Living Gratefully: A Passage to a Radically Inclusive World

I was guided by the light inside of me. That light does not belong to me alone. It is innate in all of us. Everyone has it. But more often than not, we choose not to see it.

Lily Yeh

We are told we are divided and we may also feel divided. I feel it when I watch the news or spend time on social media, but I seldom experience the divide in routine human-to-human interactions in which we are all busy simply going about our daily lives. Even if the divide is as true as we are told it is, we still need to collaborate because we belong to a tightly woven ecosystem of relationships. We depend on each other. 

Br. David Steindl-Rast writes, “Gratitude is a passage from suspicion to trust, from isolation to give and take, from independence to interdependence.” Each of these passages advance us towards collaboration and inclusion rather than holding us back.

From Suspicion to Trust

Living gratefully awakens us to the dependencies that exist within our human ecosystem. It can also help us navigate the distrust that emerges from harm, hurt, and experiences with people gone astray. Waywardness and distrust, though, are not opportunities to exclude, abandon, or discard people. A far greater and more challenging act is necessary. 

Henri Nouwen once said that “We cannot change the world by a new plan, project, or idea. We cannot change other people by our convictions, stories, advice and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, to lay aside their occupations and preoccupations and to listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center.” Nouwen challenges us with an invitation to radically include rather than cast out. He is proposing that we trust in the human heart’s ability to change. The transformation he describes is one of co-creation — something each of us helps make possible.

This act of inclusion and its transformative abilities, described by Nouwen, reflects a grateful perspective. The grateful heart recognizes that every life is an unearned gift and we all need loving opportunities to disarm ourselves throughout our life’s flimsy pilgrimage. Living gratefully both invites us to confront the difficult realities and suffering that exist in our complex human ecosystem and reminds us that we are enmeshed in the solution. 

Isolation to Give and Take

Inclusion is a powerful and guiding value to hold dear, but also a difficult one. It is foundational to living gratefully because it challenges us to look for the opportunities that exist in every moment and in every person. In other words, if we avoid the hard stuff and the hard people in life by excluding them, we miss a lifetime of opportunities. This, of course, is a particularly challenging task if you believe what you have been told about other people. It’s harder yet if someone has shown you something about themselves that makes their humanity hard to recognize. In life, and with people, we receive both the good and not-so-good. 

In a culture that loves victories, being on top, and dominating a perceived opponent, inclusion requires dialogue. One might think that compromise is also expected; however values do not need to be compromised in order to seek understanding. Inclusivity as a guiding value provides the space for understanding and the hope that we will be understood.

Independence to Interdependence 

I love birds and I love my flock of chickens. The hawks and I have this in common. I needed to reconcile my love of birds last summer when aerial attacks came day after day. Until I built a fortress to protect my flock, I became furious every time a red-shouldered hawk flew overhead seeking yet another meal. My fury, luckily, was balanced by an understanding of ecosystems. I needed to embrace, even welcome, the simple truth that the health of the entire forest around me, which I hold sacred and enjoy, is dependent on those hungry and swift hawks. 

While this was happening in my backyard, a different predator-prey dynamic was — and continues to be — at play between tribes and nations on the global stage. Reflecting on the chicken and hawk metaphor helped me recognize that we humans are also an ecosystem that is at risk of crumbling from targeted exclusion, violence, “othering,” and the destruction of the environments that hold us together and provide life. When we live gratefully we are challenged to resist the cultural status quo and the unloving inclination to banish perceived “others”. With a grateful perspective, we can more easily see how problematic and misguided “cancel culture” is for our communal health. 

Loving Wisdom Makes Inclusion Possible

To be repairers, we need values like trust and inclusion. To live into such challenging values, we also require the extraordinary gift of love.

The Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio describes love’s power: “Love changes the way we know things. Love is not blind affection or mere satisfaction. Rather, love is the highest good that seeks and desires the highest good in another. The wise person is one whose knowledge is shaped by love and who sees the world through the eyes of love.” Our individual and collective well-being are dependent on the wisdom to seek what is good in another. This earned wisdom, of course, is a condemnation of shame and fear because love requires courage. 

Delio also writes that “To convert hostility into hospitality and fear into friendship, we need space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them into a new relationship.” This invitational act is audacious, courageous, and counterintuitive, and yet necessary for transformation and deeper understanding. 

Inclusion means “to leave little out” and, my favorite, “to enclose.” We need to ask ourselves how we and others are transformed when we encircle those who have been cast out and discarded, those with whom we disagree, those who have wronged, and those who are so outrageous that loving them is beyond our imagination. 

Practicing inclusion may feel immeasurably difficult right now. However, living gratefully’s invitation to pass from suspicion to trust, give and take rather than isolate, and embrace our interdependence with courageous love, is a critical opportunity before all of us who are in pursuit of a more grateful life and a kinder, more compassionate world.

Feature image by Nikola Knezevic

Joe Primo, Grateful Living

Joe Primo is the CEO of Grateful Living. He is a passionate speaker and community-builder whose accomplishments made him a leading voice on resilience and adversity. Gratefulness for life, he believes, is foundational to discovering meaning and the only response that is big enough and appropriate for the plot twists, delights, surprises, and devastation we encounter along the way. A student of our founder since his studies at Yale Divinity School, Joe is committed to advancing our global movement and making the transformational practice of grateful living both accessible to all and integral to communities and places of belonging. His TED talk, “Grief is Good,” reframed the grief paradigm as a responsive resource. He is the author of “What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids About Death and Dying” and numerous articles.

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