Gratitude Lounge

G’day, I wrote this for the blog on this site about a year ago but as I’m pretty horrible with referencing I didn’t end up doing that so I thought I might post it here. It’s probably better posted here anyway 🙂 Hope That’s ok…
Grateful Hiddenness
By Craig Irving

I’m a nobody but let me tell you a secret… it’s wonderful. Let me explain. Gratefulness is something I’ve wrestled with for a long time. I first came across it via G.K. Chesterton almost twenty years ago, “Joy doesn’t produce gratitude. Gratitude produces joy.” I still remember the feel of the cool, cushiony deep green grass I was sitting on, the late afternoon orange glow of the Aussie summer sun on the trees in the distance and even the warm and humid wind on my skin when those words leapt off the page for me, glowing. I sat for days, weeks, months with that statement and had no idea what a powerful and secret guiding light it would become. It eventually led me to my spiritual teachers. 

If there’s a concrete destination to the spiritual journey, it most certainly embodies our increasingly becoming as hidden as God. Thomas Keating presents a beautiful picture of this reality in his talk, “Transformation According to Therese of Lisieux, Part 1”. He explains that quite often we are presented with a God of victory and success, a Being offering wealth, good health, the overcoming of all circumstances and every blessing under the sun to all those who go through the proper rituals, follow the appropriate moral instruction and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (by “faith” of course). What my spiritual teachers have taught me, and which Keating explains so eloquently, is that this is simply myth. The reality is that it’s in what we perceive from our tiny vantage points as calamity, abandonment and the loss of all these things when God is closest to us. This is what makes grateful living so radical. It recognises how reality works.

The first thing I was taught by my spiritual teachers, and which I tell anyone who will listen (which isn’t many), is to apply nothing to yourself that you can’t apply to the “least” of us, not because you should or must or have to, not because it’s spiritual or “progressive” or “emergent,” not because that’s what good gurus do but simply and ordinarily because it’s the fastest way into truth, beauty and goodness… and it’s free. Unfortunately, that’s a journey many aren’t willing to take because it doesn’t look good, it often doesn’t feel good and it means letting go of almost everything we lost and crazy humans think is important (perhaps and more likely it isn’t a choice for those who do go down that particular road. We go kicking and screaming much of the way). It means becoming a nobody, not as a costume to dress our egos in (“Look! I’m a nobody!”) but as a beautiful reality. Only nobodies know Nobodies in the Hidden Kingdom, where being a somebody is simply too boring and burdensome, a pointless waste of energy, like building old and mouldy pillow-fort dwellings in spacious mansions or acting on a stage nobody’s watching.

I suspect many of you guys know full well by experience that trying to give this gift of radical grateful living is like trying to offer a hurricane carefully caught in a bottle or a bucket of water from a wild and raging river. “Here! Look at this… oh.” It’s the atmosphere of those who live daily in the hidden kingdom, where nobody cares what letters you have after your name or whether the buttons on your shirt are askew or you dribble when you eat. But the gold of Elfland turns to dust in the “real world.” And yet, on the other hand, trying to tell people about it is all there’s really left to do. It’s just too good to keep to yourself even if nobody wants it, much like how God secretly yet “completely gives Itself/Herself/Himself away in and as the concrete immediacy of our lives,” no matter how inadequately we’re able to respond… Love just gives because that’s what love does.

We live in a world in which we were sold a lie early on that being a somebody is the name of the game. And it is a game, an ultimately dreary game, built on ever shifting comparisons, the illusion of scarcity and the absurdity of competition… and yet it seems quite often to be the only game in town. It keeps us firmly established on the “circumference of our lives.” I stopped playing some time ago (though I regularly get dragged back into it) when I realized life, real life, is found not in being a somebody but in how you choose to see.
Annie Dillard, one of my favourite writers, put it this way, “When the Muse comes she doesn’t tell you to write; She says, get up for a minute. I’ve something to show you. Stand here.” To stand in the place of radical gratefulness will open your eyes to the truth that being a nobody, deliberately choosing to become as hidden as God, is a breathtaking place to stand. It is a place of ease and abundance and playfulness. You get drenched in goodness, truth and beauty and it shines and overflows from the centre of everyone and everything. Often, and when you least expect it, joy bubbles up from that centre and fills your mouth with laughter at the absurdity of ever having thought that being a somebody mattered at all.

Have you ever seen the light in someone’s eyes, someone the world has forgotten, someone so hidden that they rarely even get looked at let alone talked to, when another fellow nobody sees them as they are and takes genuine interest in them because they are our brother or sister? Worlds are created with that light 😉 Love explodes into Beauty at the meeting. Most of us know nothing of the true power of gratefulness. A teaspoon can topple kingdoms. Go and see.