Breeze on Bare Skin and Gentleness of Every Kind: A Gratitude Collage

Breeze on Bare Skin and
Gentleness of Every Kind

A gratitude collage inspired by Christina Hutchins' Thanksgiving note
in Facebook (2013) and her poem "Beautiful Our Waiting"

created by Jay McDaniel

Christina Hutchins' Thanksgiving Note

Dear ones, I am thankful for you. & for the meadowlark who has chosen a nearby roof-ridge. For the compassionate flow of the cosmos continuing while we rest. The leading edges of storm fronts over the Pacific. For time befriended. Old growth Redwood forests & days spent among them. Coffee made by other hands. Spontaneous laughter & serious concentration of beloved children. For wooden building blocks. Pens. Paper. Eyeglasses. Maybe even for the sadnesses that tell us how deeply we stain one anothers' lives. Typewriters. Boots. Strangers and the neverbefore. Beethoven's terrible dedication to making, Alfred North Whitehead's, Judith Butler's, & the poets'. For the funny canned cranberry sauce that in a few hours will ride shotgun, a measly contribution to the most generous of feasts, but desired anyway. For breeze on bare skin & reaching to play our hair after illness. For gentlenesses of every kind.

-- Christina Hutchins, posted on Facebook, November 28, 2013

Gratitude for Christina Hutchins
Reciting "Beautiful Our Waiting" in church.

Gratitude for handwritten Thank-You notes

With so many digital means of communication available at the touch of a button, taking the time to write a thank you letter by hand and send it via snail mail may seem antiquated. And maybe I’m just naively digging in my heels hoping the elegant simplicity of a handwritten letter will not become a lost art. Admittedly, any type of thank you note is better than none, but why not do something that’s great and handwrite your thanks?

-- Lisa Schmidt

Gratitude for beautiful people who have known suffering and teach us what life is about

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

—Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

I think some of the most beautiful people that Kübler-Ross talks about are not only the dying, but also those with dementia and those who care for them.

- Joanna Seibert

Gratitude for Smiling Flight Attendants

It was my first time to the U.S. and I was very excited. Although I speak English, I was still unsure about what would happen amid my three transfers to a foreign country. Everything turned out wonderfully. Part of this was due to the grace an kindness of the flight attendants. Perhaps you have read the Analects of Confucius. You remember the Analect which reads: “Isn’t it a great thing to have friends come from afar?" This Analect can be interpreted in many different ways.

Who are the friends whose "coming from afar" is "great"? Perhaps you think of friends as people you already know know. In this case you will only be kind to those with whom you are familiar. You will smile at friends, not strangers. But another way -- call it a constructively postmodern -- is to think of the friends as strangers: that is, as people you have never met before, and who are not part of your social network or family, whom you approach as friends.

-- Han Sun

Gratitude for Tortoises and Birds

I have heard that if one swan dies, her partner won’t leave her easily. So with the elephant. But I have never experienced it in person. After this event, I began to pay more and more attention to the birds. I noticed the moment I opened the door that they began to sing happily; once I let them out of the cage, they would follow me around in the room. It seemed they wanted to share things with me. So unlike before, instead of caging them, when I was home, I let them out.

The tortoise and the bird experiences let me understand: If you keep a distance from something, you can never get to know it well. Then fears and misunderstandings come out. As a tiny part of the whole world, we need to understand other things and connect with them. I mean if my son had not kept a tortoise at home, I would never have known how much happiness a pet can bring to children. It is not just fun; it is a dialogue between two lives; it is a connection between two different beings. When the birds follow me here and there in the home, I feel the same connection now.

-- Songhe Wang (Harbin, China), The Tortoise and the Bird

Gratitude for Hanuman

Some people have asked me if I “believe” in Hanuman. That’s like asking me if I “believe” in love. We can understand Hanuman (and the other gods and stories) as archetypal, and that understanding has been helpful for me over the years as my relationship with Hanuman has developed – it gave me handholds in what was becoming a mysterious, and sometimes surprising, experience of utter love and amazing boons. Finally, I just let go of the handholds. I let go of explanations. I rest in Oneness. I merge with Hanuman and find within Him and the stories the timeless truths and boundless love that guide this mystic’s path. Chanting the Hanuman Chalisa opens my heart, reminds me when my soul is captured by fear or insecurity or uncertainty that there are forces at work to bring me back to who and whose I am through the power of spiritual practice.

-- Beth Johnson

Gratitude for playing music with other people

If I've been playing with someone for a number of years, there is a reason for that, and when I say, "I love you", I mean it. Not being an especially social person, there is no way I would have the depth of friendship that I have with so many people without having spent hours and hours of performing and wordlessly communicating with them.

-- Chris Mosley

Gratitude for imperfection

Through the years, process thought—especially process theology—helped expand my narrow, severe, impoverished view of myself, God, and the world into a lovely, widening landscape of beauty, love, and letting go. The psychological effect of process theology helped me slowly regain my health and, eventually, flourish. Yet when, as a professional minister and teacher, I encountered anorexic girls, I related to them only as an objective professional, keeping my own "imperfect" past to myself. But now I am too old and life is too short for such distance and pretense. At least that's what Karen Carpenter was telling me with her voice from somewhere in heaven.

I realize now that my essay was not so much imperfect as it was too perfect. It lacked the embodiment of my own imperfect authenticity—a personal story that might help someone who is suffering. Now, with this added postscript, the essay feels authentic, wabi-sabi—an imperfect offering.

-- Patricia Adams Farmer

Gratitude for Tai Ji when you thought it was just for old people

That's me on the right. I am from Sechuan Province. I am twenty-one years old, studying at a university in the United States. I am taking a Tai Ji class. Here is the character for Tai Ji: 太极. You will see some classmates, too. One of them is from Africa. Tai Ji may seem Chinese, but it is also global. It is one of China's gifts to the world.

I have always been curious about Tai Ji. Growing up in China I never did it. I wanted to do it and I was attracted to people who did it. There seemed to be a peace inside them. But I was too busy to be at peace.

I also like the ideas behind Tai Ji, which came from Taoism. I liked the idea that the universe has a kind of balance and the idea that we can live in balance with the universe (宇宙).

-- Xu Lin

Gratitude for Feminist-Shamanic Art

D Ellis Phelps

Gratitude for Cornbread made by your husband

Joanna E S Campbell

Gratitude for Rural Women

Maxine Payne

Gratitude for Grateful Eating

By grateful eating I mean more than putting food in your mouth. I mean eating with a conscious awareness that the food comes from true heroes and heroines of our world, the farmers, and that it comes from a mother whose life is in some ways richer and more precious than anything we can easily imagine.

