Attention is a form of prayer. —Simone Weil
The season of gratitude is upon us. It’s plugged from every pulpit, platform, card, and commercial. It breathes down our necks as we max out our credit in gifts and gatherings. We drop money into the cups of beggars and buskers and feel a generous thanks in the air. Volunteers passing out warm food to those who often don’t get much of it could follow that loving act all the way back to a conscious gratitude for being a Have and not a Have Not.
When they’re not inspiring anxiety, the traditions concentrate our awareness of our love connections. We embrace our friends and relatives, children and pets, servers and co-workers, stopping just short of letting in the holy stranger at the door. We float on a rich, red-and-green wave of seasonal music, food, and décor, yet we are often blind to the origins of present-day gift-giving.
In an earlier time, a single piece of fruit or candy was given to a child to accompany a bedtime story involving high-class royalty bringing small gifts of gratitude to a classless infant born in the middle of nowhere, whom they sensed was — as ridiculous as it seemed — going to be influential.
But the word “gratitude” has been dulled, weighed down with non sequiturs (“Eat your food — children are starving in India”), relativity (“at least be grateful for what you do have”), rote protocol (“let’s go around the table and say what we’re each grateful for — then we can eat”), humiliation (“I did that for your own good, you ungrateful punk!”), supplication (“Dear Lord, I’m so grateful you took pity on an insignificant worm like me”), and eye-roll-worthy doggerel (“rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub”).
There is another way, a form of Thank You in sweeter words that rise up as clear and unstoppable as bubbles in champagne.
I discovered it in myself a few years ago as a fluke, while walking alone in Wellfleet. As usual, I was pondering the nature of God (another overloaded G-word).
Thinking of the story of the blind men defining the elephant by the body parts they happened to grab, I imagined that musicians, so aware of sound, must think of God as the ultimate musician. Mathematicians, so aware of patterns, must see God as the ultimate mathematician. Artists, so aware of physical beauty, might see God as the ultimate artist.
And then I, the artist, looking at the blue wavelets glittering across the inner bay, said, in overwhelmed appreciation, “I see you. I see what you chose to do with this glittery stuff!” A sudden tide of pure delight welled up in me, as if the Source of All Art had enjoyed my mere recognition.
It isn’t the same as our Outer Cape habit of commenting on how lucky we are to be able to walk in this beauty whenever we want. It was, instead, a sensation of intimate and mutual recognition, as wonderful and surprising as a helium balloon.
With practice, I found I could apply it to anything and consistently get the same giddy result. Nature, of course, is easy pickings — the flying swan, the staring fox, or that drenching light, the color of fire, igniting the treetops as the sun sinks.
But awe-full awareness can be just as easily turned on by the serene pattern of a chain-link fence, or the sorrow-song of an ambulance siren.
For a different frisson of “divine appreciation,” I sometimes play the game of choosing a manmade object — headphones, perfume, spoon — and deconstructing it all the way back to its ultimate origins, whether it is the oil underground, or the roots in the soil, or the design sketched on a piece of paper.
I don’t know why our cultural version of “gratitude” denies, and maybe even condemns, this spiritual high. There are better words to evoke an alternative gratitude, bound to no season and requiring no conditions: awareness, attention, recognition, stopping (e.g., “by woods on a snowy evening”), be-ing, stillness, wonder.
You know you’ve achieved it when you feel glad just to be alive to experience it.
