A Prayer of Gratitude

Brian met a man on the road yesterday on a bike. His name is Matt, he is from California and he is in the middle of a two month bike journey across Namibia. We insisted he spend the night with us, cooked him dinner and forced him to sleep on a mattress in our living room, his first night sleeping indoors in a month. We talked for hours over our dining room picnic table about our lives and our adventures, Namibia and its people. In many ways I think Brian and I needed to talk to another Westerner (or another person) more than he needed our hospitality but it was a nice evening. Over the course of the evening he told me more than once what an interesting life I had led since graduation. At first I laughed it off, since nothing Brian and I do is ever very well planned, but his sentiments reflect a running theme that I have been thinking a lot about ever since my fundraising trip to Sacramento. Bear with me and allow me to explain.

Sacramento, pardon my language, is a sh@#*hole. Of perhaps all of my fundraising escapades, Sacramento best embodied the harsh reality of America, a reality that I had never been exposed to in my white middle class town of Cheshire. In Sacramento poverty is juxtaposed with middle class suburban sprawl. I had known of course that third world type poverty exists in my country (I majored in Anthropology after all) but I had never seen it. And had known that I am very lucky to have grown up where I did but had never really understood what that meant. There is after all a difference between intellectual knowledge and experience.

Somehow all of this became very clear to me in California. The world came into focus one Sunday while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. I realized that I am not just a lucky American because I happened to be born in a fairly middle class family, graduated from high school and went to a private college. I am, in fact, a privileged human being on a global scale - I automatically rank in the top 10% of the world because I have a refrigerator, never mind a college education. Standing in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge, staring up at the red towers looming above me, the parameters by which I judge my reality – dinners out and hundreds of dollars spent on drinks and clubs, expensive Christmas presents and gadgets and gear I need for Namibia, flights to other countries and the mere concept of vacation – expanded to take into account not just my immediate social reality but the global human condition and in that moment I felt extreme and very real gratitude.

And I realized with clarity that I was standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. One of the most iconic landmarks in the world. I stood there and pictured my father standing next to me, a man who had once loved and longed to travel but in the end had rarely taken a vacation – and appreciated every one that he got. And in my mind I took a panoramic helicopter ride over the globe, thinking about all of the amazing things I have gotten to see in the last five years. I have seen the Eiffel Tower. The Cliffs of Moher. The Sydney Opera House. The Great Wall of China. The Terracotta Warriors of Xian. I have lived or spent a significant amount of time in Ireland, Australia, Mozambique, and now Namibia, and I have gotten to that with my best friend. I have sat in the Turkish baths of Budapest. Taken in an opera in the magnificent opera house of Prague. Dived the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Swam with whale sharks in Mozambique. And now walked to Golden Gate Bridge. I am truly, truly lucky.

It’s important to know how good you’ve got it but it is even more important to feel it. Maybe people pray to try to remind themselves to be grateful, because in our day to day lives it is easy to know we are lucky but much more difficult to feel it. Maybe true gratitude is prayer. It’s impossible to be truly grateful all of the time but we can try and maybe that is holy. I don’t have a religion and I don’t pray in the traditional sense but in I do pray in my own ways, ways that are rooted in the beliefs of my father who, thinking back, tried to knock gratitude into us every chance he got. The trick, he would say, is to be happy with nothing, the inverse of which I suppose is to be grateful for everything. I greet the morning with a song and perform sun salutations to the sky. I appreciate beauty in the way light dances with the trees. I send positive energy to friends and loved ones back home who need it. In these ways I try to honor the truly important things in life and put my own self in perspective.

So let us pray. I am grateful for the capacity of thought my education has given me, I am grateful for the beauty that surrounds me, I am grateful for the experiences of my past and the promise of my future, and I am grateful for you.

Amen.