In traditional China many people had a sense that the natural world was the larger context of our lives. If we are to be happy said the Taoists, we need to live in harmony with the Ten Thousand Things. Amid our urbanization we forgot this. We came to believe that we should subdue the earth and conquer it, rending it into our own image.

What good son of Confucius would subdue his mother? What good daughter of the Tao would subdue the earth? Is it not possible that in a postmodern China we will recover the arts of grateful eating and realize that every meal is an occasion for thanksgiving?

-- Songhe Wang

Gratitude for people who take long hikes

Thomas Oord

Graititude for Kirtan and Mantras

Here is what I notice about kirtan and process thought: What comes to mind is, like process thought, kirtan affirms the individual and the community. What I mean is that when we do kirtan in a group it is still a solitary process, we are experiencing our own relationship with the divine…we are feeling God in our heart and we are opening our hearts in response to God. When we do that in a group we are also having a collective experience. Our voice join with the voices of others and becomes one with them, even while retaining its uniqueness. In this way kirtan affirms the individual and the whole.

I think about why and how singing the mantras can transform the world. I say this because there can seem to be a focus the individual benefits of this spiritual practice without an emphasis on the rest of the world or, especially, on activism. I have had to think about this because I’ve wanted to reconcile my kirtan practice with my work in the world, which lately includes a very real urgency for what I believe is a need for radical revolutionary change.

-- Beth Johnson

Gratitude for Albert Camus

I was a teenager when I read the Albert Camus novels The Stranger and The Fall.

As a budding atheist, I resonated with Camus’ views that life was replete with unexplainable suffering, alienation and apparent absurdity.

By Grade 12 in North Vancouver, I was carrying around in my wallet a card with a maxim from one of Camus books. I had written on it: “Whatever does not kill me strengthens me.”

That existentialist assurance captured an attitude I needed in the 1970s — the conviction that, even though life seemed intimidating, unfair and a little crazy, it was worth taking risks in the name of a full and adventurous future.

I would not end up being an atheist, but I would never give up my respect for the passionate man who was born into misery, poverty and war in Algeria 100 years ago this month.

For me, Camus stood out from more celebrated atheists, including Jean-Paul Sartre. And, in his humility, Camus remains in a different class entirely from today’s know-it-all atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

-- Douglas Todd, Columnist for the Vancouver Sun

Gratitude for people who like fresh tomatoes and who are good listeners

People who are truly loyal to the world plant gardens and spend time with friends. They seek to reduce suffering in active ways, but they also savor the good things in life: fresh tomatoes, fresh ideas, friends both old and new. They know that stories are always more than numbers, and they like listening to stories -- those of people they know and people they do not know. And they know that we live on a small but gorgeous planet in which each person has a story and every voice counts, not just those close at hand. They remember that other living beings, too, have their stories as do the hills and rivers, landscapes and waterways. There are stories within stories within stories, which together form a republic of stories.

- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for Free Spirits

We might think of a church for “Nones” as more like a symphony or play, with each personal encounter functioning as a different segment of the music or theatrical act spread out across time. We don’t know the full meaning of any of the musical measures or acts until the end of the piece; which, in the case of spirituality, occurs in the beckoning future. To make matters more interesting, we might also imagine that – mysteriously - there is no composer, conductor, playwright or director, yet the symphony or play comes off perfect the very first time. For the creator of it all – the Ultimate Mystery - is forever emptied out in eternal bliss into the performance.

Whenever I imagine this sort of “church” spread out over the course of a day, I envision wilderness explorer John Muir playing a tune with his feet as he leapt from boulder to boulder on a mountain talus slope. “If for a moment,” he wrote from his beloved Sierra, “you are inclined to regard these talus [slopes] as mere draggled, chaotic dumps, climb to the top of one of them, tie your mountain shoes firmly over the instep, and with braced nerves run down without any haggling, puttering hesitation, boldly jumping from boulder to boulder with even speed. You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of rock piles.” Following Muir’s lead, we might view each day as one of these pieces of music, created from the encounters we engage in – one after the other - all strung together to make a beautiful “cantata.” Alternately, we might think of this kind of spiritual community as a mountain stream, one that is forever in process as it plays an endlessly varied series of tunes in the process of flowing across a multitude of different-sized rocks and pebbles, each of which produces a unique musical note.

-- Stephen Hatch

Gratitude for flaking plaster in old houses

In my bed at night I could hear the sounds of Lake Michigan. Cold winter air crept through my window. I was five years old and my parents had just bought a very large 1920s stucco house. My immigrant father had been discharged from the Army and was starting his medical career. The house he bought was so big that it frightened even him. After all, he had grown up in apartments in Belgium and on the west side of Chicago. Up to then we had lived in small military housing. The new three-story house had a cavernous entryway, a black and gold marble fireplace, a back staircase, a secret door into the basement, and a boiler that looked like a WWI submarine.

Even when I knew that there were other people in the house, I sensed them more than saw them. My parents rented out the third floor and I heard the murmurings of people I never saw. Sometimes they snuck out on the roof, causing damage to it. Thus my room always had a wall where the plaster cracked and the wallpaper bubbled; often my eye got lost following the dirty drip patterns and flaking plaster. No matter how many times it was repaired, a new slimy organic stain appeared. I wondered how many decades this had been going on.

-- Matthew Lopas

Gratitude for souls

What is true of our bodies is also true of our souls. Since I am a philosopher, let me tell you a great secret of life—a soul is not a thing, it is not something which stands untouched by the events of your life. Your soul is the river of your life; it is the cumulative flow of your experience. But what do we experience? The world. Each other. So your soul is the cumulative flow of all of your relationships with everything and everyone around you. In a different image, we weave ourselves out of the threads of our relationships with everyone around us. But clearly, some people, some relationships, are the central threads of that weaving.

Kate and Max, as you live together over time, remember that you will be creating your lives, your souls, out of your relationship with each other. Kate told me that Max knows that the path to happiness is paved with tiny pebbles as much as it is by the big stepping stones. And that is true. Whether we think of weaving our souls, or laying a path we will walk, the small things matter so much. So have a care what you give each other for your self-creativity. Each smile or frown, each touch, each kiss, each kind or angry word, becomes the material out of which you both create your own life and life together.”

-- Bob Mesle,

Gratitude for Criticisms
of Process Theology

(1) The assumption that theology is primarily a matter of "thinking" about things, especially about worldviews; but somehow excludes perceiving, acting, celebrating, or participating in a community of faith. It lacks sensitivity to the wider range of religious life, including liturgical and community life.

