Do you remember a night when you stood outdoors looking
up at the stars, countless in the high, silent dome of the sky, and
saw them as if for the first time? What happened?
Eugene O'Neill described his experience this way: "For
a moment I lost myself--actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved
in the...high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within
peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own
life...to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way." [You
may have good reasons for not putting it that way, for not using the
G-word, but in any case you have caught a glimpse of "something greater"
than your limited self.] "For a second you see--and seeing the secret,
are the secret. For a second there is meaning!"
In the second that follows, you may hear your heart calling
out, "Thank you, thank you!"--"to God, if you want to put it that way,"
or to no one in particular. But let us steady our focus on the second
of gratefulness before thankfulness. Why do I call that wild joy of
belonging "gratefulness?" Because it is our full appreciation
of something altogether undeserved, utterly gratuitous--life,
existence, ultimate belonging--and this is the literal meaning of grate-full-ness.
In a moment of gratefulness, you do not discriminate. You fully accept
the whole of this given universe, as you are fully one with the whole.
In the very next moment, when the fullness of gratitude
overflows into thanksgiving, the oneness you were experiencing breaks
up. Now you are beginning to think in terms of giver, gift, and receiver.
Gratefulness turns into thankfulness. This is a different fullness.
A moment ago you were fully aware; now you are thoughtful. Gratefulness
is full awareness; thankfulness is thoughtfulness.
The thought pattern of giver, gift, and receiver does
not have its origin under the starry sky, but in a social setting. Under
the night sky, "I lost myself" in gratefulness. In my exchange with
people, I find myself cultivating thankfulness. I receive kindness from
a giver who in turn becomes receiver, when I return kind thanks. The
gift exchanged is always kindness. There need not be any tangible gift;
kindness alone will make me thankful. Barter is an exchange in kind;
thankfulness, an exchange in kindness. Kindness implies mutual belonging.
The word itself makes us aware of this: Just as we like those who are
like us, so we tend to be kind to our own kind. Even kindness to a stranger
expresses some sort of kinship, some recognition that all human beings
belong together. This awareness is only a mild ripple compared with
the tidal wave that swept over me when I lost myself and realized that
I belonged within something greater than my limited self. Yet, in every
joy which kindness triggers, flashes a flicker of that wild joy of limitless
belonging. After all, the kinship that shows itself in kindness is simply
one particular instance of that cosmic kinship which unites me with
all humans, animals, and plants, with the very stardust out of which
all is made, and with its secret Source.
Since all gratitude celebrates belonging, we can understand
the inclination of the human heart to project thankfulness back from
social to cosmic belonging. But when we super-impose thankfulness on
our primordial gratefulness, we have to be extremely careful not to
press the conceptual framework of giver, gift, and recipient too far.
Otherwise, we end up with a god who is just another person, and whose
kindness is measured by the gifts we receive. This has landed not a
few religious people into the trap of dualism, where they sit chewing
on the old conundrum, How can God be kind, yet give us gifts which we
cannot possibly recognize as tokens of kindness?
In your grateful moment under the starry sky, you do not
experience yourself as separate from a giver who may or may not be kind,
but seeing the secret you are the secret. At that moment of meaning,
"the world is accepted," as Abraham Maslow, the psychology pioneer who
coined the term, "peak experience." put it. "The cognition that comes
in peak-experiences...can best be described as non-evaluating, non-comparing,
or non-judging cognition.... Evil itself is accepted and understood
and seen in its proper place in the whole, as belonging there, as unavoidable,
as necessary, and, therefore, as proper... [Such] universal understanding
would never blame or condemn or be disappointed or shocked. Our only
possible emotions would be pity, charity, kindliness, perhaps sadness
or amusement. But this is precisely the way in which self-actualizing
people do at times react to the world, and in which all of us react
in our peak-experiences."
Our conceptual framework will inevitably shape experience,
but we must make every effort to correct our concepts by ever-alert
attention to experience. Within a given religion, the mystics play this
role by emphasizing experience. Gratefulness is the mystical dimension
of gratitude, thankfulness, its theological one. Thankfulness can, indeed,
be grafted onto gratefulness where it will thrive and bear rich fruit.
The history of spirituality proves this fact. But mysticism must continually
correct theology.
Something similar is true of our personal lives. Gratefulness
must continually flow into our thanksgiving to make it full. Remembering
our moments of ultimate belonging determines to what extent we find
ultimate meaning. Why do we so rarely step out through this door of
remembrance into joyful aliveness? Could it be that the mystic gratefulness
in the depth of every human heart sings with "a still, small voice,"
and is easily drowned out by the noise we endure and the noise we make?
Maybe we need more silence. Maybe we simply need now and then to look
up at the silent stars and lose ourselves to be set free.