November 24, 2021
November – Thanksgiving
Dear Friends,
Just this past week I read an article that inspired me to think about gratitude in a slightly different way.
Maybe we can look upon our gratitude as actually giving three gifts to us.
First, gratitude leads us to a healthy and good sense of humility.
Whenever we say thank-you to God or to someone else, we are recognizing our dependence upon the other for something.
It may be for a text message that I just needed to hear at that moment.
It may be for my job and home and family and all the really important things of life.
Gratitude takes us away from thinking that we have earned it all or that all of the good things in life are owed to us.
Gratitude puts us in touch with our humanity and with our dependence on God and inter-dependence upon one another.
It gives us the gift of a healthy and holy humility.
Second, being grateful leads us to peace.
It leads us to be in touch with the good things in our lives.
Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the good and just get caught up in the negatives.
Maybe a blessing of Thanksgiving Day is that it leads us to realize that the positives are also there.
This blesses us with a certain inner peace.
And the third gift to us for being grateful is hope.
Our awareness of the blessings that we have – even though we still have problems and challenges – this awareness gives us hope.
We feel empowered to keep on going, to look toward tomorrow, resolved to do our best, and trusting in both God and the goodness of others.
Now, this kind of prayerful gratitude doesn’t take a long time.
We can enter into this gratitude in just a few minutes.
However, the effects in us will be enduring: humility, peace, and hope.
And this will affect how we live and relate.
I hope this is a good Thanksgiving weekend for each of you.
Father Michael Schleupner
The above was inspired by and partially based on Three Ingredients in a Recipe for Gratitude by Lisa Kelly, (ignatianspirituality.com).
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