Learning The Deep Bow of Gratitude and Happiness - Bro. David Steindl-Rast - Centered Leadership
People often ask me how Buddhists answer the question: “Does God exist?”
The other day I was walking along the river. The wind was blowing. Suddenly I thought, Oh! The air really exists. We know that the air is there, but unless the wind blows against our face, we are not aware of it. Here in the wind I was suddenly aware, yes it’s really there.
And the sun too. I was suddenly aware of the sun, shining through the bare trees. Its warmth, its brightness, and all this completely free, completely gratuitous. Simply there for us to enjoy.
And without my knowing it, completely spontaneously, my two hands came together, and I realized that I was making gassho. And it occurred to me that this is all that matters: that we can bow, take a deep bow. Just that. Just that.
If we were able to experience this fundamental gratitude at all times, there would be no need to talk about it, and many of the contradictions that divide our world would at once be resolved. But in our present situation, talking about it might help us at least to recognize this experience when it is granted to us and give us courage to let ourselves down into the depth which gratitude opens up.
We can begin by asking ourselves: “What happens when we feel spontaneously grateful?” (It is, of course, this concrete phenomenon which concerns us here, not any abstract notion.) For one thing, we experience joy. Joy is certainly there at the basis of thankfulness. But it is a special kind of joy, a joy received from another person. There is that remarkable “plus” which is added to my joy as soon as I perceive that it is given to me by another, and necessarily another person.
I can treat myself to a delicious meal, but the joy will not at all be the same as if someone else treats me to a meal, even though it be a little less exquisite. I can prepare a treat for myself, but by no means of mental acrobatics can I be grateful to myself; there lies the decisive difference between the joy that gives rise to gratitude and any other joy.
Gratitude refers to another, and to another as person. We cannot in the full sense be grateful to things or to impersonal powers like life or nature, unless we conceive of them in some confused way as implicitly personal, super-personal, if you wish.
The moment we explicitly exclude the notion of personality, gratitude ceases. And why? Because gratitude implies that the gift I receive is freely bestowed, and someone who is capable of doing me a favor is by definition a person.
A joy, even though I receive it from another, does not make me grateful unless it is meant as a favor. We are quite sensitive for the difference. When you get an unusually big piece of pie in the cafeteria, you may find yourself hesitating for a moment, and only when you have discarded the possibility that this may indicate a change of policy or an oversight, you take it to be a favor worthy of a smile for the fellow that hands it to you across the counter.
It may be difficult in a given case to say whether the favor I receive was meant for me personally. But my gratitude will depend on the answer. At least the favor must be meant for a group with which I am personally identified. (When you wear a monk's habit you not infrequently receive a bigger piece of pie or some other unexpected kindness from someone you never met before and who you will never meet again. But there, the people do mean you, in so far as you are a monk, and it is quite a different case from the painful experience of smiling back at someone only to discover that the smile meant not you but someone who stood behind you.)
via gratefulness.org Bro. David Steindl-Rast
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