Bairbre CahillOur daughter Deirbhile started university in Dublin this year and was home last week for a few days during her Reading Week. She lives out near DCU but takes the bus into the city now and again. Over the weekend she said to me: “In Dublin, it’s great, almost every single person getting off the bus says thank you to the driver”.
Gratitude is a wonderful and important thing – whether it is thanking the bus driver, the friend who has taken time for a chat, our children for their help around the house or thanking God for the blessings in our lives.
I was working over the past number of weeks with students from fifth and sixth year in secondary school – all at various stages of preparing for their Leaving Certificate.
Having walked them down round the beach and across the headland at Ards in Co. Donegal to make sure they were all awake, one of the first exercises we did was on gratitude. I asked the students to think about what the blessings had been in their lives over the past week, to write them on pieces of paper and to put them up on the ‘sticky wall’.
We ended up with a wonderful collage of blessings each day, simple, ordinary things like friends and family, good test marks and good dinners, craic, company, faith, support and love. I invited the students to spend a few minutes every night gathering up the blessings of the day and thanking God for them.
This makes sense from a positive psychology point of view. When we focus on the positive we become positive in our outlook. If we go to bed thinking about what is positive in our lives we are more likely to wake up the next day ready to meet the world in an optimistic frame of mind.
I felt this was important for the students who can often feel overwhelmed by the pressures of school, exams, life choices and simply being teenagers. The exercise certainly created a good atmosphere for what we did in the rest of the day.
There is more to it than positive psychology however. St Ignatius talks about being contemplative in everyday life and finding God in all things. Ignatius sees our everyday lives as the context where we encounter God. Being contemplative in this sense is about being tuned in to those blessings, seeing God’s hand at work in our day. In this sense blessings are often the things that bring us happiness and peace, where we find love, beauty and wonder. However blessings can also be seen in the challenges of life. There we clarify what we believe in and what we are prepared to stand up for. We discover our strength and the strength of others. We become more aware of what matters most in life and have the opportunity to rejig our priorities to reflect that. Blessings come in all shapes and sizes, all hues and forms. The gift is being able to recognise them.
So as we come to the end of the Church’s year with the Feast of Christ the King maybe it is a good time to look back over this year and gather the blessings. Our own children have always enjoyed those conversations that begin “do you remember when…” and all the stories of our various exploits begin.
Then perhaps we can move into Advent with a commitment to that contemplative spirit in our individual and family prayer – noticing the moments, the gifts and the blessings in our days.
For myself I know that takes a bit of discipline. We need to give ourselves time to stop and be aware but in the ever increasing hustle and bustle approaching Christmas, surely that is a good thing?