Posts Tagged ‘on being thankful’

Variations of Gratitude

Posted: August 12, 2015 in god
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“Say, “Thank you.'”

We have all been told or said that, or some variation of it, “You could a least say, ‘Thank you,'” or “Aren’t you going to say “Thank you?””

In modern American culture, such “Thank you’s” are protocol; they are our appreciation cliches. They are ubiquitous, often perfunctory.

Yesterday at the store the checkout my clerk thanked me for shopping at her store. I thanked her for serving me.

Verbal ettiquite is rote, a tote, a quick vote, but that’s okay. Our light-weight apprreciations are perhaps tributes to our aspirations for cultural nobility, perhaps small island-hops in our perpetual flight from selfishness.

But there is present in life a deeper gratefulness, a profonde gratitude, a heart-felt appreciation, which arises from within, which comes out of surprising places and has a substantial mooring in our souls.

Lately I have experienced deep gratitude.

I am at loss for words.

Repayment is impossible. The words “Thank you!” are in no way adequate. I have no eloquence for this, I have no thank you gift for this. I suffer gratitude paralysis; I can do nothing to properly say, “Thank you.”  I will never have anything that can adequately convey appropriate gratitude.

For what?

For God!

God has been so good to me and my family. He has approached us with such gentleness. He has lavished us with such love. And He has softly redeemed our personal brokenness, saved our self-inflicted and our others-inflicted lostness, gentled our unique brand of fragility.

You have no idea.

Many are offended by God, his allowance of suffering, his seeming distance from us in times of need, his standards, his judgments, his absence.

I am not. Certainly I get it. I too suffer over the many unexplained injustices of life, the horrible suffering, the mysteries of our failures and successes, and yet in God’s own way, in his own time, as he has seen fit, He has very uniquely proven his love for me lately, and for my family and my friends again and again and again.

Things have happened to work things out, to create new realities, to take care of old needs, to give us new peace, to bond us to each other and to others, to create hope.

I am dumbstruck. I have no gratitude cliches. This is very personal, between God and me, a very, very deep gratitude.

Wow!

What?

Ahhh …

Dipping Deeply Into the Bottom of the Jar of Satisfaction

Posted: February 1, 2014 in gratitude
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It’s evening.

I like it.

It’s grown dark, but my family is safely at home, and we seize the opportunity to dip to the very bottom of the jar of satisfaction.

If one of us were missing how terrible that would be, but we are not missing, and because of that we are not traumatized.

I am in my warm house; the heater is on; my family is hugging me.

I like the safe, warm, tingle in these cheek-to-cheek encounters, so very different from not being touched, so different from no warm skin-on-skin contact, so different from unsafe and cold and lonely.

We eat chicken stir fry. We have enough, and it fills us up, and it is so not like being hungry, not like the weak, tired, empty, gnawing pain of want and deprivation.

We are deep in the jar. We sigh a satisfaction. We lick our fingers.

I lie on the couch and watch TV; my cat comes and sleeps on me; she purrs. This is so different from nothing to entertain us, from lying on the ground, from having no lights to turn on, from having no pets to snuggle with.

We dip, we lick our lips, we feast on the familiar. These provisions, by which discomfort and dissatisfaction are warded off, surround us now.

There is no medical test tomorrow, no scheduled surgery, no cancer treatment, no soul racking, sobbing loss to wake up to.

We luxuriate within the jar. Satisfaction deepens through the awareness of its opposite.

It won’t always be like this.

I know that, it makes it even sweeter, and so I savor it now.

I savor the deep, rich, delicious, astonishing, provisioned, universal-particular present tense. I dive into it; I suck on it; I down it.

I call to mind the desperate, terrible, dehumanizing opposite of all my mundane and astonishing satisfactions and in doing so turn my jar upside down and pour it down my throat!