Nov. 11, 2025
Tis the Season:
Grounding Gratefulness
“If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough,” wrote the great 14th-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart. A grateful attitude is one of our most potent tools for health, agree doctors across the board. As we approach another season in which giving, receiving and thanking take center stage, it is common practice to bring to mind the particular blessings that grace our lives. But this year, perhaps more than many, finds many lists of blessings in disarray, and the sense of gratitude endangered.
Yet perhaps we have misunderstood this business of gratefulness. Is this life-giving essence really at the mercy of circumstance? Is it an emotion that waits for the appearance in our lives of the people, events, or possessions we have learned to covet? That would be a sad prospect indeed, dooming this core human experience to the chancy success of our efforts to chase its conditions.
It is sad too that we are unlikely to reflect on gratefulness in the times when we have the most to be grateful for. Thus when the state of things alters and the life we have taken for granted seems tenuous, we are tossed about on the waves of events we feel powerless to change. It may be that we should rather look to those who have spent much of their lives in scarcity and insecurity to learn their paths into joyful and grateful living.
Such a one is Austrian-American Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast. The son of parents who separated when he was only seven, Brother David spent his adolescence in Nazi-ruled Austria, was drafted into the German army during World War II, and endured the years of scarcity after the war. He is no Pollyanna. But for more than forty years, his book, 𝘎𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘳𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳, has invited readers into the life of gratefulness that is both practice and gift, the exercise of will that rejoices in the utter gratuitousness of life.
Paradoxes all round, to be sure, but they perch together, says Brother David, in the cultivation of surprise – the surprise born in an abiding mindfulness that recognizes that everything we have, and everything we experience, is pure gift, the sole alternative to nonbeing and the repository of possibility. That life is gift does not rely on our recognition of its largesse; gift simply is the Reality within life, the Gift of all gifts. But within the human freedom that most all would acknowledge as gift, whether or not we experience life as gift is really up to us. And the gift is only revealed through the exercise of some skills of which most of us are sorely out of practice.
The Work of Wonder
Mindfulness practice is advanced in many contexts these days, of course – work, study, relationships. The cultivation of full attention to what is before us does indeed honor the presence of what is in its simple integrity of being, in its donation to the fabric of life. It certainly has the power to draw us more fully into participation with the reality around us. But what our gratefulness mentor would add to this quality of awareness is the glowing tip of 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵. This moment in which we stand, this current of time and being flowing through us, 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴; 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭! Its very particularity as the product of the magnificent web of the universe should strike us as a marvel, says Brother David, offered to the becoming of one’s self and awaiting our own precious contribution. It is gift, sometimes nestled and sometimes thrust into our hands, but always offered for its own transformation.
Even when it doesn’t particularly 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 like a gift. Wonderment can be hard to come by in the moment. And that’s where our work comes in. Gratefulness is in our hands, albeit not in the forage for the things we believe our hearts desire. No, Brother David locates our work in the fostering of three very familiar religious – and 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 because so very 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 – qualities: faith, hope and love. In the tending of these three lies the seed of wonderment, for they are the tools which may open us to the life of creativity that is the fruit of gratefulness.
I have often pondered how these three qualities, so often cited in religious contexts, are almost always listed in precisely that order – faith, hope and love – for it seems to me that they build upon each other in just that way. Each opens the way for the next. And the thread that joins them is courage
The Courage to be Surprised
As its place in the list suggests, faith is foundational. Faith, 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 is not passive reliance on a greater power, but rather is the choice to trust – often in the face of contrary evidence – that life is not random. Without faith, gratefulness will never be more than a fleeting bubble of pleasure. But by faith, the self may take its joyful place in the parade of life toward a wholeness it cannot yet see. So entwined are gratefulness and courage that Brother David asserts them as one and the same: “True gratefulness is courage to give thanks for a gift before unwrapping it.”
