08 05 11 Gratitude

Gratitude is an attitude that a person has to learn and nurture. That has been true for me, and I believe it is true for others. There are always problems that we have to deal with, and I don’t want to minimize these, but it is too easy to become so fixated on today’s problems that we lose track both of all that has happened in the past to make the present possible.[1] When I contemplate such things I am filled with gratitude, both for the amazingly complex past that makes my present possible, and for the amazing potential for the future to which our present existence is contributing.


It is this attitude of gratitude that helps me appreciate that all things have their purpose. I thought of this the other day as I was eating a salad made of home-grown greens. The salad included a variety of lettuce-like ingredients, plus onions, tomatoes and a garnish of flowers on top. It was a wonderfully flavorful blend, and beautiful.


On the other hand, eating flowers is a relatively new thing in my awareness. I usually think of flowers as having two purposes: procreation and beauty. I was amazed to discover that flowers are really quite tasty—who would have thought that they were also for eating? Not me. Occasionally, I had seen them on salads in restaurants, but I really thought of them as beautiful garnishes, not as something to eat. When Cindee began putting them on salads and insisted they were edible, it was a great surprise.[2]


This quality of the flower for tastiness was the quality I fell back on last summer when I made a mistake fertilizing the bok choy cabbage. We had learned that urine is high in nitroge and, when diluted with water, makes a great fertilizer for plants that tolerate high acidity. Since our composting toilet separates out the urine, I thought I would try making some homemade fertilizer out of it. Unfortunately, I fertilized a bit too often at the wrong moment in the bok choy life cycle, and the bok choy bolted. With amazing speed, the bok choy developed five-foot tall vines and rapidly went to seed—without developing the desired bok choy cabbage heads.


I was so frustrated, of course; we had all that bok choy, but no cabbage to eat. Then it occurred to me that those pretty yellow flowers on the vine should be edible. We put them on our salad that night and discovered a fabulously tangy new garnish! As we experienced once again, though I had made a mistake in fertilizing nothing has to go to waste. In this case, I was able to take joy even in a mistake.

An attitude of gratitude is necessary if I am to be able to embrace new ideas and new possibilities. Without it I am left with the perception that everything needs to go my way and needs to happen in a predictable way. Life does not unfold that way, nor does God operate in our lives that way. One does not have to be much of a scientist these days to recognize that we exist only because of billions of years of evolution—which means we are here only because of the innovation present in all creation through an amazing sequence of events over billions of years. One does not have to be much of a scientist to recognize how grateful we all must be for all that has come before us, and for the enthusiastic creativity that has been present in creation from the beginning.


For Christians that creative tendency in creation comes from God, who initiated creation in the first place (through the big bang—and very probably from something les knowable that can be thought of preceding the big bang). But God, who is the creative force beyond creation, is also present in and through creation. It is God that inspires this capability of self-transcendence over time that brings us into existence at all.


If gratitude is what makes possible the innovations I enjoy in my thinking and acting, then I wonder: is gratitude also what makes evolution possible? Could it be that the enjoyment of greater possibilit

y is at heart a God-thing? Could it be that enjoyment and possibility has much to do with what a relationship with God is all about?


And what about my other human beings? Am I able to be grateful for the differences present in them—even when those differences complicate my own life?


Maybe I’ll think about this some more…over a salad garnished with flower blossoms.

[1] Not to mention the fact that in the present we get to contribute to that same string of events as our contribution to the future’s potential.

[2] Some plants are not edible. Monks’ Hood, for instance, is downright poisonous. In Alaska this has led to a rule of thumb that a person should not eat purple flowers.

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