Brother David Steindl-Rast in his book Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer, says that surprise starts gratefulness in us. He uses the image of a rainbow when we first glimpse it; how surprising it is and how it gives us joy and gratitude. Steindl-Rast offers other examples of striking moments and then he says some surprises are less striking and non-the-less give us joy and gratitude.
I think of times one of my children has called just to say hi, to catch up, to share some news.. Always a bit of a surprise and always makes me happy and grateful. There was a time when I would not have noticed my own gratitude, my own joy in that experience. Not, though, I’m even gratefula dn happy that I am aware of it.
I have mentioned Rabbi Shai Held in this blog previously. I find him to be brilliant in parsing the sacred scriptures of Judaism. He holds a world view that I can readily grasp and hold as my own – and I am grateful to him.
So why do I bring up Rabbi Held? Because this morning I read one of his commentaries on Exodus. Rabbi Held asks us to consider that besides being a story about the enslavement and liberation of Israel and a foundational story for Judaism, Christianity and Western culture in general, Exodus is also a story about gratitude and ingratitude. Very simplistically: Moses was successful in liberating Israel because of his gratitude; Pharaoh failed due to his ingratitude.
It’s a complex reflection/ argument that I could not do justice to here but if you’re interested get The Heart Of The Torah Volume 1 by Held, turn to Shemot #2which is titled “Gratitude and Liberation.” The last paragraph reads: “…to be grateful is a powerful manifestation of freedom – the freedom to live a life infused by mutuality and reciprocity. In allowing ourselves to be grateful, we free ourselves from the prison of our own self-enclosure and become available to meet and be met by others.” The thinking that gets Held to that paragraph is subtle and profound and worth reading.
My own take on it, today, the 14th of June 2025, is that the difference between a grateful Moses who liberated Israel and the Ungrateful man in our White House is shown by the use of force to frighten and imprison those who disagree. It is not lost on anyone what the military parade is about: not impressing the friends and foes of the United States but rather intimidating the citizens who think that this country is about something other than fear of neighbor. The lines of gratitude and liberation and ingratitude and enslavement are being drawn.
Try getting into your heart a feeling of gratitude for what you have; It will make you feel free.
Many years ago several college friends and I went on an all night pot fueled crawl around Spokane. We wandered down and up deserted streets, climbed through brush up the South Hill, made our way to Cliff Park just in time to see the dawn. I was pretty repressed in those days so when my friends all proceeded to proclaim their awe at the sunrise, I was trying to understand what that was all about. Later, as we were nearing our campus, still pretty early with few cars on the road, they again hallelujahed the cloud formations that crossed over the sky, complementing the rising sun. What I became aware of was that they had learned to see beauty and to find joy in it and to express admiration for it – and I had not.
I didn’t try to figure out why I was unable to appreciate the beauty (that would come a lot later) but I knew that I needed to open up to the beauty and joy of the world. It’s been a long hard road. I thought I had become pretty good at it until I met my wife a few years ago. Openness to the beauty and joy of the world is her life style and I have turned out to be a downer for her – at least sometimes. But I have learned how much more free and alive I could be if I could grow in appreciation of the beauty of the world; allow myself to see it, to hear it, to feel it – even in that which I do not like. Now there’s a task I was not cut out for but I’m working at it just the same.
I can tell you that it’s a loving, living circle of awareness breeding gratitude breeding more awareness… I will never reach the level of profligate gratitude and joy that Patty has. What I have learned, though, in working at it, is that I am able to share my appreciation of others, who may value it even more coming from someone who’s pretty stingy with compliments. To see their faces break into a smile or even a grin at being appreciated makes my day – and I want more of that.
In my life I have not often felt gratitude. I am more aware of the things that annoy me than of the things that I appreciate. Partly that is due to the nature of being alive: we notice the things that make us uncomfortable so that we can avoid danger or death. Because we are immersed in life we forget that life is a gift – all of it. To be grateful for life, for our very own lives and the lives of others is what makes life worth living, in the end. For by the end, we don’t usually remember the annoyances, we remember the loves and the joys. Working with dying people, I have seen this over and over. But what a waste to wait until we’re on our last legs to appreciate it all.
