Gratitude as Practice

 Gratitude as a Practice — The Deacon’s Prayer and more

I closed last week’s writing with “ . . .  Let’s let gratitude be its own improvable characteristic, its own practice that we can use Lent to refine, take root, and continue throughout the rest of our lives.  

The changes we are hoping for are gifts from God.  Let’s start with gratitude and then ‘do Lent.’”

So how might we improve our practice of gratitude?  First we could acknowledge that gratitude can be adopted.  We need not wait on some rush of inspiration — although God’s spirit is involved — as if gratitude only happens to us not from us. 

We can discipline ourselves, even set our clocks to remind us when to be grateful.  It will not take very long at all for your focus to shift as you repeat your list and acknowledge those gifts of relationship and circumstance in your life for which you are thankful.

Minus acknowledgment, everything — even someone we love — can shrink and settle into fixtures or obstacles to our preferred intentions.  That’s why “the Deacon’s prayer” is best said as we wake and with these words, “Lord I thank you for getting me up this morning.”  

BTW, if you forget to start the day with gratitude, just be ready to be grateful after you realize you missed the start.  Gratitude begun at noon is still gratitude.

As your practice develops you’ll start to prepare for the moment.  Your “inventory” will grow and change. Soon gratitude will become more than the act of acknowledgement.  It’ll eventually become a lively part of how you meet new people and circumstances.  

I’ll admit that if you put me in a room full of horse manure I’d start looking for a pony.  But you don’t have to be that crazy to be grateful.  Just allow the possibility that something good is waiting to be found.  I’ll bet you’ll find your anxieties decrease and your blood pressure go down, too.

I’ll have more later but to close let me say that my practice is not some post-new-age-meme-based- self-hypnosis. It is an attempt to be faithful to a God who has allowed us freedom for the sake of love.  A God who has all bona fides of which my life enjoys only a fraction and understands first hand what it means to choose and to act for the benefit of others, to see the potential for good in everything and to give thanks for the calling to serve. 

This season of Lent is going to help us to see Jesus’ journey to the cross as a labor of divine love and we can make our way — one Deacon’s pray at a time — onto that path to follow him with our gratitude. FrDann