Grateful Heart

Small Bowl

“And for us, for many people in our culture, the heart fills up with joy, with gratitude and just at the moment when it wants to overflow...at that moment,, advertisement comes in and says, 'No, no, there's a better model, and there's a newer model, and your neighbor has a bigger one.' And so instead of overflowing, we make the bowl bigger and bigger and bigger, and it never overflows. It never gives us this joy.”

Br. David Steindl-Rast (On Being; interview with Krista Tippett, Dec. 21, 2017)

Benedictine Monk, David Steindl-Rast, who is now in his 90's, compares our hearts to the bowl of a fountain. While the bowl is filling with water, there is relative silence. But when the bowl fills to the top, and water begins to run over the edges, it becomes noisy. When our hearts fill with gratitude, we experience happiness in a quiet way, but when the joy begins to overflow, we often sing and shout and dance. He distinguishes between gratitude, gratefulness and thanksgiving, and says we can not always be thankful for what life gives us, but we can still be grateful in every moment.

I don't know about you, but right now I'm not singing and shouting with thanksgiving. I have the respiratory virus that's been going around, so I'm pretty miserable. What I can be grateful for is that I know a little bit about what to do to relieve the symptoms, so I can sleep at night. I had a childhood full of compresses--Vicks VapoRub on the chest with a warm cloth over it; hot water compresses over the sinuses, and other home remedies. I also appreciate that I can go down to the local pharmacy and buy whatever over-the-counter medicine I need. Not everyone has that ability. Even in the midst of misery, we can, if we choose, find gratitude within.

David Steindl-Rast was a child just after WW I, and remembers the battered veterans sitting on curbs of destroyed cities. And he was a youth in Austria during Hitler's brutal campaign—so not everything is his life was an overflowing fountain of thanksgiving. Still, his devotes his life to the practice of gratitude—as founder and senior adviser of The Network for Grateful Living, and as an author and teacher. No life, if you live long enough, is exempt from pain and tragedy, but every life has something in it to celebrate. It's not a bigger bowl we need, just the willingness to allow our small bowl to overflow.

                                                          In the Spirit,

                                                               Jane