Judith Valente's Blog: Mindfulness in the Age of Twitter - Posts Tagged "gratitude"

Last week I had the privilege of guiding a retreat for the lay associates of Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey, an Olivetan Benedictine monastery sheltered beneath the Pecos Mountains in northern New Mexico. The monastery’s abbot is Father Aidan Gore, a soft-spoken Scotsman who exudes gentleness and humility, two of the most important of Benedictine values.

What impressed me most, though, was the number of times Abbot Aidan expressed gratitude. He never failed to thank the monastery’s lay associates – known as Oblates – every time they gathered for prayer with the monks. He thanked them when they attended Mass on Sunday. He also thanked the local residents from Pecos who came, and the lone musician who led the singing.

He singled out in a special way young couples there with small children, asking how they were doing, waving at the children during Mass, and enduring good-naturedly the crying babies and fidgeting toddlers. He noticed a group of young men who were apparently attending Mass at the monastery for the first time, gave them a special greeting, and oh yes, thanked them too for being there.

Abbot Aidan is a man who carries a heavy burden. As with many monasteries, the number of monks at Our Lady of Guadalupe has been shrinking for decades and is now down to just eight. Most of them are over the age of 65, and two are in their nineties. The abbot is responsible not only for the monks’ well-being, but the spiritual direction of the 273 lay Oblates affiliated with the monastery. He presides over a large facility with dozens of immaculately kept, comfortably appointed guest rooms open to the monastery’s visitors, as well as nearly a thousand acres of land. How he keeps it all going, only he and God knows.

Despite their age and in some cases obvious infirmities, the monks of Our Lady of Guadalupe are ever gracious. They spend time with the guests, and attended the wine and cheese social the abbot arranged on a Saturday night for the visiting Oblates, even though it began at 7:30 p.m., an hour when most of the monks usually retire for the day.

The monastery is situated alongside the Pecos River (one of the cleanest rivers I’ve ever seen), amid the lush greenery of the high desert mountains. The monks of Our Lady of Guadalupe seem determined to keep their home an oasis of quiet contemplation for a world desperately in need of serenity. I’m reminded of something my friend the Trappist monk Brother Paul Quenon once told me. “Contemplation is just a big fat word for gratitude.”

I left Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey grateful for the setting, for the prayer life of the monastery, and for the monks and lay associates who help keep it going. “Now I know what has been holding the world together and keeping it from cracking into pieces,” the famous spiritual writer Thomas Merton wrote on his first visit to a Trappist monastery. “It is this monastery and others like it.” I felt much the same way during my time in Pecos.

The next time you are in the southwest, please consider stopping by Our Lady of Guadalupe and extending to Abbot Aidan and his monastic family a hearty thanks. In the coming week, I will try to be like the abbot in openly and extravagantly expressing my gratitude for the people and many blessings in my life. What blessings are you grateful for?

My mother was such an integral part of my life, it seemed preposterous to me that she could be gone from it forever. Her death showed me just ho vulnerable I am. I realized in ways I never had before, that I too am going to die one day. I remember how my mother, when she entered her eighties, would rise before dawn to see the beginning of a new day. She always felt grateful for having lasted another night.

She prayed for about two hours every morning. Her first prayer was always one of thanksgiving. After she died, I found myself waking earlier, too, trying to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. I felt privileged now to see the sun come up. It was a privilege my mother no longer enjoyed.

Sometimes this cherishing would strike me in the oddest places. I remember going into a deli and ordering a corned beef sandwich. I suddenly burst into tears right there at the table at the sight of slices of corned beef lying on a bed of pumpernickel. I thought of how my mother love corned beef and pastrami sandwiches.
When I was in college, we would mark the start of a new semester by shopping in New York, then stopping by the Carving Board restaurant at Macy’s for a sandwich. I felt horrible that my mother could no longer have this pleasure. I felt guilty that I could.
Then it occurred to me that one way of cherishing those memories is to go to a deli every once in a while and order a corned beef or pastrami sandwich, to give thanks for those memories, and in so doing, honor my mother. It is a way of saying, “I am living. I remember you.”
A few years ago, I began doing nightly what St. Ignatius of Loyola called the examen. It is a daily accounting of what I did well each day and of where I fell short. I also list all that happened that I’m grateful for. It is my favorite part of the examen. The funny thing about gratitude is, the more you focus on it, the more you find to be grateful for. These days, I find myself more and more grateful for the most ordinary of moments — when I look out on the ever-changing prairie as I drive from Chicago to Charley’s and my home in central Illinois. As I walk past our living-room windows in the middle of the day and spot the sunlight sifting in through a latticework of branches.

In the final scene of the film American Beauty, the main character, Lester Burnham, speaking from the grave, says he doesn’t feel regret that he’s no longer alive, only intense gratitude “for every single moment of my stupid little life.” Then he adds: “you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, someday you will.”

From Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul
by Judith Valente and Charles Reynard