Infinite Gratitude

Most all but the die-hard Nihilist recognize that a sense of gratitude is a worthy virtue.  Talk show hosts and their gurus promote gratitude—even suggest that one should start the day with a list of at least three things for which to be grateful.  The thank you card business seems to be doing well.  Walmart does what it can to promote your welcomes and thank yous.  Thanksgiving Day still happens once a year, every year.  And yet real gratitude is a much rarer experience in the lives of men. 

In order for gratitude to be experienced as a virtue, one must experience what it is to be grateful beyond the fleeting moment in a day. Gratitude, in the most meaningful sense, is an approach to life and an understanding of one’s position in relation to the forces that surround him.  The experience of gratitude is a humbling one for man and is preceded by the recognition of his insignificance within the universe.  When man is able to see his inconsiderable self among the billions of stars, alongside the massiveness of the planets, within the expanse of the galaxy, and across infinite time, then he is prepared to be thankful.  When fully bathed in the knowledge of his irrelevance, man may then notice that despite his utter lack of ability to stand against the infinite, he lives. 

The universe, definitively beyond man’s grasp, has recognized man and gifted him—gifted him with breath and thought and feeling.  And from breath and thought and feeling springs all that man may create.  The mere possession of these gifts does not dictate whether man will create that which is good or bad, productive or distracting.  These gifts are not a guarantee that man is a favored child.  The motion of forces that have granted man his breath and thought and feeling is just as likely to destroy all that a man has created.   But the first of these gifts (breath) is a guarantee that man exists, inexplicably and undeniably.  The remainder of these gifts (thought and feeling) grant for man’s existence that for which he might hope, aspire, dread, question and embrace.  Ultimately the power to wield these gifts in a boundless universe and to know that we wield no power at all in a consuming scape--of sea and air, gas and wind, gravity and anti-matter, propulsion and implosion--is the very reason to know complete and unreserved gratitude.