A Note on Gratitude: On Which the Scientist and the Clergy Can Agree

As I reflect on what I’m grateful for this year, there is one theme that continues to stand out. This is, of course, beyond the most important things I’m grateful for—which are my family (among many things) and the basic necessities, from food to shelter to healthcare to freedom, that many around the world are desperate for. Still, during the holidays, I try to look back on what specifically, in a certain year, uniquely stands out as a gift.

This year, it is the growing wonder of sheer existence.

In our online store, we have a tote that we made alongside FEED. The graphic includes the odds that you exist: 1 in 10^2,685,000. That probability is, quite literally, pretty much zero.

But it’s not just the odds about you, but the best friend who holds your secrets, the lover who sees you, the children that come through you, the dreams that propel you. The sun that rose today and the bread that will rise on Thanksgiving Day. Everything happening everywhere, all the time, is an improbable, inexplicable gift. And should we be able to lift the “veil of familiarity” that makes it so hard to see, I believe it’s possible—at least—to live in the knowing of that improbability. To find gratitude at every turn and not only on a certain turkey-filled Thursday.

And, it turns out, experts on every side are finding awe is something we can agree on. This week, I found myself holding two voices at once: Richard Rohr on one side and Neil deGrasse Tyson on the other. One in a friar’s robe, the other in a star-speckled lab coat. And yet here, in this week of gratitude, both pointing to the same truth.

Rohr writes, “Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it."

Tyson says we won the greatest lottery ever held: “…each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises, and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe.”

The mystic and the astrophysicist
standing shoulder to shoulder,
reminding us that gratitude isn’t an emotion
so much as an orientation—
a way of turning toward the world,
eyes wide open to its improbable beauty.

Wishing you and yours a very happy Thanksgiving.

With gratitude,

Katie