Rolheiser on Gratitude

Reflections for Thanksgiving

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

With Thanksgiving this week, I’ll be back to writing a full newsletter next week. I’m excited that the Defining Deconstruction series is finished and am personally so thankful for the feedback I’ve received from it. I hope it’s helpful for thinking through an issue that’s personal to so many people right now.

I recently read two books by a Catholic author, Ronald Rolheiser. The books were Sacred Fire and The Holy Longing. Both are phenomenal, but Sacred Fire spoke to my soul in particular.

With Thanksgiving tomorrow, there were a number of quotes in Sacred Fire regarding gratitude and our maturity in Christ. I found these encouraging and even challenging, so I wanted to share them with you.

Gratitude, both in terms of our recognition of our need for it and our expression of it, is ultimately the basis of all virtue.

Gratitude is the basis of all holiness. The holiest person you know is the most grateful person you know. This is true too for love: the most loving person you know is also the most grateful person you know because even love finds its basis in gratitude.

The real task of life is to recognize… that everything is a gift and that we need to keep saying thanks over and over again for all the things in life that we so much take for granted, recognizing always that it is nobodies job to take care of us.

The highest compliment we can give a gift giver is to enjoy the gift thoroughly.

Our level of maturity and generativity is synonomous with our level of gratitude—and mature people enjoy their lives.

Happy Thanksgiving.

— Ian