(2) A general neglect of prayer and meditation in process theology. Even as we process theologians might speak of prayer and meditation, it can seem as if we are trying to make sense of them, but not willing to learn from them in ways that might challenge our already-existing commitments to something called "process theology." We seem especially neglectful of silent or contemplative prayer, in which prayer is not communicating with the mystery but rather resting in divine silence.

(3) A general neglect of the role of story in process theology. We come across much more inclined toward didactic prose, aimed at drawing conclusions, so that we might enjoy, in Whitehead's words, "a completed static state of mind" (Modes of Thought, 43). We prefer precision and clarity to lures for feeling which may be interesting even if not (necessarily) true.

Conjoined with this is a preoccupation with having the last word and having all the answers. We forget that, in Modes of Thought, Whitehead proposes that a sense of completion -- of the satisfied intellect -- is not true understanding. He says that exploring ideas in a way that is "incomplete and partial" contains, in his words, "fuller self-knowledge."

(4) A general neglect of context-based, experientially-engaged approaches to theology, such that theology begins with experience rather than with metaphysics. We tend to begin with ideas and then turn to experience, seeking to apply them.

-- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for the God
of a Million Second Chances

Of course, we never really get the chance to go back and re-do some of the things we’d like to; in each moment of our lives we are different people, and so are those around us. But the new year does nurture the possibility that things can be different somehow, that we can respond even to what we perceive to be failures in new and life-giving ways.

For process theologians, these fresh possibilities are called initial aims–divine promptings within us that guide us along paths of forgiveness, mercy, and compassion, always drawing us toward the greatest healing, beauty, and wholeness available in each situation.

Other Christians may refer to these new possibilities as resurrection opportunities that come to us through the outstretched hand of an ever-merciful God–a God who is always inviting us to join in the ongoing co-creation of the world, to participate in the continuing work of reconciliation through which all things are being made new. Some may simply call these new possibilities “second chances,” or “do-overs.” To all of us, they are experiences of grace.

And so as we approach the new year, each with our own longings from deep within, may we walk in the joy of new opportunities, and the redemptive grace of a million second chances.

-- Teri Daily

Gratitude for Islamic view of the universe

The universe is dynamic not static, slightly different at every moment, forever pulsating with rhythms which point to a deeper Rhythm -- the callings of Allah -- which can be heard in the sounds of the Qur'an.

The meaning of the Qur'an does not simply lie in the meaning of its words, but also in the sweetness of its sound. We live in a sonoral universe.

The Qur'an is a revelation of the deeper sound from which all sounds emerge. The deeper sound is silence. Silence is not the absence of sound the the presence of listening. The deep listening -- the Knowing -- is Allah.

One of the most beautiful sounds we can listen to is the universe. Science is a way of listening to the universe with attention to its quantifiable properties.  Poetry is a way of listening with attention to its qualititive properties. Both contain wisdom.

The universe is a multiverse, because it has many dimensions: visible and invisible.  Even in science today we speak of invisible dimensions of reality.  All are sonoral. All are rhythmic. All are vibrating, like the sounds of Qur'an when recited.

-- Farhan Shah, Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for the beauty of the Qur'an

The Quran: literally, “that which is often recited." A web of rhythm and meaning, the words of which throb through Muslim worship and which, at every point in the believer’s life, break surface, sanctifying existence with the scent of eternity. A paradoxical flash of the divine light, penetrating the veil of solid existence into our world. Redolent with symbol, half-hidden meaning and rapier-sharp insight, it transforms the reader by suggestion rather than by formal structures of argument and proof. It demands to be accepted on its own terms: only when the reader is prepared to discard all that he believes a book should be, will he begin to discern its symmetries and its heart-rending power.

-- Oubai Elkerdi

Gratitude for People who understand vertebrates and know the meaning of decussate

The vast majority (96%) of known animal species are invertebrates—they do not have a spinal cord that is protected by bony vertebrae. Ants, crabs, squid, worms, sponges, jellyfish, butterflies, scallops, and snails all fall into this category. And—interestingly, none of these species exhibit the crossing pattern that you mention. Decussations are unique to vertebrates. Some invertebrates, such as sponges, have no known nervous tissue. Slightly more advanced invertebrates, those with radial body plans (think, jellyfish), have a diffuse “nerve net,” but no central nervous system to decussate.

Bilateral invertebrates, however, tend to have a large collection of neurons near the front of the body (the brain), and nerve cord (or cords) that runs the length of the animal. The primitive brain of bilateral invertebrates is found above (dorsal to) their mouths, just like ours is.

-- Kelly Zalocusky

Gratitude for Fat Souls with all six characteristics (but it's Ok if it's less)

Gratitude that we don't have to be happy all the time; it's enough to hold hands.

Now we are quiet
and sing no more songs.
The steps have become heavy;
night wants to fall.

Give me your hand,
perhaps we have a long way to go.
It snows, snows.
Winter is hard in a foreign land.

Where is the time
that gave us a burning light?
Give me your hand!
We have a long way to go.

-- by Herman Hesse, translated by Gary Wilkins

Gratitude for Sweet Joy

Love is always a risk. We risk being hurt. We risk being unmasked. We risk being known. But it is a glorious risk: to expand yourself to include another, to know a joy so sweet it almost hurts, to find your sentences finished in someone else's mouth, to bask in the light because there is no possibility of hiding. "Love is stronger than death," we learn in the Biblical Song of Songs. Love is our door to truly connecting, and in that connection, to really matter. (July 2, 2013)

-- Rabbi Bradley Artson

Gratitude for daughters who pamper their mothers

Happy Birthday to my Mama, Pauline Anita Bigby! We are rarely together on her birthday and so today I have a bunch of surprises for her. So thankful to have a three-generational household and my Mama with me daily!

Today I am thankful for all the little ways I got to surprise and pamper my Mama on her birthday. So much fun!

-- Monica Coleman, second Facebook post, 1/25/2013

Gratitude for landscapes left alone

"I do hope landscapes can be beautiful for our children —we hold an ancestral connection to our landscapes and a responsibility to future humans, animals and plants. This is a familiar sentiment, but it seems that we continue to take our responsibility too lightly. When I look at an old forest, besides being in awe of its diversity and beauty, I feel gratitude to those who left it to grow. I feel an enormous grief for lost ecosystems—for immediate gain we have left ourselves in long-term debt."

