just as many walking in the same direction as me—ahead and behind. I immediately thought of CAC and all those reading the Daily Meditations together each morning. In leaving the narrow, dualistic teachings of my childhood, I often feel lonely when friends and family express their fear that I have left the fold and lost my salvation. Today, I want to express gratitude to all those traveling the contemplative journey, unseen yet together. —Sally L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

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An Attitude of Gratitude

Father Richard Rohr reminds us that when we receive everything as a gift, we can live gratefully, allowing the energies of life and love to flow through us to the benefit of the whole.

In Philippians 4:6–7, Paul sums up an entire theology of prayer practice in very concise form: “Pray with gratitude, and the peace of Christ, which is bigger than knowledge or understanding [that is, making distinctions—Richard], will guard both your mind and your heart in Christ Jesus.” Only a pre-existent attitude of gratitude, a deliberate choice of love over fear, a desire to be positive instead of negative, will allow us to live in the spacious place Paul describes as “the peace of Christ.”

It is important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen attitude of gratitude will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap” (Luke 6:38). In my experience, if we are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. Moreover, to ask for “our daily bread” is to recognize that it is already being given. Not to ask is to take our own efforts, needs, and goals—and our selves—far too seriously. Consider if that is not true in your own life.

All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light. Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them. They know that “love is repaid by love alone,” as both St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux have said.

In the end, it is not our own doing, or grace would not be grace. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work well done. It is nothing for us to be boastful about. We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus. All we can do is be what God’s Spirit makes us to be, and be thankful to God for the riches God has bestowed on us. Humility, gratitude, and loving service to others are probably the most appropriate responses we can make.

References:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditation s (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 281, 134;

Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 61; and

Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: New Testament (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1988), 96–97.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the humbling truth that our lives are not about us.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2022, United States, photograph, Unsplas h. Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, Laughing Nuns (detail), 2018, Italy, photograph, Unsplash. Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2022, United States, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Thank you, Spirit, for life. Thank you for shared joy. Thank you for beauty. Amen.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Gratefulness: Weekly Summary

Gratitude is a Practice

Take, Thank, Break, Give

School of Gratitude

Gratitude and Generosity

Sharing God’s Grace

An Attitude of Gratitude

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Gratefulness: Weekly Summary

Gratitude is a Practice

Take, Thank, Break, Give

School of Gratitude

Gratitude and Generosity

Sharing God’s Grace

An Attitude of Gratitude

Category Archive

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