Mom would frequently quip that she’d recognize us kids as fully formed adults when we finally remembered to bring our own Kleenex with us so as to not be perpetually dunning them off of her. Proud to say this suggestion took hold around the age of 27 for me, and I have been dutifully tissue-toting ever since. Bring ’em with ya’.
What mom was really trying to impress upon us was the need to plan ahead. To do something before it became abjectly imperative. To anticipate. I’m grateful to mom for having instilled this in us, and I apologize to her for not having extrapolated the concept to include umbrellas. I have thusly learned that it takes a lot of tissues to blot up rainwater that otherwise could have been deflected by an umbrella that I anticipated needing…
But thanks, Mom.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we hosted our annual Planes, Trains And Automobiles watch party. Each guest was given a quote from the movie on a small card, and when the line occurred in the film they were invited to stand up and offer an expression of gratitude for something this past year. Many of those expressions were quite personal and moving. In some cases, people even expressed thanks for challenges and misfortunes in their lives.
Since then, I’ve been reflecting a bit on gratitude and its contribution to hum. And the little bumper sticker line that keeps playing in my mind is, “Don’t just share it, wear it.”
The most important prayer in the charism of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (known more commonly as the Jesuits), is the Examen. Prayed at intervals during the course of each day, the prayer invites a person to set aside time to sequentially become aware of God’s presence, review the day and recognize failures, ask for forgiveness, and imagine forward one’s self in greater imitation of Christ. This sequence, in repetition each day and perpetuity through life, comprises the core structure of how we come to know God more fully.
Now there is an often overlooked aspect of the Examen that establishes the disposition one is to bring at the onset of it and thereby profoundly sets the worldview of the participant. Ignatius makes clear that we are to come to the Examen with a disposition of thankfulness. At the start. No matter how well the day or the week is going, begin with gratitude. And that is where “wear it” comes to be.
The shackling effect of understanding thankfulness singularly in retrospective is that it must inherently include a component of evaluation. We get to decide what we’re grateful for based on our sense of appreciation of it – how it made us feel, the impact it has had on us. Thanks for the lined slippers, for picking me up at the airport, for letting me know I had spinach stuck in my teeth. These are all things which would be evaluated as a net positive.
But what if we flipped gratitude and tried to see it as something that is ever-present, not merely a periodic endcap to life’s perceived blessings? What if thankfulness was a lens to life instead of a response to it? How would life hum if gratitude was future-facing and not only retrospective? Think about that for a moment.
How could we be unwavering in something that is future focused when the future hasn’t happened yet? The past lends itself to certainty much better, no? The answer perhaps is to reimagine gratitude as something by which to cast our sights within our lives; to orient how we see the richness of life in its entirety.
There is, without question, an additional vulnerability to such a disposition because life is going to hand you lemons. Irrepressible optimism can be naive and problematically out of tune with the gravitas of life’s challenges. I’m not suggesting that life should be led in pollyannaish fashion.
Instead, I’m inviting you to consider thankfulness in a manner that is cousin to courage; as something you bring with you as an antecedent to each day, knowing that doing so will not ensure seamlessness, seashells and balloons along the way. The steadfast understanding of that marks the difference between foolishness and faithfulness.
When I have encountered people who carry this light of antecedent gratitude, I have witnessed the transformation of gratitude from effect to cause. Their disposition brings illumination to the life ahead of them, which morphs potential problems into manifold opportunities. There is an authenticity to them that is immune to circumstance. They understand life, both in its intricacy and its composite, as a gift. And as such, they become gifts themselves – they share it because they wear it. They hum.
Oh, and don’t forget some Kleenex too.
One Response
I loved the idea of considering “thankfulness in a manner that is cousin to courage.” This perspective has given me a fresh way to approach the Examen—with the courage to truly revisit my day, present myself in total vulnerability to Christ, and be emboldened to become more like Him. Thank you for this inspiring new insight!