-- Melissa Cowper-Smith

Gratitude for Buddhist-Inspired Art

Melissa Gill

Gratitude for Jazz and Mutable Boundaries

I grew up on the prairies, where horizons are further and further away. This creates a sense that boundaries are mutable, and also a sense that we live within what Whitehead calls an Adventure: an adventure of ideas, experiences, encounters, and feelings. As we exist in any given moment, we inherit the past but there are also fresh horizons in the future. The “future” in Whitehead’s thought does not yet exist as actual, not even for God. It is an opening and an openness: a horizon on the prairie. A beyond that is always beyond-ing, but perpetually present to our eyes and ears and hearts.

As I grew up I was also aware of passage. There was decay, transition, loss, displacement that belong “to the essence of the Creative Advance.” (p 286 Adventures of Ideas). Whitehead speaks of this in Process and Reality as the perpetual perishing of immediacy. Of course I did not know this as a teenager, but it was part of the formation of who I am. I had a sense of perishing and the open future.

Rock and Roll was emerging as the sound track of our time. In the midst of that simple beat and melody that we danced to, I had an epiphany experience. I was 16 and went to the touring group - Jazz at the Philharmonic. The JATP concerts featured Swing and Bop musicians. They were among the first high-profile performances to feature racially integrated bands, and some bookings were cancelled rather than have the musicians perform for segregated audiences. It was exotic. Musicians who were black, playing with others who were white. A time before integration and the civil rights marches beginning to spread across our horizons. Here, too, I learned later, there was something Whiteheadian. There was a coming together of people from different ethnic and cultural traditions – different colors – in which the differences were not collapsed but harmonized and creative. The harmony was not a stagnant harmony but a dynamic one. The open horizons of life were being filled with beauty. It was almost like creative transformation in-carnate or, to coin a phrase, en-melodied.

-- George Hermanson

Gratitude for windows

Melissa Cowper-Smith

Gratitude for Open Theism

In this view God is “open” in two important senses. First, God is open to and affected by what creatures do; and second, God is open to the future in that, even for God, there is more than one possible future. God’s plan is not a blueprint but a broad intention that allows for a variety of options regarding precisely how these goals may be reached. God has “dynamic omniscience” meaning that God knows all the past and present as definite and God knows the future as possibilities. Because God has chosen to rely upon creatures for many aspects of life and humans do not always do what God wishes they would do, it follows that God takes some risks. Consequently, God adjusts divine plans and implements flexible strategies in order to try to achieve the divine purposes.

-- John Sanders

Gratitude for Swirling Stuff and Patterns

God creates the universe not by inventing it from nothing, but by taking the mess of swirling stuff and creating patterns and order so that life can grow and advance. God creates by inviting the messy possibilities into a universe that we can count on, us and the rest of nature can too.

That takes all of God's effort and care, and God asks us to join in the work of bringing order, justice and love into the world too. We get to be God's partners by making the world a better place for everyone.

-- Rabbi Bradley Artson

Gratitude for being able to improvise your life

Just as Process theology is an evolution in theology, jazz is the evolution of music, being able to improvise is the ultimate level of both. We know in the life there is a beginning (Part I) and that there is an end death/or life’s transition, (the piece is finished). But what about the middle? The middle is where we probably struggle the most, and is where our most important decisions happen. We decide about our education, who we marry, if we marry. We experiment and decide our career, whether or to be parents, and if so then we may have grandchildren. It is the middle of life we experience moves, conflict, resolution, reconciliation, death, new life. It is in the middle where many of our most profound decisions and rituals happen. If one does not have tools at which to go through the middle, one could become stagnant and handicapped or even stalled.

-- Monica Corsaro

Gratitude for Being Able to Move Forward after a terrible divorce

"She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful."

--Terri St. Cloud

Gratitude for healthy community

1 group mixed individuals (should include variety of identities - species, age, gender, ideology, ethnicity, physicality, sexuality)
2 cups private space
4 cups public space
1 T trust
5 T individuality (a.k.a. freedom to be unique)
1 ¾ T respect
3 cups love
1 cup accountability
2 T spirituality
3 oz. conflict resolution
3 cups relationship with land and/or place
2 cups awareness of and care for larger world
2 T laughter
1 tsp music
2 tsp grief
3 tsp pain

-- Margi Ault-Duell,

Gratitude for the early Beatles

https://www.openhorizons.org/the-early-beatles-you-know-you-should-be-glad.html

Gratitude for touch

Gratitude for Christina Hutchins

The fallacy of misplaced thanksgiving occurs when we give thanks to an abstraction in our minds -- perhaps the image of an ultimate source -- and forget to thank the concrete realities that enrich our lives: our friends, the meadowlark on the nearby roof-ridge, canned cranberry sauce that will soon be eaten, gentlenesses of every kind, and maybe even the sadnesses that reveal so much about our relationships. In Whitehead's philosophy these multiple sources of grace are part of the unity of God. When we thank them, we are thanking God, too.

This does not mean that we can or should be thankful for everything. Terrible things happen to others and to ourselves that rightly elicit sadness. Still, we can live with a sense of gratitude for whatever is good or beautiful in life. Gratitude is a mindset, an attitude, filled with a freedom to recognize and appreciate goodness and beauty, and to recognize that so much of it is not of our making. Thus the grateful mindset is also a humble mind-set. It knows that goodness is a gift, not an achievement..

The goodness in which we take delight need not be good for us. It can be good for others, for the wider world, for the earth, and for God. This is how relational thinkers see things. We can be glad that others are glad. And everything doesn't have to last forever, either. We can be grateful for the breeze on bare skin and the meadowlark who has chosen a nearby rood-ridge.

Still, of course, there is the tragedy and pain. We need not be thankful for it, but we can live with a hope that, no matter what happens, fresh possibilities are available for responding creatively to what happens, whatever happens. These fresh possibilities are one way that God is present in human life in an active way. God is the lure of novelty, the presence of newness, the gift of hope, whether it comes from wooden building blocks, coffee made by other hands, serious concentrations of beloved children, or strangers and the neverbefore. Sometimes it comes in the form of a Thanksgiving Note written by a gifted poet, who reminds us of the beauty of gentleness of every kind.

-- Jay McDaniel, in appreciation of Christina Hutchins' Thanksgiving Note

Gratitude for the Manyness of God

Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unrest-ing advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation. This is God in his function of the kingdom of heaven.

-- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality,

Gratitude for my mother

I remember when I was a little girl, I loved to swing on a swingset on the schoolgrounds. I think I was about six years old. You know what it feels like to swing? It's a feeling of independence and being in airy space. Sometimes your best friend is swinging right next to you. This is what I experienced.

These moments were among the many times in life I have felt pure delight. I also felt this delight when I played hopscotch. I would do all of this at recess. It was moment in time when I felt like I lived in a perfect world.

