It has been almost two months since I finished work on Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. Now, on Thanksgiving, with a little distance between me and that work, it seems a good time to think over its message and try condense it down to its essence.
Living with gratitude should be easy, it should be natural, but it is not. Living with gratitude opens up a whole world of beauty and mystery, but there is a price of entry charged at the gate. To enter we need to set aside the concerns of day-to-day life, our fears, our grievances, our preoccupation with what is not fair, our desire for “more” whatever our definition of more, with what about life is less than perfect.
In my interview of him, Balbir Mathur summed it up so well – as well as anyone I’ve ever encountered or read -- “I call my boat Surrender, my oars Forgiveness and Gratitude. Instant forgiveness. I get angry, but then I remind myself, and I put my oars back in the water.”
Surrender isn’t easy. Forgiveness is not always easy. Rachel Carson describes dwelling among the beauties and mysteries of life as life’s supreme reward. Harlan Hubbard, devoting his life to living simply in nature, reflects on how easy it is to lose touch with that love through some trivial distraction of day-to-day life. We are all distracted by the trivial, the superfluous, the petty. We are all distracted by the things that, in the end, don’t matter.
The Lord works in mysterious ways – Whomever or whatever the Lord is. To Einstein and Thomas Berry and Ray Bradbury the Lord is a vast sea of energy, a sea in which, of which, we are a drop. Our separateness is an illusion, a delusion. “To see birds,” as John Burroughs says, “we must have birds in our heart.” To see life, we must have life in our heart. Helen Keller, sightless, unable to hear, finds her way to an Enchanted Wood where foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, where life and death are one.
“The universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts,” said Ray Bradbury. We exist as a brief spark between two eternities. Living in that realization, incorporating it into how we think, how we live, is a challenge worthy of the gift of life.