Gratitude as "the new thing"

“Radical gratitude begins when we stop taking life for granted.”

                                                                                    -Mary Jo Leddy, Radical Gratitude

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isa. 43:19)

                                                                                  

Gratitude is on my mind today. Not some kind of rose-colored glass gratitude, a hazy gratitude that pretends all will be sunshine. Not a gratitude of oughts: “you ought to be thankful; see what he gave you? Did you remember to write your “thank-you” note?” No I am thinking about a gratitude that helps us see more clearly and doesn’t shy away from the shadows, a gratitude that springs forth by realizing our fragility as creatures.

This morning while I was at work, my husband called to tell me that an accident on the main drag, the route we drive every day, claimed the life of an elderly couple that had attended our church. The roads weren’t good on this snowy first day of spring.  To process the news, I began some conversation with a co-worker and customer about accidents in general, about driving, about death. It wasn’t a rosy conversation but a real one about how “you just don’t know.”

I could say, then, that the response to tragic news is gratitude: hugging your children tighter, embracing and not cursing a March snowfall, awareness of the inhalations and exhalations that tell us we are alive. This is all fine, of course, but I have always been inspired by the wise counsel of Mary Jo Leddy in her book Radical Gratitude, counsel that opens gratitude to more than private thankfulness.

“Gratitude will forever remain a nice and sometimes comforting attitude until and unless we also consider whether or not we have the power to make changes in our lives and in our world,” urges Leddy. This is, I think, the perception of newness Isaiah calls us to. “The new thing” begins of course, with gratitude. But how does this awareness of the giftedness of life—our own, one another’s, the creation itself— lead to creative power?  And how does gratitude open us to another’s pain rather than make us fearful of losing what we have?

More musings on those questions as we continue on this Lenten journey.