I know now that the world is not perfect at all; it wasn't then either in my life or anyone's life. But somehow, for me, being in a small-town school, with teachers who made each young student feel important and secure and welcome, life had a kind of beauty.

In my case, my parents were not in harmony. My home was not a perfect world. So going to school and being with those teachers, and being loved by them, and being able to swing on the swingset, taught me something about life. It taught me that there's a goodness in life that cannot be erased by any disharmony.

When no one was around to push me on the swingset, I also knew how to pump. You know what I mean by pumping? You move your legs on your own to get momentum. I have been thinking about that these days, which may be because, these days, my legs don't work well.   Still I sometimes need to pump, not only with my body but with my heart and my mind. In truth, sometimes it's very hard. I can't seem to get myself swinging. This is part of being old.

But there are kinds of pumping that come to me these days, that I was not as good at earlier in my life. One of them is gratitude.

--Virginia McDaniel (in giving advice to her son)

Gratitude for Grandchildren Who Call You
A Carrot-headed, Dirty-Eared Mimi-Roll-Baker

When I’m around Asher and Elliot, I witness first hand that Creativity is the most general notion at the base of all that is. This spring break I played a game with Elliot that I’d played with one of my college classes---creating and hurling “Shakespearean insults” at each other in fun. “Thou saucy clay-brained fustilarian” was our model. I’m not sure even I can define “fustilarian” satisfactorily, but Elliot, 4, “got” the idea. He could make up similar crazy taunts: “You carrot-headed, dirty-eared Mimi-roll-baker!”

These little boys are in the present and they are becoming. There is nothing static or inert about their realities.

-- Barbara Mesle

Gratitude for Zhihe Wang

The last but not least person I want to mention is teacher Zhihe Wang. I would rather call him teacher rather than doctor. He is a charismatic scholar with wisdom and self-confidence. During my study there, he greatly encouraged me and I am sincerely grateful for his help. He is a wise man who selflessly practices process principles in his life. He is a pioneer in Sino-US cultural communication, he models deep respect for others, he is a vegetarian. Zhihe Wang is a teacher in the real sense, patiently and skillfully expecting the progress of each student. I offer my deep respect to him and the cause of Sino-US culture communication that he promotes.

-- Wu Yunpeng

Gratitude for Playing Tennis in China

Being a foreigner, I attracted quite a bit of attention when I first started going to the tennis courts in the afternoon and as such I met many students including my best Chinese friends, Weibo and Kevin. Weibo is from a city in Heilongjiang Province, which he graciously wrote down for me in characters that I cannot read, and will be a junior here at Heilongjiang University. If I were to describe Weibo, I would simply say he is a full-body smile. Kevin is undoubtedly the coolest person I have met in China with his metro hair cut, cool glasses, and fashionable clothes. Everyday I get the chance, we meet and play from 5:00 to 6:30 and then go eat together giving us time to get to know each other on and off the court.

-- Kent Dunson

Gratitude for Jiaozi (Chinese dumplings)

There is an old saying nearly known to all--- men and women, adults and children---in northeastern China, which goes "hao chi bu ru jiao zi, shu fu bu ru tang zhe (好吃不如饺子，舒服不如躺着)". It means that no other food can be more delicious than jiaozi (dumplings), and nothing can be more comfortable than lying down to sleep. If one could have a meal of tasty jiaozi, and then have a sound sleep in bed, how wonderful that would be！

-- Xie Bangxiu

Gratitude for practicing Zen Meditation
before reading the New Testament

In Zen meditation – or zazen -- you learn to see the world like it is, free from your past prejudices and from your future desires. Every moment is a new moment. How wonderful would it be if you could read the Bible as it speaks to you, in a fresh way, as if for the first time? Katagiri says also that when you sit in silence you become intimate with the reality. I have experienced this. When I read the Bible in this attitude I become intimate with it. The Bible is no more an object of inquiry; but a subject who speaks to me, the living word of God. From silence we can encounter a new word, a word that is not you, but that comes from outside. This fresh word will then have a chance to speak forth. The chance emerges that, on the pulpit, you will preach not your own opinion but the world of God, what a sermon should be.

Gratitude for Good Guilt grounded in Love

Good guilt is grounded in empathy and respect. Empathy is a lot like what Buddhists mean by compassion. It is sharing in the subjective states of others, including the suffering that you may well have inflicted or contributed to, and it is imagining the world from their point of view. State-sharing and perspective-taking: that's empathy.

And respect is simply an awareness of the dignity -- the intrinsic value -- of each and every life, human and non-human, on its own terms and for its own sake. This is an important idea in process theology. It is that every living being with subjective aims, with a desire to find satisfaction, deserves respect and care. It is complemented by the idea that the mystery at the heart of the universe -- God -- cares for and is enriched by each living being in his or her uniqueness. The differences make the whole richer: the whole of the earth and the whole of God.

Good guilt, then, is an enlightened activity. It is the sense of remorse that wells up in your psyche when you wake up to the harm you have caused others, by commission or omission. Inwardly good guilt is the feeling you have when you say "I am sorry."

-- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for Critics of American Gun Culture

Is change possible? As a process thinker I certainly affirm that it is. Over against the self-fulfilling belief that one is threatened by armed criminals or even the government, there are self-fulfilling moves toward trust and non-violence. When the new “enemy” justifying violent self-defense is racially defined, for example, white fear of black lawlessness, the consequence is often discrimination against blacks that in fact leads to an increase of lawless violence. This vicious circle can be reversed when whites treat blacks justly and friendships are established across racial lines. Violence begets violence. Generosity begets generosity. Guns beget guns. Nonviolence begets nonviolence. The choice is clear.

-- John B. Cobb, Jr.

Gratitude for Jainism and its Invitation
To Radical Non-Violence

Jain nonviolence is indeed rooted in wider and more subtle modes of perceiving our planetary multiplicity than most perspectives allow, whether religious or secular. As my study of the tradition deepened, I found a very realist metaphysical and ethical worldview that understands every existent entity to be its own Ultimate. This creative multiplicity is never reduced to an abstract One, and consequently Jains epistemology is necessarily formalized around a manifold reality with innumerable valid perspectives.

-- Brianne Donaldson

Gratitude for Judaism and its bottom lines
Of Love and Justice

Judaism is a way of life, a philosophy, a discipline, and the cultural expression of the Jewish people throughout the ages. An expression of faithfulness and robust hope, Judaism encompasses the communal act of transforming the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) from literature into lives well lived. One of the world’s oldest continual ways of being human, Judaism is at once a portal into a universal perspective on the cosmos, life, God, humanity and justice, and at the same time a love affair with a particular people, otherwise obscure and small except for the spiritual light they shine on humanity out of all proportion to their number.

