Gratitude: Seeing the Holy Amidst the Ordinary

              I believe living lives marked by gratefulness is an essential quality to develop in one’s Christian life. We are abundantly blessed. First and foremost, we are loved and forgiven by the eternal King and Creator of the world. However, in a world like ours, cultivating grateful lives and hearts can be an arduous, difficult and seemingly impossible task. We, instead, are so easily tempted to live lives of grasping, a constant "chasing after the wind" (Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind”). Especially, for those of us in North America,  who call ourselves Christ-followers, we can become seduced into thinking as our wider North American culture thinks, wanting more and more. We need to get certain things: popularity, material possessions, or, for those of us in schooling, certain grades. This insidious desire for more necessitates that we become vigilant cultivators of gratefulness. Christ’s sacrifice calls and equips us to live differently. I would like to explore how gratefulness can be gardened and cultivated in our lives.
            The novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is a novel whose characters simply radiate gratefulness: In other words, Gilead oozes with gratefulness. This novel follows an elderly pastor as he prepares to die. He does so, by writing a book-length letter to his young son. Throughout this novel, its main character and speaker, the Reverend John Ames expresses gratefulness. For example, John Ames will often conclude ordinary and simple experiences about preparing dinner or watching his son play outdoors with the cat, Soapy, with the exclamation: “Ah, this world, this life.” This expression is as if to say “Thank you, Lord for this experience. For this, too, is a gift.”
          In one of these scenes, John Ames finds himself able to appreciate the holy within the ordinary task of construction. A local church in Gilead has been struck by lightning. John Ames and his father go to repair this church. Recounting this story later, John Ames is able to see holiness in the midst of an ordinary moment of repairing and constructing: “I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me a biscuit from his scorched hand, with the old blackened wreck of a church behind him..........I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.” Because John Ames knows and appreciates the cost of Christ’s sacrifice, he is able to see a moment filled with brokenness (repairing the burned down church) as a beautiful, even holy moment. John Ames receives the ashy, broken morsel of bread from his father, himself a blackened and soot-covered man helping repair a broken church. In Gilead we are taught to see the world with John Ames’ eyes of gratefulness, able to see beauty in the broken.
          These eyes of gratefulness are the eyes with which we must learn to see the world. Gilead reads, in many ways, like a narrative prayer. In much the same way, Christians must live lives which amount to narrative prayers, filled with gratefulness. Practically, speaking I have found keeping a journal to be very helpful in fostering a spirit that is able to see one’s experiences with a grateful, even prayerful, spirit.