Guess what. You won’t be doing anything with bootstraps you don’t have. Hubert H. Humphrey said, “The worst thing a man can think is that he made it on his own.” For instance, thanks only to the generosity of State of Formation, I can write here in this forum with all these amazing people! Wow.

“What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7), asked Paul. The truth is, we have received everything.

Our response to that reception is what we make of what we have been given. What we make is the new creation, which is our gift to the future.

So, how we regard the gift, whether with contempt, boredom or gratitude will shape what we make of the gift, and will therefore shape what we give to the future.  How we see what we have been given and how we see what we have created will form our attitude of giving, whether disregard for the future, or withholding—clinging, attachment and stinginess— or generosity.

Concerning the vast divine or cosmic gifts of the causes and conditions that have made me and my environment what they are—if I regard them as meaningless lumps of dead matter, then it will not make any difference what I do with them.  This attitude can lead to a sense of nihilism, or a sense of pure wastefulness (which is the mark of consuming which devastates unseen environments, unseen human beings, unseen human communities).

But, if my reception is grateful, I am opened to the unimaginable wealth which has been laid at my feet (and which makes those feet possible!).

Religiously, we live in a truly new situation for an unprecedented immensity of gratitude.  For us, in a way that it was not so for previous generations, the entire wealth of spiritual ingenuity, and sublime sensititvity to the Vital Life—Divine Presence— or the metacosmic fecundity known as dynamic Emptiness (Sunyata,which is another word for generosity), and the observational expressions of science—all of this has come to be available to us as our true inheritance as members of the human race!

We fortunate persons in this situation, can claim as our true spiritual inheritance the recitations of the Prophet, the meditations of the Buddha, the legislating of Moses, the loving of the Christ, the interconnected-vitalism of indigenous religions, the gravitas of Newton, the evolutionizing of Darwin and Teilhard de Chardin, the skepticizing of Dawkins, and the relativizing of Einstein and Whitehead.  All we need is the softness and gentleness of hearts that can receive these with an expansive (non-imperial) inclusiveness, an expansive gratitude free from the fear of losing the self.

All we need is to recognize that from moment to moment all we do is become new creations, and it is our true vocation to at once receive everything and surrender everything to this process of transformation.  In giving up everything we gain everything; we become a newness; we become a new creation (as I am fond of saying).

Gratitude makes the fullness of creative transformation possible and is the very basis for having anything at all to give. Giving-thanks in a heart of gratitude is the ground out of which we may have the courage to give it all away. Thanks-giving leads to Generous-giving.  Thanksgiving is the ground out of which the Generous-giving of Christmas-gifting makes any sense at all.  And boundless gratitude is the only stance Christians can assume in anticipation of Emmanuel (God with us). The secret we need to learn is that Emmanuel-God-With-Us is not some once long ago gift of the past. Thankfully, we are never alone: God-With-Us lovingly and tenderly participates in every breath in our process of transformation.

So, thanks… And Happy Thanksgiving!

Let’s become a new creation together.