Like the rabbis of old we may tweak here and there, we may modify here and there as they did, in order to preserve the tradition as vibrant and wise and compassionate. But if we remain true to those two values, then we truly stand on the shoulders of the rabbis of the Talmud, and we sit ourselves on the throne of Moses. Hesed u-Mishpat - Love and Justice.

I bless us all to be resilient in the love we give to each other, to be tireless in the pursuit of a world of justice, and to insist on using the Torah as God's gift to achieve that vision.

--Rabbi Bradley Artson

Gratitude for the Space within the Trinity

There is a space within the Trinity so vast that it holds all the suffering of the world, all our pain, all of who we are. It is a space bridged by the Holy Spirit, bridged by the love that holds the Trinity together and infuses everything that lies within that space with that same love. What we see as we gaze at the cross is that there is nothing outside of God’s grace and love.

But the ascension creates a space to see things differently. The parting of the ways that takes place at the ascension serves as a reminder that to follow Jesus presupposes a very different final destination than that of world history, because to follow Jesus is to bear witness to our hope and belief that, in the end, all things are taken up in Christ. The Holy Spirit won’t be constrained by the systems of the world or limited by the options we see in front of us. Instead, God’s power and love break into the world—altering its trajectory, opening up new possibilities, and leaving it forever changed. And that alone lets us imagine that things can truly be different from the way they are now.

-- Teri Daily

Gratitude for Baseball

Batting is a similar kind of magic. How is it anything but magic that guides a chunk of wood that is no thicker than three inches and no longer than 42 inches to jettison a sphere with a three inch diameter that is moving in largely unpredictable directions in a significant space? The crack of a bat making contact with a baseball is simultaneously exulting, breathtaking, and divine. I have been watching ballgames and playing baseball for as long as I could hold a stick and to this day the crack of a bat crashes into my consciousness with a tidal wave of thrill and awe. Perhaps it is because, as a batter, one is so often faced with failure to find that contact, to create that noise, to effectively channel power, that the crack feel so mystical. No matter the reasoning, when a batter becomes a vehicle for such emotion and is graced with a hit, a batter cannot help feeling a bit greater than life. I have never hit a homerun before in my life, but I have watched plenty in all sorts of situations and they continue to blow me away. There is nothing like watching a ball be smacked out of the park by someone of the same matter as yourself. It is amazing to consider that the someone who struggles to lift a car can, with a certain movement and a stick, rocket a sphere over 400 feet.

-- Jessica Nicholls

Gratitude for the Republic of Stories

"We are in the midst of seismic cultural change. In the old paradigm, priorities are shaped by a mechanistic worldview that privileges whatever can be numbered, measured, and weighed; human beings are pressured to adapt to the terms set by their own creations. Macroeconomics, geopolitics, and capital are glorified. They form the foreground of the world depicted by powerful institutions: banks, militaries, energy corporations, major news media. People are expected to make sacrifices for profit-margin, to go to war for oil, to accept environmental damage that threatens future generations—and often, to do all this for no palpable reward beyond “improved economic indicators.” Within the old paradigm how we feel, how we connect, how we spend our time, how we make our way and come to know each other—these are all part of the scenery.

In the new paradigm, culture is given its true value. The movements of money and armies may receive close attention from politicians and media voices, but at ground-level, we care most about human stories, one life at a time. Our deepest debates, our obsessions, our consolations, and our most purely discretionary choices about where to deploy our resources and attention are conveyed through sound, image, and movement, in the vocabulary of art. People care passionately about how they and the things they value are depicted. They revive themselves after a long workday with music or dance, by making something beautiful for themselves or their loved ones, by expressing their deepest feelings in poetry or watching a film that never fails to comfort. In the new paradigm, it is understood that culture prefigures economics and politics; it molds markets; and it expresses and embodies the creativity and resilience that are the human species’ greatest strengths.

-- Arlene Goldbard,

Gratitude for Photography that is Prayer

June Xie

Gratitude for Negative Numbers
And a blind aunt who takes care of you

I was raised up by an old blind lady in a small rural town; she is my grandma's sister (my father's side). She has no child, no husband, and no name. Adults always call her the fifth aunt and I call her the fifth grandma. Her life is sad and dreary in lots of people's eyes. To them, her life is a kind of zero, and this zero is a kind of sadness.

I spent the first five years of my life with her. I love my zero. In my deep memory, her face with closed eyes once was the warmest face in my life. She had no chance to see my face, but every time, when I came back to my grandma's house, she always held my hands tightly, with tears flowing out from her old eyes which she was never able to open. The zero of my grandma’s sister is not simply nothing. It is her love for me, her love of life, her love of everything.

When I grew to five years old, I went to live with my grandparents in a big city (my mother's side). I was malnourished at that time. I seldom ate food, except for oranges. My face turned out to be an unhealthy yellow. My grandma tried all the methods to coax me into eating more. Most of the time, when I put some food in my mouth, she would started to count numbers. When I swallowed the food in my mouth, she would say, "Good! Our little Dandan (my pet name) eats food so quickly, I haven't even reached five."

One day, I said to her that if she started from negative five, I will finish my food before zero. She was shocked at that moment, because I was only five years old and nobody had taught me anything about negative numbers. She took my advice. With her patience, my malnutrition was cured soon. To me, a negative number is very positive. It contains much sunshine. It is never really negative.

-- Vivian Dong

Gratitude for urban agriculture

Gratitude for Sludge Metal Music

Moreover, I kind of like the music of Jucifer. It is intense and there is something beautiful -- even spiritual -- about pure intensity. Process theologians propose that there are two forms of aesthetic value in life: harmony and intensity. I have a student who once said to me: "I'll take intensity." When she read Whitehead's Process and Reality she wasn't quite sure about the God is Love part, but she sure liked the part about the ultimate reality of our universe being Creativity. Her name for the ultimate reality was Energy. I began to wonder if there aren't multiple forms of spirituality, some centered around divine love, some around pure Energy, some centered around interconnectedness, some around integration of heart and mind.

- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for Mozart

Gratitude for healing touch
when you are in the hospital

When you are in the hospital receiving care, nothing touches you more than to be softly touched by a kindly nurse. The holding of your hand, the cleaning of your body, the combing of your hair: all done in a spirit of compassion. In the touch there is a healing event, even if you cannot be cured. You have been touched by the nurse: “specific forms of feeling conveying that intensity.”

