Gratitude emerges in almost all religious thinking.  The most obvious reason is that we are creatures and owe our existence to a Creator. Yet those who do not believe in a Creator perhaps find the greatest reason to be grateful:  If this world is all we’ve got, it is all the more precious.  Cherish it and live each moment for all it’s worth.

The calendar says it’s time once again to give thanks.  And what could be easier?  After all, at least in material ways, the least among us lives better than 99 percent of everyone ever alive.  But what of the rest of the year?

The wisdom of many cultures suggests the key to happiness year-round is an attitude of gratitude.

I’m reminded of this every day because about a year ago I enrolled in a Web service called The Network for Grateful Living (www.gratefulness.org), at the suggestion of a friend.  Each morning, a one-sentence message about some aspect of living with gratitude pops onto my computer screen.

It’s the first message I open each morning, a grown-up version of the prize in Cracker Jack.  Finding one that strikes a chord is like a slow-release medicine, providing up to 12 hours of relief from symptoms of self-judgment, crankiness and pessimism.

For example, my most recent message was “Reality is permeated, indeed flooded, with divine creativity, nourishment and care.”  Another day it was “Happiness is not what makes us grateful; it is gratefulness that makes us happy.”  And here’s a third:  “Once we are in the practice of seeing, moment by moment, that everything in life is a gift…we cultivate the practice of gratitude.”

Quotes often come from the Website’s moving spirit, David Steindl-Rast, an artist, writer, and theologian who has spent a lifetime building bridges between Christianity and other spiritual traditions.  Quotes come from Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi sources and from current and ancient literature.

From these messages, a few themes have emerged over the year, themes that appear in nearly every religion and among the nonreligious.

Religions offer a sense of the universe and provide meaning to individual lives.  Gratitude emerges in almost all religious thinking.  The most obvious reason is that we are creatures and owe our existence to a Creator.

Yet those who do not believe in a Creator perhaps find the greatest reason to be grateful:  If this world is all we’ve got, it is all the more precious.  Cherish it and live each moment for all it’s worth.

“Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy,” says a message from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

A second theme is awareness or living in the moment.  This practice is central to everything from success in athletics to experiencing God in ordinary living.  When we say to ourselves, “Where has the day gone?” we probably lived most of it in the past or the future.

“Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five seconds or five minutes, “says a message from someone named Etty Hillesum.

A third way to live in gratitude is best understood by American Indians (who often give thanksgiving for four days):  See every created thing as infused with the Divine.  “Life is a glorious thing for a great contentment,” Sioux Chief Standing Bear said.  “Come with a feeling of friendship with the living things about you…we look upon all animal life as friend and benefactors.  They are the ones with the great mystery and so are we.

As they mature, thoughtful hunters come to understand this well.

A fourth theme deals with what happens if we live each day with gratitude:  We are inspired to magnanimity and courage.  No time for mean, petty letters to the editor; no room for political enmity and scapegoats.  Instead, with constant courage, spend life for a worthy purpose.

Inevitably, gratitude must account for suffering and evil in the world, a question for man to consider since God afflicted a just man, Job, with one affliction after another.

Treating well so challenging a subject would take more space than I have.  However, on Friday, on the Community Spirit page of The West in this newspaper, I will write about Phillip Simmons, a man who chronicled his slow death from Lou Gehrig’s disease.  His inspiring book, Learning to Fall, addresses the meaning of suffering.

Simmons describes his painful “falling out of life” as, ultimately, a gift.  In the end, all of us are falling, he writes.  By letting go of ambition, grasping and self-image, we fall “into humility…into forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others we realize are likewise falling.  We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.”

That was a lot of quotes one column, but here’s one more from a very wise man living in medieval times, Meister Eckhart:  “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.”

Can that be?  Is there hope for those of us who pray inconsistently and often mindlessly?  It seems to me Eckhart is talking about our fundamental outlook on life.  And about the unfathomable goodness of God.

Live in gratitude.  From this posture, all else flows.