Dave Brisbin 11.30.25
Gratitude and thankfulness are not the same. 

I see thankfulness as a positive reaction to a specific gift or circumstance, and though gratitude begins there, it journeys on to a non-specific attitude, a view of life that is all-inclusive, sees everything around us as a gift we could never give ourselves. Once we’re aware that life is the free reception of what we could never give ourselves or repay, that repayment is not even required, any sense of entitlement vanishes. 

Jesus said the highest form of love is loving the enemy: loving—identifying with—someone who had not earned the right to that gift. And the flip side: the highest form of gratitude is being thankful for something we believe we have already earned. We can’t know love until we know gratitude, the opposite of entitlement, the ability to see everything as a gift no matter how hard we work.

What blocks this ability? To help us survive, our brains have adapted to focus on anticipating and solving problems, to start from a base of scarcity and fear. This makes us quicker to react to challenges, but jealously entitled to what we can catch and kill. Jesus rejected scarcity, started from a base of abundance, that everything God has and is, is already ours, within us. Even as we struggle for the legal tender, using our minds as survival guides, our job spiritually is to learn the balance of remaining thankful for each gift we earn, let thankfulness incite the journey to gratitude.

Gratitude is an umbrella term, covers and includes all positive emotions, excludes the rest. You can’t be grateful and depressed at the same time. Or angry, anxious, envious, entitled, victimized. Literally impossible. So what does gratitude feel like? Like enough. No more or less than just enough. Enoughness is the feeling we call gratitude, which feels like happiness, fulfilment, meaning, purpose.

We can’t create gratitude. It’s what happens when we begin to see everything in our moments as gifts we could never give ourselves—let go of the complexity, calculations, judgment upon which our minds insist. Instead of scarcity, see the abundance of each moment as enough.

Gratefully Enough

Dave Brisbin 9.20.20
Still talking about presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way and the contemplative prayer that will take us there. When Moses came down off the mountain with God, his face was shining, and when contemplatives and mystics come back from their experience of presence, they say strange things to try to express themselves: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.” (Rumi) What are we to make of such words? When Jesus says unless we hate our fathers and mothers, children and even our own lives, we can’t follow him, what are we to make of that? Truth is, trying to understand the words of those who come back from the experience of presence is like trying to understand the equations on Einstein’s blackboard—a dense wall of numbers and symbols that stops you in your tracks with its sheer incomprehensibility. It’s not until there’s enough of a change in our minds to allow the beginning of a change of habit, habitual action in the direction of the practice of presence, that we’ll get our first inklings of what Jesus, the contemplatives and mystics, and perhaps even Einstein are trying to express.

Einstein's Blackboard

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Gratefully Enough

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