The intensity of the energy is very deep. You may even die the next day, but in the moment of being touched you encounter something everlasting. Whiteheadians speak of this reality as divine Love. It is not all-powerful but it is all-meaningful and all-gentle. It gives life its value. It finds its home in the nurse’s hands and in the nurse’s compassion. There is a vector transfer of energy.

-- Bruce Epperly

Gratitude for introverts (including Whitehead)

No wonder I’m a Whiteheadian. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was not only a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, but also a famously shy introvert, according to Jerome Kagan inGalen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature. As Cain points out, in Kagan’s Harvard studies with children, he compares one thoughtful, shy child named Tom, who wants to be scientist, to T.S. Eliot and Whitehead, both of whom were also shy as children, and so grew up to choose the “life of the mind.”

I find comfort here. For here we see that shy children, if not forced to be “outgoing” by well-meaning parents and teachers, can grow up be quite bold in their own introverted way. Whitehead wrote Process and Reality at Harvard just as the Culture of Personality was picking up steam. But he evidently did not pay attention to the Zeitgeist. Rather than seek popularity, Whitehead quietly and persistently forged a bold new path in philosophy—breaking apart Cartesian dualism and issuing in a “philosophy of organism” for the interconnected quantum world in which we now live. This philosophy cut against the grain of the more popular trend of analytic philosophy of the time.

-- Patricia Adams Farmer

Gratitude for Critics of Hyper-Individualism

A major root of this perception among us comes from the fact that so many in our era seem to believe the isolated individual alone is real. Mass shootings of innocent people – like the one that recently occurred in a school in Newtown, Connecticut or in a theater in Aurora, Colorado - reveal gunmen who feel alienated from friends or meaningful social connections, loners who seem unable to view other people as sacred realities in their own right. Rather than being isolated cases, these shootings are symptomatic of a society that is increasingly autistic and atomized, where everyone is too busy for sustained friendship. It is this hyper-individualism that is at the root of so many of our ills.

-- Stephen Hatch

Gratitude for People united with Heaven

Such a person has united with Heaven as one (天人合一). A life of this might look secular and ordinary. However, each moment of the life has been sacred because you are living with the God, or the Heaven Way, or the Dao. The salvage has been done and the transcendence accomplished, here and now. Death, as part of the Dao, becomes a natural event. Only if can one behave this way, one can face death peacefully and say that

-- Haipeng Guo

Gratitude for Constructive Postmodernism

Constructive Postmodernism encourages us to live with deep freedom: not a freedom apart from our relations with others, but a freedom in relation with others, accepting our responsibilities.

Constructive Postmodernism embraces individuality without the ideology of individualism. It emphasizes the dignity and uniqueness of each individual, appreciating not only the way in which individuals share many things in common, but also the way in which their differences form complementary contrasts. It appreciates the beauty of the plural.

Through constructive postmodernism we are invited to open ourselves to others, to listen to them. And we are encouraged to approach life as an adventure, an ongoing process in which we need not be complacent with static perfections. We can create our own live in a spirit of freedom, and also respect others in a spirit of kindness and tolerance.

-- 黄晓男

Gratitude for the coalescence of science
and wonder

The holy need not transcend time and space. If we have eyes to see we find the holy throughout the whole of life, in other living beings and in ourselves. It is that quality within each living being, no matter how small or large, no matter how like us or unlike us, which elicits a sense of wonder. Buddhists call it the Buddha-Nature within each creature.

Science is by no means the enemy of the holy. The more we know about things scientifically, the more wonder-filled we become because we have made contact with a world other than our own, which is beautiful in its own right. At some level, deep down, our encounter with Wisdom the Albatross is an encounter with the holy, however ephemeral it might be. And so is our encounter with so much more of the more-than-human world. Whether they know it or not, naturalists are our priests. Some are scientists, some are artists, some are storytellers. They give us stories to learn from and eyes to see. They help us find our place in the transcendent community of life.

-- Martha Johnson, Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for the Tao of Basketball

Gratitude for Laughter and Conviviality

Joy for its own sake, laughter and conviviality without pretext, meeting time's advance with unapologetic delight, raucous noise, good friends — these are nothing less than the eruption of the hidden light cracking the conventional crust of our mature good sense, our dehumanizing obsession with control, our idolatrous reliance on possession as salvation.

In this most secular of celebrations lies hidden the most vital of religious purposes. The light is there to be found.

Party on!

-- Rabbi Bradley Artson

Gratitude for people who are Crazier than Hell

Imagine a group of people who are making hell on earth today. They are obsessed with oil and power, and with the movement of arms and money. They think numbers and data are more important than stories and songs, and they believe that the earth was created for human use. They don't know that rocks are alive and that the ancestral spirits are as real in their way as are the plants and animals around us. They think that the well-being of a society is measured in terms of gross domestic product rather than the well-being of life, both human and more-than-human. Intoxicated by ideologies of consumerism, they are blind to the beauty of the planet and the poignancy of each life. They are crazy as hell.

It will take somebody crazier than hell to see beyond their craziness. Someone who knows that the truly real things of our universe -- plants and animals, stars and planets, people and spirits -- are made of stories and songs rather than zeros and ones. Someone who knows that our calling in life is not to amass wealth beyond our need, but to hear the songs of creation and sing with all our relatives: friends and strangers, plants and animals, stars and planets. Someone who knows that we are bones made of spirit.

-- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for halos (the spectral luminosity
of ordinary things)

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it might display? (Virginia Woolf)

To convey the qualities of an elusive, luminous halo: this may be the aim of theology, as much as it was the goal of Woolf’s fiction. It is, indeed, what has led me to the image of glory. Not the blinding lights of its triumphalist counterfeits, the reflection of gold, or the glamour of celebrity, but a quality inseparable from life in all its fragility and ambiguities. Displaying both light and darkness, this halo is perhaps like the almond-shaped auras of Byzantine iconography – also called “glories.” It is the spectral luminosity of ordinary things, neither irresistible nor self-sufficient, but incessantly alluring. It is often barely perceptible, yet some-times disconcerting – even terrifying. The apparent aberrations of its depictions do not diminish a theologian’s zeal to convey its varying, hazy radiance. Drawn by passion to the glory that flickers in the midst of everyday life, theology speaks of its “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.” This is a spirit that cannot be confined to neatly defined theological concepts or categories. And yet theologians persist in our weak attentiveness, “resolute” (Keller) in our attempts to describe it, however inaccurately and distortedly. We seek, with feeble words and images to express the inexpressible, in a multiplicity of voices, languages, and genres.

