The radical power of gratitude
Photograph by Marcos Paulo Prado via Unsplash
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf
Gratitude is one of the most underrated virtues of all time, or at least it was for me. I spent most of my life never being satisfied with anything. No accomplishment was big enough to satisfy my appetite. I’m still ambitious, but I’ve found a different sort of balance based on gratitude and contentment.
The feeling that what I have is enough was not easy to come by, but now that it’s a part of my life, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. Contentment naturally leads to a sense of gratitude for being here and now, a sort of thankfulness that rumbles just beneath the surface of my life. Perhaps that’s why gratitude is underrated – it’s not a very showy thing.
You can be grateful in a multitude of ways, of course. You can be thankful for a variety of things, circumstances, or experiences, and you can be grateful to God, a spouse, friend, or just the universe. It is an astoundingly pliable feeling.
The constant thread that unites all these various ways of expressing our thanksgiving is an awareness of ourselves. It is impossible to be grateful if we aren’t even aware of what’s going on in our lives and how we feel about it. That might sound like an easy task, but in my experience reflection and awareness don’t come naturally to most people.
Rather, it is a skill to be learned. One of the places that I’ve learned it is my meditation practice, where I am forced to simply breathe in and out for an extended period, acknowledging my thoughts as they come up. Before I started this practice, my thoughts spent so much time refocusing myself on the next task that I could lose myself for days at a time.
Gratitude opens the door to one of the greatest gifts of all time – community. Alone, resistance is impossible; together, united in gratitude, I think we can change the world.
This all came to a head for me when my therapist asked how I was doing. I rushed to give a handwave of “fine,” but I realized that I couldn’t give an account of how I was feeling because I simply didn’t know. The therapy appointment was just another thing on my to-do list that I was checking off to get to the end of the day. I decided right then and there that I would like to know more about myself. Over time through therapy, I reconnect with who, what, and where I have been.
The person I discovered was using a list of tasks to accomplish as a way of proving my worth to myself and to others. If I could work hard enough, then I could make sure everyone knew how valuable I was. But that’s a death trap, and the only antidote I know is gratitude.
That’s because gratitude is a fundamental rejection of the logics of capitalism, individuality, and hustle culture. Gratitude puts us in a frame of mind not to acquire more, but to marvel at what we do have. It helps me not to see my accomplishments as my own, but to gaze in wonder at how I was supported the entire way by a community of people who made my life possible.
That fundamentally altered my connection with God. As a pastor, I naturally oriented my gratitude towards something, and this reorientation helped me see the ways that I had received so much grace, care, and compassion without deserving it in the least.
When we become grateful, we not only learn more about ourselves, but we can do things for others too. In recognizing how we are all interconnected, we can be bold in helping others and being a part of their story. Gratitude opens the door to one of the greatest gifts of all time – community.
And we certainly need a lot of community these days, as we face the advance of authoritarianism. Alone, resistance is impossible; together, united in gratitude, I think we can change the world.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf is senior minister, Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois. He currently serves as the co-associate regional minister with the American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. His book, published in 2023 by T&T Clark, is titled “Sanctuary and Subjectivity: Thinking Theologically about Whiteness and Sanctuary Movements.” He is also the co-founder of Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland, an initiative that brings together people of all faiths to counter Islamophobia from a religious perspective.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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