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The Surprise of Living
Gratitude is about moving beyond the inadequacies, the longing, the not yets. To be grateful is to recognize the mystery of love and connection, the inexplicable power of the human touch. It is to be awed by the ability to laugh, even in deep pain. It is to let the magnificence of a moment take our breath away.
We can meet every day with a sense of awe and wonder. The fact that something can be scientifically explained or medically verified must not mitigate the element of surprise. Rabbi Eddie Feinstein says that the opposite of religion is not doubt or disbelief or secularity. The opposite of religion is boredom. It is the unwillingness to look at the world and find anything worthy of our gratitude.
Let's use this Thanksgiving to train our hearts to recognize miracles and blessings all around us. "Look at the world as if you have just entered it," Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel teaches. "When you look at everything with newness every day, what was monotonous will become exhilarating." Today let us be grateful for the extraordinary gifts and the endless possibilities of each day.
By
Sharon Brous
|
November 25, 2010; 11:13 AM ET
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Posted by: goofykook | November 30, 2010 9:01 PM
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When Rabbi Eddie Feinstein suggests that the opposite of religion is boredom and unwillingness to look at the world and find anything worthy of gratitude; he couldn't be more wrong or self-indulgent.
Most non-religious people have great freedom from the blinders of religion and the dead dogma that almost always accompanies it. Religion is a thought prison, the result of undue influence perpetrated by parents and grandparents on defenseless children who lack the adult intellect to refute its glaring fallacies and regrettable human history of oppression and divisiveness.
I have no religion, and I couldn't be more grateful for every waking and sleeping moment and for the cup of tea I just had, not to mention everything else large and tiny in my life. I'm especially grateful that you wrote such categorical nonsense so I could articulate a thoughtful response to it. How do you explain my overflowing gratitude given my lack of religion ?
Posted by: jackpot666 | November 30, 2010 11:01 AM
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I think, actually, that you prove Rabbi Feinstein's point, Jackpot: considered atheism is not the opposite of considered religion, even though many of us think that it is. Your overflowing (secular) gratitude and my overflowing (religious) gratitude are very much the same, and unite us in the battle against boredom.