YES! With Thanks by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

"Gratefulness is the great task, the how of our spiritual work, because, rightly understood, it re-roots us."

[Cont. from page 2] ...

Leisurely living, even lifting things up in a mindful way, makes you mindful; and every activity becomes full of presence. Mindfulness leads immediately to gratefulness. Before you are leisurely, you can never be mindful. You’re just running around like a chicken without a head. We do this most of the time; we’re so busy, we don’t have the time to breathe. But the moment we become leisurely, we allow ourselves the luxury of balancing work and play.

Balancing, by the way, means doing it at the same time. If you don’t work leisurely, you can’t spend your free time leisurely either. These days people have more and more free time and less and less leisure, because when their free time comes they are either so exhausted from their work that they simply collapse, or they are so in the groove of working that the only thing they can think of is giving themselves an hour workout. The leisure never comes.

We are talking about a balance that is built in, balance between the clear purpose you are achieving and the meaning you are receiving. To the degree that you become mindful you recognize that you are not doing so much but that it is all given to you.

That is how you become grateful. You suddenly recognize every moment as a given moment and every situation as a given situation and you realize that we live in what we call a given world. We usually only call it given when we don’t like it much; we say, “Well, we just have to deal with this given situation.” At least at those moments we remind ourselves that it is given, because it is given. You haven’t made it, you haven’t earned it, you haven’t brought it about in any other way; everything is given. The only appropriate response is gratefulness.

Gratefulness is the great task, the how of our spiritual work, because, rightly understood, it re-roots us. Think a little bit about your moments of gratefulness, about how you act when you are grateful. Think what is involved when you simply say, “Thank you,” and mean it. We are not talking about big events, where you are almost drowning and somebody pulls you out. We are talking about when you are carrying five packages and somebody holds the door open and you really mean it when you thank them. Or when somebody gives you a present and you say thank you.

The first thing is that you trust the giver. You trust that they didn’t hold the door open for you because they have some hidden agenda. You trust that this little package, although it is the right size and weight, isn’t a little time bomb. When we say thank you, we usually think we are expressing our appreciation for the gift, but that is not true because we haven’t seen the gift yet. We trust it is a good gift.

So the expression of thanks is really an expression of trust, and that trust roots us in religion, in that religion which underlies all the religions and alone makes those religions religious. That religion has to do with trust and faith. Faith is not beliefs. Beliefs can even get in the way of our faith. Faith is first and foremost trust: trust in the give r – and even before we think of a giver, trust in life. Religious beliefs are not the measure of our religiousness; trust is – deep existential trust in life. That roots us in the spirit.

There’s another aspect to gratefulness. In order to be grateful, to say “thank you” and mean it, you have to be open for a surprise. Surprise is almost a synonym for a present. I gave her a present; I gave her a surprise. Even if she knows what she is going to get, it’s still a surprise that she gets it.

Life itself is always surprising. The only thing that we know for sure about reality is that it is surprising. If it isn’t surprising, it isn’t real or true, it’s just make-believe. And so that aspect of gratefulness which has opened us for surprise, roots us in reality.

The religious term for openness for surprise is hope. Hope does not mean that we are absolutely sure that the best is going to happen. Rather, much more than that, it means that the worst that we could imagine will be the best. That will be the surprise. Openness to surprise is not only an openness to reality but also to the source of all reality, the Divine. Surprise may be the only appropriate name for God. Every other name boxes God in, but if you call God “surprise”…

"If we say thank you and really mean it, we have said yes to our belonging together."

The third element – the most important one – about being grateful is: a joyful acceptance of the bond established between the giver and the thanksgiver. In tribal societies, when you bring presents to the head of the village, it’s a very important ritual. It is an attempt to establish bonds. The exciting moment is when you come with your gift: Will they accept it or not? From the moment your gift is accepted there is a bond. You are a guest and no longer a stranger.

Bonds are established when you say thank you. You enter into obligation. Nowadays we don’t like obligations. When I learned English 35 years or so ago one could still say “very much obliged” instead of “thank you.” In America you can’t say “very much obliged” because nobody wants to be very much obliged. When people move into a new neighborhood they say “Let’s not start gift-giving with our neighbors, it just creates obligations,” as if this were something unpleasant.

If we say thank you and really mean it, we have said yes to our belonging together. We have said yes to the fact that we are receiving something which under no circumstances can we give ourselves – a present. It’s always another from whom I receive. When we cultivate that gratefulness to life, we not only cultivate trust in life and openness for surprise, we practice again and again saying yes to our limitless belonging to this great Earth household. That roots us and makes us at home; it gives us that great at-homeness.

Therefore, we can say that the great spiritual work for our time, in the sense of re-rooting us in life and aliveness, is learning to be grateful. It is cultivating surprise not only with unexpected things, but all the more with expected things. It is cultivating that trust and that yes to our obligations where each one is obliged to every other and the world is a network, a great Earth-household in which all belong together.

Reprinted from One Earth (Findhorn Foundation): March/April 1986
(Vol. 5, #3, pp. 6-9).