As far as we know, we are the only animal that has the capacity, the gift of awareness of this gift and to experience the joy of our awareness, our consciousness and of everything that life offers us. Human beings are unique so – as far as we know. I have not noticed that we are grateful for the capacity of awareness. Generally we seem to be arrogant about it, like we earned it but we did not. Consciousness is a gift that we received through the process of evolution. This gift of consciousness can be used to create higher more sophisticated awareness that would truly create a better self, better relationships, a world but we have squandered that gift for the most part by using our consciousness to exploit that which has less sophisticated awareness. It’s too large and complex a topic to go into here.
I believe that each of us has a core part of us that is grateful and that that is what keeps us alive and creative, joyful and related. It seems like the air we breathe. If we take the time to realize what we have been given to give thanks for it, I am convinced that we assist in the evolution/ creation of the world.
And when we realize that it’s all gift we may be lucky enough to realize gratitude in our hearts – for heat too hot to go out in; for a cloudy sky; for the mosquito that just took a nip of our tasty blood – and, hopefully, did not gift us with malaria or something even worse. We’re talkin’ gratitude, thankfulness and it’s not just about that Turkey dinner every November.
There is literally nothing in the world that is not gift, including the world itself. Brother David Steindl-Rast makes that extraordinary claim in his book gratefulness, the heart of prayer. We Americans always like to think that we made it happen. Believe ourselves to be in charge of our lives and to owe nothing to anyone (excepting our credit card debt, of course.)
It’s hard to not take the weather for granted; or not take the trees in the forest for granted or your best friend. They’re always there, right? Of course the reason we are not grateful for them is that we no longer take them as gifts. We unwrapped that package years ago and now it belongs to us and we hardly even see them. Unless. they suddenly disappear. It is our awareness, the greatest gift that we have been given, that we no longer appreciate and no longer nurture, that we have most taken for granted but that we should feel the most gratitude for. After all, it is our awareness, consciousness that allows all of the other things that we are capable of to grow and blossom.
As with anything else, however, if our awareness stagnates so does our appreciation of ourselves and others and of the world around us. And if we only nurture negativity in our awareness the world seems nothing to be grateful for. Sometimes we’re not even grateful for the gift of ourselves because our awareness of ourselves is negative. We were taught that negativity, no doubt, but then WE have to nurture it – and that’s a choice.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep paying for this blog site. I don’t post very often and mostly no one reads it. But every once in a while I am reminded that I have something to say – even if only to myself. I have a lot of thoughts about that having recently read Louise Penny’s 1st book in which one of the detectives sees a mirror, in the bathroom a victim’s house, with a note taped to it. The note says: You are looking at the problem. The detective is sooo self involved that she is unable to connect that cryptic message to herself. Ironic, no? I could go on about this but it’s not what I came her for. Also, I had a conversation with a friend about gratitude and I am reading a book in which the main character reminds me of myself and it’s not flattering. I told you that to tell you this:
I came to say Thank You.
I know but continually forget that gratitude improves one’s life. My ego-nature is to notice what’s painful or wrong or disgusting or negative in any way and focus on that. I have become aware that my shadow self is actually grateful – but I seldom express that gratitude. And I have soooo much to be grateful for. Right now I am grateful for the realization that my true self is grateful – especially compared to my ego self. I would rather my true self be out there than my ego self. I am grateful for the realization that I will feel and be better if I make a point of expressing gratitude regularly – even if only to myself though it would be better to let others know that I am grateful. That causes ripples, you know?
I have actually made this effort before but I quit after a year because I had met my goal of doing it for a year. That’s like an alcoholic starting to drink again when he gets his AA 100 day pin. The effort was lost and now you’re worse off than you were before. I have to work the program; not self righteously but humbly, having surrendered to the higher power of gratitude. I recognize that I am powerless over my ego self but that gratitude can help to manage it.