The flowering of this courage is gratefulness that the world is as it is, that its emergent fullness comes to us wrapped in surprise, in the juncture of joy and pain that shape its innate promise. Any given instant may not be wrapped in shiny colorful paper, but its facets are constantly recombining in a kaleidoscopic presentation of possibility. And thus enters hope, the ineluctable issue of genuine, deep rooted faith. For if faith is 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵 that surprise comes to us in Reality’s unfolding, then hope is the 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 of it. “Surprise,” announces Brother David, “is a name of God.” Hope dwells in the infinite divine possibilities of a world that does not stand still, offering surprise around every turn. Hope focuses not on the apparent limitations to possibility that surround us, but looks to the horizon of the new moment. This hope transcends particular hopes and desires in its reach toward possibilities yet to be imagined and unable to be imagined. And hope is the way we get there.
Steindl-Rast draws a beautiful metaphor of the nature of this grateful hope. “Hope looks at all things the way a mother looks at her child, with a passion for the possible . . . It creates a space in which perfection can unfold.” Authentic hope does not define what may become, but creates space for becoming itself, trusting the divine Reality that lures it beyond the present.
That lures the becoming into love, the final demand of the courage that paves the way for surprise. The calls to faith and hope may reside in the cosmic imagination, but the call to love brings us to ground. Faith and hope have called us to trust the divine promise woven into life, setting the stage for gratefulness; love calls us to trust, to be grateful for, the other. Others like us, but others too with their own desires, their own agendas, their own perceptions of what makes for wholeness. Others who may appear to be, often are, obstacles to the particular hopes we have conjured. Yet it is these very others who are both the road and the destination of our gratefulness journey. They are those 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘮 and 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘮 we exercise the faith and hope that carry us into the heart of gratefulness. The other standing right in front of us is the one who explodes our limited vision of the giftedness of life so that together, in faith, hope and love, we may open ourselves to what we cannot yet see. This other and every other are, must be, the locus of a gratefulness that opens into greater gift.
I sometimes think that when the apostle Paul extolled the virtues of faith, hope and love, and declared that “the greatest of these is love,” he was acknowledging that not only is love the most crucial, but that it is the most difficult. Love is undeniably the greatest challenge of the three in our day. The divisions among us are deep and destructive. Who among us has the courage to march intrepidly toward the love of other? Only, I think, the one who has drunk in gratefulness to his toes, the one whose gratefulness floods through her arms held out to the broken world. The one whose gratefulness flows from deep roots of faith and hope, and into love’s surprises.
The Gift of Gifts
Love names the nature of the universe. Love knows all as gift. In the vast web of a dynamic universe, everything for which we are inclined to be grateful comes packaged along with everything we are inclined to dread. All of life streams toward us, unsolicited and unearned; our desire and our fear, our welcome and our rejection, have nothing to do with it. And while that would appear to be the greatest trial of gratefulness, in truth it is from within the heart of the Reality that “whatever there is belongs to whatever else there is” that gratefulness offers its greatest gift: the gift of opportunity. In daily lives always in search of opportunities to make them better, life’s fecundity raises a chain of opportunity from the particularity of every occasion.
For nothing arises that does not draw upon the whole – upon absolutely all – of this boundless and vibrant variety. And to the degree that we take it for granted, that we pick and choose, welcome or ignore or reject any of it, we rob ourselves of the richness of opportunity it bears. As we tread along the full spectrum of our experience of this Reality, our mindfulness knows it, our courage engages it, our surprise enlivens it, and our gratefulness unleashes its flow. And lifts our focus from a static praise of whatever we imagine its Source to be, to lives lived in honor of its bounty.
This is no easy gratefulness. Those who promote gratitude practice, I think, often know not what they ask. The holidays ahead will offer to many of us abundant evidence that in its gratuitous fecundity, life does not promise the kind of smooth sailing that prompts the spontaneous gratefulness that meets our most ready definition. The opportunities to be carved from faith, hope, love can be difficult to discern, and gratefulness may seem a long reach. But in entering them mindfully, knowing our place in the vast network of belonging and standing open to surprise, we may yet glimpse that vast network that supports us, and feel genuine gratefulness for a world that exists solely to invite us into a renewing Reality.
Hand in hand with the becoming of life goes the learning of it. Gratefulness is a practice that takes practice. But in its light we will learn so much more: we will learn how to use life’s gifts to build a world that is known as gift by all and for all. What are we waiting for? Let’s practice.
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