Here are some exercises to heighten your sense of gratitude. They were written by my friend Vinita Wright and published in her book Days of Deepening Friendship. Create a physical space in your life, in which you can focus on and enjoy creation. It could be a single potted plant or window box, a bird [...]
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In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius Loyola often urges us to “pray for what you want.” Here’s a short talk from a TED conference about doing that. The speaker talks about praise, gratitude, and saying “thank you.” (Click here if you can’t see the video.)
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This is a guest post by Joseph Durepos. We are all living the unlived lives of our parents and our culture. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Now we speak of dysfunctional families. We’re wounded by our beginnings, even if we just [...]
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The season isn’t quite right for this poem, which speaks of “leaping greenly spirits of trees,” but it’s my Thanksgiving poem nevertheless. An achingly beautiful hymn of gratitude. i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is [...]
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As I get ready for Thanksgiving Day I’m thinking of Speedy, “a thrill seeker in the world of project gangbanging,” as the Jesuit Greg Boyle describes him in his terrific book Tattoos on the Heart. Speedy hailed from a broken family, left the gangs, worked his way out of the projects, and made a life. [...]
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A friend of mine was stuck in traffic in New York City late on a summer Friday afternoon. He was really stuck—sitting in his car on a narrow east-west cross street in Manhattan, going nowhere. He grew impatient, then angry. After a while, he started to think about how pitiful his life was. His friends [...]
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Here is a deeply moving poem of gratitude by Franz Wright, a poet who draws on his work with addicts and the mentally ill. One Heart It is late afternoon and I have just returned from the longer version of my walk nobody knows about. For the first time in nearly a month, and everything [...]
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A psychologist named William van Ornum will be writing regularly on America Magazine’s “In All Things” blog about the intersection of Christian faith and psychology. In his initial post he writes that one common denominator is Ignatius’s exhortation to gratitude: “I will call back into my memory the gifts I have received–my creation, redemption, and [...]
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i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and [...]
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I’ll bet that you already know and love this week’s Ignatian song, but tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. There’s no better time to listen to Louis Armstrong sing “What a Wonderful World” again. It celebrates finding God in all things. Hat tip to Rick Malloy, SJ, for the suggestion.
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