Expanding our capacity for gratitude

Hello dear readers,

For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a happy one! The Daily Quaker Message spent the last month exploring the theme of Gratitude. In early Quaker texts, this sentiment was more often communicated as “awe” before God, and we read excerpts from journals where a feeling that began as reverence for the Divine moved Friends to feel thankful for life’s blessings.

Though gratitude isn’t one of the Quaker testimonies, engaging in gratitude necessarily means engaging more deeply with Quaker values and is a tool some Friends use to help them enter into worship. Paired with humility, a gratitude practice can be a transformational force of compassion and set the practitioner up to choose happiness, even in times of suffering.

Tomorrow we begin a month of messages on the theme of Rest and Quaker Retirement. Each of us deserves rest — not because we’ve “earned” it or because we are preparing ourselves for productivity, but because we have divine light within us, inherent value. These messages will explore the relationship between rest and spirituality, the idea that we can be outwardly busy but inwardly resting and prayerful, and the Quaker concept of retirement, routinely setting aside time for a devotional practice.

In friendship,

Maeve Sutherland
Editor of the Daily Quaker Message

Reader Responses

How do you share your gratitude with others?

By cherishing, recognising and focusing on other people’s strengths, even when they have wronged me. By being patient and kind, genuinely being pleased to spend time with others, and always making eye contact when speaking an individual. 

For me, this stance helps to avoid inauthentic actions from a position of ‘having to’. Rather, I genuinely see the ‘good’ and feel thankful that I can.

Rob L., Peterborough, Lincolnshire, UK
I am not wealthy, but I usually have a sense of having plenty of whatever is needed. I read somewhere that the one thing the very wealthy never have is enough. This gave me pause.

Fact is, I have enough plus a little extra, and a friend who doesn’t have quite enough. For a few hours each week, this friend helps me and I compensate her, with cash and perhaps a dozen eggs or a chicken from the Halal grocer.

My sense of gratitude for a clean house, a weeded vegetable patch, or a bag of bulbs tucked in the warm autumn ground supplements my feeling of having enough, plenty even. There are times when I find myself absolutely giddy with gratitude.

Patricia S., Bon Air, VA, USA

This Week’s Messages

Mon Nov 24

The key to a happy life

“Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy — because we will always want to have something else or something more.” …
Tue Nov 25

Behind the Scenes of a Quaker Media Startup

It’s been a little over two years since we embarked on this journey to give Quakers a platform in the digital age. We believe Quakers have something to offer in the 21st century, and by telling our stories and exploring our practices, we can both deepen and broaden the modern Quaker movement …
Wed Nov 26

Baking pies in God’s presence

“Many years ago, I was present at a monthly meeting for business seeking to discern whether to hold worship on Thanksgiving morning. Thinking of all the work I would be facing that morning, my contribution to the discussion was, ‘You all can go ahead and worship Thanksgiving morning, but I will be home baking pies.’ As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt humiliated. How could I make such an unworshipful comment? Wouldn’t Friends think me a bad Quaker for prioritizing pies over worship? After the business meeting, many Friends responded to my comment. To my surprise, none scolded me. Instead, many seemed astonished that anyone knew how to bake homemade pies anymore. Reverently, they said, ‘You bake pies?'” …
Thu Nov 27

Celebrating Thanksgiving as a Grand Sabbath

“Rather than ceding the major holidays to corporate America, I believe that it is time to reclaim them. Starting with Thanksgiving. We are a nation that is over-worked to the point of exhaustion. We are a people desperately in need of Sabbath. Sunday was once widely reserved as a time of rest and worship, but now it is considered fair game by many employers. Even those of us who are privileged enough to be exempted from working weekends have largely lost the rest that our ancestors once knew. If we do not spend our weekends putting in extra hours on our electronic devices, we are out shopping, chauffeuring kids around, and generally catching up on all the unpaid work that we had to defer during the week.” …
Fri Nov 28

The most precious element in life is wonder

“When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion and power is power but both love and power are based on wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, animal consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which many called the religious element in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense.” …
Sat Nov 29

I am terrified and astounded to find myself here

“When I consider the short extent of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space that I fill or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces unknown to me and which know me not, I am terrified and astounded to find myself here and not there.” …

Banner art by Olive Rush

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Author

  • Maeve Sutherland

    Maeve Sutherland is a communications professional who never recovered from her wonderful childhood at a Quaker elementary school. She has spent her career helping nonprofits share their stories, from schools and universities, to museums, to radio stations. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Maeve spent a year living in “Peaceable Kingdoms,” pacifist intentional communities around the world, where she learned that everyone has a role to play in shaping a better world. She worked as a freelance social media manager before joining Thee Quaker Project.

    After returning to Quakerism as a young adult, Maeve now attends Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting in Philadelphia.

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