Years ago I had a life crisis that forced me to look at my self and who I thought I was. That started me on a journey of re-assessing my perceived self on a regular basis – mostly because small crises continue to arise. I learned that though the facts of my self narrative don’t change much, my understanding/ the meaning, of those facts and of my narrative do change. So now, approximately 40 years after the 1st crisis my self understanding has undergone a lot of change and as a result I feel much more whole than I ever had. I am so grateful for all those crises, small and large, that brought growth to me, evolving me as a person into someone I like.
Recently, my wife, Patty, and I had a small crisis, that caused her to look again at her self narrative. She is a remarkable woman. I know that taking stock of her story was painful for her but she did not flinch. She is quite courageous and a very loving person. When Patty realized that her understanding ow her own self identity was in need of revision she did it. She hah talked to every person that she needed to speak with, to assist with her in even better self-understanding. Now, I am used to this sort of thing so the process for me is not quite as formidable. For Patty, it was more of a challenge but when she begins a project she gets it done. No doubt there will be other occasions for her to do a life review but this was the big one.
We all need to do narrative reviews, preferably on a regular basis. Ignatian/ Jesuit spiritual practices give us a very good tool for continuing awareness of our self understanding called The Daily Examen. In years past, Catholics had devolved the Examen into a kind of examination of conscience before going to confession. These days, we have returned the Examen to a examination of consciousness. In other words, a toll to see where in our day we have become more wholly alive and where we have diminished in our aliveness. Another way to say that is: where have come grown closer to our true selves (Thomas Merton’s term) and where have we slipped away from our true selves. If we also have a spiritual director or friendly mentor with whom to go over the examen we are doing ourselves a favor.
12 step programs have a similar tool and process with their 4th step: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves; and 10th step: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admit it. I love the 12 steps. They work for anyone whether the have an addiction problem or not. In my opinion 12 step is the most powerful spiritual practice on the planet that is available to any person. It doesn’t require a church but it does require people who support each other in their spiritual practice.
My personal inventory at this crisis was more or less easy for me because I have had to do it so many times. Patty has not but she really went after it. And continues to do the work. I really admire that and I am grateful to have a partner that I can count on to help me with mine.
PEACE and LOVEYA,
RON
PS: Really old photo of us. I somehow lost most of my more recent pictures.
A long time ago, when I was just a lad unaware that the world is capable of endemic evil becoming a pandemic. that actual event happened in these United States when Joseph McCarthy and his crony and Trump mentor Roy Cohn instigated hearing on Capitol Hill to investigate communist activity in the US of A. Specifically they targeted The Army although most of us only know about the Hollywood witch hunt. McCarthy was finally brought down when the Counsel for the Army, Joseph Welch asked McCarthy as the senator slandered a young officer; “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
As I grew up, I learned about these things and also learned that we have to work to preserve decency in our democracy. I did not ever think that our democracy of die of indecency. And yet, here I am today, mourning, grieving, wailing over the death of decency as a guiding principle of our people. And everyone is infected, including myself. We all have our own ways of coping with what has just happened politically, but in that coping, we need to take a hard look at our own personal selves. Because it was not just a few far right crazies that brought about the birth of an immoral, unethical government. It was all of us; mostly by shrugging 0ur shoulders and saying things like “I don’t talk politics,” or “what can you do, that’s how things are.” There have been plenty of responses that were even more negative but what it all amounts to is a cancer of indecency.
I do not choose to attempt a solution to the problem of our current political situation. That will evolve in it’s own way. What is important is that, however it evolves, we respond with decency. And, for many of us, that involves finding out what decency means. We’ve lost sight of those simple things. Some people will think that decency involves sexuality. That’s the farthest thing from what it means.
Decency means giving your word – and keeping it; assisting your neighbors when they need help – even if we don’t really like them; respecting people’s privacy; telling the truth; making sure we have facts before we spread stories about people or events. Decency, simply put, and in the greatest beliefs of every spiritual tradition, means “to love your neighbor as yourself.” And more than that, Decency means that we take the time and expend the energy to learn what loving your neighbor really means – to them.
