The Hard Spiritual Work of Gratitude

With November on the horizon, our thoughts almost naturally turn to ideas of the Thanksgiving holiday and, soon after, advent and Christmas. It’s a beautiful time of year, filled with family gatherings, wonderful food, parties and gifts. But let’s be truthful: it’s also a time of almost unrelenting schedules and stress.

How are we going to get all the shopping done, prepare for the onslaught of relatives, attend parties and school concerts, clean the house, take care of end of the year business, and on and on and on? It’s a time of year when we have so much to be thankful for and, in reality, so little time to spend being thankful.

Ask any person of faith if they are grateful for all they have received and you will no doubt receive a resounding, “of course.” And, indeed, saying thank you to God should lie at the very center and heart of our prayer life. The 14^th-century German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart famously wrote: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”

So we are a thankful, grateful people. But what exactly does that mean and how does it play out in our daily lives? Just how grateful are we, what are we grateful for, and how often do we pause to say thank you to God and others for the gifts that flow into our lives?

Gratitude begins with awareness

A number of years ago at the suggestion of a friend, I started a “gratitude journal,” a daily accounting of all the things for which I was thankful. This seemed like a simple enough exercise, something akin to going around the dinner table at Thanksgiving sharing what we are all thankful for – family, job, food, friends, health, etc.

But my daily recording quickly became so much more. For when I took the time each day to recall the blessings of the past 24 hours, I became acutely aware of the nearly constant movement of God in my life and the blessings that came with God’s presence. Time spent writing in this journal became itself a time of prayer, a time of remembering and bringing to the forefront of my consciousness the experiences and people that affect my days and turn my eyes toward God.

It became, in the Ignatian spiritual tradition, a form of the “examen,” St. Ignatius’ “examination of consciousness,” something quite separate from the “examination of conscience” that we Catholics undertake before going to confession. For instead of focusing on our faults and sins, the examen becomes an internal search engine for the blessings in our lives.

[For a quick, contemporary and easy to understand introduction to the examen, I highly recommend Jim Manney’s, “A Simple Life-Changing Prayer: Discovering the power of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Examen,” published by Loyola Press.]

However you go about it, learning to live with gratitude is all about first being aware of the gifts and good things in our lives. And from experience, I learned that once I started keeping a list, I was nearly overwhelmed by how many daily experiences and interactions I could count as blessings. In short, we have no idea how present God is to us until we start paying attention.

Here are five suggestions toward living a more aware and grateful life:

1. Spend time at the end of each day praying over (or writing down) the good things that happened to you during the day and the gifted and gracious people who are a part of your life.
2. Put prayers of thanksgiving at the top of your prayer time with God, well before you get to your list of wants and needs.
3. Write more thank you notes to the people who make a positive difference in your life. You may think they don’t need or expect your thanks, but your note might be exactly what they need to get through a tough day.
4. Don’t forget to thank those closest to you, for they are the ones we most often take for granted.
5. Pay it forward. If you’re thankful for something you’ve been given, find ways to pass on that blessing to others. Perform random acts of kindness.

But life is not always abundant with blessings, of course. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of difficult and dark times. As hard as it might seem, it is precisely at these times that we must become all the more aware of the gifts and movements of God in our lives, for surely God is still there. It’s not easy, but it is an essential part of our lives as people of the Word. Henri Nouwen wrote beautifully about this aspect of gratitude in his book, “Bread for the Journey”:

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives — the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections — that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

As November and the colder winter months sweep across us, may we all reaffirm ourselves to lives of awareness, gratitude and prayer.