-- Maya Rivera Rivera

Gratitude for the Numinosity of Rocks

But as serendipity would have it, we shell seekers often find even more beguiling treasures. Small, mineral rich rocks in variegated colors and designs wash up on the beach alongside giant conch shells and smooth driftwood. I stuff my pockets with what I can carry, pebbles and small rocks--red, orange, green, even pure crystal--until I am so weighed down I can hardly walk home. But I revel in each find like a child on an Easter egg hunt, plucking up the colorful little gems before the sea reclaims them. It's as if a Primordial Artist is sculpting away deep under the sea, tossing up imaginative, wholly original creations for the lucky treasure-seekers on shore.

-- Patricia Adams Farmer

Gratitude for Fungi

Gratitude for Biblical Scholars
who critique capitalism and consumerism

The apparent message of this vision is that true power is found not in military strength, or in political power, or in the wealth of a comfortable lifestyle. Rather true power is found in the self-giving love of Jesus Christ--the one cared more about living among the poor than about amassing wealth for himself; the one who taught love of enemies rather than victory through military power; the one who claimed that true love is to be found in feeding the hungry and quenching the thirsty, in clothing the naked and visiting the sick, in letting the captives go free.

In our day, the wealthy will weep over the American markets as they wept over the destruction of Rome in John’s vision. There will be anxiety about the future and whether America can regain its once and former glory. But for Christians these anxieties are revealed to be mere illusions. We know that the power of the stock market is ultimately unreliable—wealth will come and wealth will go. But for we who worship the slaughtered Lamb that is Jesus Christ, our hope is not to be found in the stock market or the governments of the world. Rather, our hope is in the way of humility and the way of peace, the way of service to the poor and comforting the lonely. We ought not to seek the wealth of the world, but rather to give our lives loving and serving those who are unimportant in the eyes of the world.

-- Robert Williamson

Gratitude for Sea Lions

The Galapagos sea lions are unique in that they are extremely friendly and love to play with swimmers. It is very common for a snorkeler to experience a sea lion pressing his nose against the swimmer’s mask. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand what the sea lion is trying to convey: “Who are you? Will you play with me?” The sea lion executes an impossibly graceful twirl, then stops and looks back at the swimmer, clearly indicating: “OK, now it is your turn! Come dance with me!” There is great joy here, and one can feel God also loves to play, to experience joy.

-- Christine Zalokusky

Gratitude for Dogs

And what is true for the dog is true for us all: our value emerges from within, rather than being bestowed from without. No person lacks intrinsic worth, regardless of the external signs people distort to create false hierarchies of significance or worth. Indeed, no creature lacks intrinsic worth commensurate with its own ways of being.

A benefit to herself. It's either true of each of us, or of none of us. Generating meaning, value, benefit engages the entire weave of creation. The task, then, is to honor the benefit-making potential of every moment, every being, and ourselves.

-- Rabbi Bradley Artson

Gratitude for Cats

But one day I really watched him. He was chewing on a piece of grass. He gave his full attention to that single blade. His body was still, his fur soft in the sun. And then I started noticing other things about Charles. He goes out in the rain and doesn't get wet. He takes care of himself, He is a survivor. In recent months I've learned to meditate. I open a window, even in winter, and sit in a black medal chair. Charles sometimes join me. We listen and hold tight to every one of our nine lives.

-- Ann Aronson

Gratitude for Horses

Ingrid Geisler

Gratitude for the Laws of Electromagnetism

Within this context of post-Hubble cosmology, what Whitehead calls “our cosmic epoch” is the electromagnetic society that began at a space-time singularity known as the big bang roughly 14 billion years ago and has been expanding and cooling ever since. By the best measurements of astronomers at present, we are able to make observations of the most distant objects now in our cosmic epoch at about 4 × 1026 m away. This sphere of the radius is our horizon volume demarcating observable objects from which light has travelled during the 14 billion years since the big bang and those even more distant objects unobservable now in principle.

-- Leeman McHenry

Gratitude for Dark Matter

Whitehead proposes that particles and waves emerge out of momentary events which come into existence and pass out of existence, which means that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are events and that the universe as a whole is an unfolding of mutually entangled events. Apparently five-sixths of these events are dark and one-sixth are light.

One thing is clear. The very idea of a pulling force sounds a lot like Whitehead's idea of a divine lure. For Whitehead God is the Soul of the universe, and this Soul is not supernatural but rather ultra-natural: as natural as dark matter and visible matter, as natural as the wind and stars.

The Soul is a reservoir of all potentialities, which Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God. The Soul is also affected by all events as they occur, which Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God. And the Soul is continuously influential, in a powerfully gentle way through the provision of fresh possibilities for the present and future. Whitehead calls this the superjective nature of God. In effect the Soul has three sides: timeless wisdom, profound vulnerability, and active love.

The Soul is not located in a particular region of space but instead overlaps all regions of space and is omni-present, albeit in an invisible way. It is deeply influential in the universe and in human life, but the Soul is not all-powerful. There are many things that happen in the universe that even the Soul cannot prevent. Nevertheless the Soul is perpetually faithful to the journey of the universe and the well-being of life on any planet where it occurs, including our Earth. It is a kind of covenant the Soul seems to have made.

Is this idea of a universal Soul compatible with physics? Whitehead believes so. He believes that the Soul of the universe is the very unity of the universe and thus a principle that helps bring about order and novelty in the unfolding cosmos. He thinks people can speak of the role of the Soul of the universe in the universe without being religious: that is, without bringing into their consciousness religious emotions such as faith and love, devotion and awe.

-- Jay McDaniel

Gratitude for community based entrepreneurs and the non-profits that support them

https://www.openhorizons.org/the-world-needs-local-entrepreneurs-rising-tide-capital-beloved-economies-8203and-process-theology.html

Gratitude for nurses

https://www.openhorizons.org/my-mother-joy-on-becoming-a-nurse.html

Gratitude for Surviving a Heart Attack

Words cannot describe the gratitude I felt and continue to feel for the gift each passing moment, for the opportunity to embrace and to be that moment. My heart attack had made me a Buddhist.

But I had also become a deeper Christian. The Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, depict Jesus as proclaiming the Kingdom or Commonwealth of God. That Kingdom was both in the imminent future, the “not yet” and the present, “the already.” The present moment is the moment of decision. It is the “kairos,” “the fullness of time,” “the ripe” moment.” In the present, the Kingdom is manifest in Jesus’ healing the sick, forgiveness of sinners, table fellowship with the rejected and marginalized. The present moment is a gift to be embraced and lived fully.

-- Les Muray