There are lots of books written on the subject of loving your neighbor. Go for the classics and those writers who build on the classics. Those are time tested, trusted approaches. but don’t be too afraid to explore further afield because those classics were often written when our understanding of who human beings are put together was sketchy, at best. The Torah, the Christian Bible, The Q’uran, The Vedic scriptures; when you dig into them deeply, you will find that they all give the same formula for seeing the divine in one another and thus how to love as the divine does. And there are mentors out there in the world: at the nearest monastery – of whatever faith tradition; maybe at your local church, synagogue or mosque; maybe even among your friend and family.
All this palaver with my brother about being a stranger; how growing up in our house left us all with PTSD (I didn’t tell you about that) and trying to get him to talk about it left me open to karma coming ’round. Taking the beam from one’s own eye is a lot harder than you’d think – emotionally and psychologically. Fortunately, when you get to the place of wanting to remove that ego support, The Spirit is there to assist. Robin to my Batman? Nah. More like providing the guidance and energy to root into the ground of my stuff and bring up the truffles.
Over the years I have done a lot of work to deal with my own trauma and I did pretty well, I think. Oh, but thinking such things is really just cockiness, isn’t it? So I am reading David James Duncan’s Sun House which is quite an ambitious book that doesn’t quite flow the way one would hope. On the other hand when an author delves into mysticism (the real stuff not the watered down pablum that most people these days are into,) he or she sets a real high bar for themselves. The fact that Duncan almost carries it off is to his credit, I promise.
Half way through the book one of the characters is challenged by Jervis, the ragamuffin mystic, who walks the streets of Portland following the guidance of Ocean, to do his heart work. I felt very much like Karma knocking at my door, yelling IT’S TIME. Following the lead of the book’s character, Jaimey, I began to examine my own unresolved resentments and hidden away fears, angers and even love.
it didn’t take five seconds to realize that I had uncovered a trove of noxious suppressed ego defenses that needed to be managed and let go of in order for me to grow in my ability to love others and to become my “true self” as Thomas Merton would say. So Now I’m on a side trip that must be finished in order for me to get where I want to go. I have to say: I am grateful for the Karmic nudge.
I have tried to share and elicit thoughts/ feelings/ attitudes from my brother about the whole ger/ stranger thing. Even though my experience of being a stranger is less profound that Ger’s, we both came up in a nomadic family and were strangers in new places over and over. My brother is an extrovert so this constant newness seemed less problematic. He could always meet people but he hardly ever made lasting friends. The pain of always losing people that we had connected with and grown close to and never got a chance to grieve has been with both of us. My luck or blessing is that over time I was more able to develop friends that stuck.
When I reach out to Ger and inquire what his experience was/ is, he is unwilling or unable to tell me. Probably a little of both. My own experience is that I have had to work very hard as an adult to learn to recognize my feelings experience, learn how to articulate it and learn how to be vulnerable enough to share it. This is still all pretty hard for me. I can manage it with a couple of trusted friends and with my kids for the most part. I try to be vulnerable enough with Ger in the hopes that that will help him to think about and share his experience. So far – no success. But he doesn’t shut me out and I take that as progress.
Now I know that there are many people who grew up nomadic and they are much healthier than we are emotionally. There are also many, maybe many, many more people who were even less emotionally health than we because of other issues within the family unit. Our family had issues, for sure, but they did not involve serious physical or any (as far as I know) sexual abuse. So you could say that we were blessed in that way. We were all raised with a connection to God, to Jesus the Christ and to The Holy Spirit, for which I and all my siblings (7) are grateful. Those connections are that which has allowed us to be in the healing process.
It’s a good thing too, because without that healing, my current relationship would be a disaster. My wife, who is widely seen as a saint amongst friends and family struggles with me. I get it. I am difficult. But my process allows me to fail and keep trying to care for someone who always does her best by me and seldom sees any response beyond a shrug. I am learning from her how to be better responsive. Slow process but she doesn’t give up. A Woman of Valor.
Camel Through the Eye 