“Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.  I may express this other feeling of cosmic coziness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence.  Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea; the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck … It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything – the coalscuttle or the bookcase – and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island.  But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hairbreadth escape:  everything has been saved from a wreck.  Every man has had one horrible adventure – as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light.  Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius, and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been.  To me, it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great-Might-Not-Have-Been.” – GK Chesterton, excerpt from Orthodoxy

We have been taught much about the importance of an “attitude of gratitude” and seen much of how a spirit of ingratitude and entitlement destroys a culture.   So, many of us already go through our daily lives and count the things we can be grateful for.  But I have also been pondering how deep that gratitude actually goes.  We thank the Lord for this or that intervention, gift, or experience; but have we really wrapped our minds around how precarious it all is?  Like Crusoe, flung upon an island, counting every single scrap that washes ashore as a boon from heaven?  It very well might have washed out to sea, never to be seen again. 

For God, the cosmos is a playground.  For us, it is a wild and unpredictable frontier.  We like to believe we have control, but we really have very little, if any.  Gratitude forces us to face that reality head on – we must admit that someone or something else is at the back of it all. Do we have the courage to look at our lives through the lens of deep and astonished gratitude at the miracle of Having Been? 

Do we have permission to ponder the depth of God’s intention in making us?  David describes this level of gratitude magnificently in Psalm 139.  CS Lewis puts another spin on it when talking about the perspective of the angels. 

“To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.”  From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.” – CS Lewis, excerpt from That Hideous Strength

God limited Himself to a finite expression when He made the universe and countless billions of times in human history.  Every time He makes a person.  When He made me.  When He made you.  He chooses to take from the eternity of His essence and spin out of it a uniquely finite creation.  You. 

I ponder the immensity of God who is vast beyond all our comprehension, choosing to leave the realm of infinite imaginative possibilities and just make one thing.  Many of us know what it is like to dwell in that fabulous realm of “what could be”.  Everything works out the way it is supposed to there.  I can’t even imagine what that realm must be like to God.  Perfect though He is in execution, He still has to narrow Himself down to one expressed reality.  And He chooses to do that over and over again. 

A new kind of gratitude I hadn’t savored before.       

I see our gratitude as a path to a destination.  Whether for the small daily hugs or the vast cosmic miracle of creation, it is a means to an end.  It is crucial to our well-being because it leads us somewhere outside of ourselves. 

I believe that is why gratitude is a fundamental building block for practicing awe.  It is meant to lead us to God with a heart that is ripe for worship.  So many flavors of awe can flow from the foundation of gratitude.

So, how can we practice it more?  I would encourage you to look at your life and determine if gratitude flows easily, and if it does, where.  Is it in the small, daily things?  Is it in the cosmic wonder of the journey?  What if you were to expand it into a place where it doesn’t already exist?  How can you make the range of your gratitude more robust?  Just practicing what comes easily doesn’t grow us.  I think it is will worth our while to invite God to show us where we could expand our capacity for gratitude – where does it matter to Him that we are not already expressing it?  What do we constantly miss, whether it be simple or profound?   

Let’s each explore with Him how we can anchor this foundational building block deep, strong, and wide.