Empowered to Confront What is Deadly: The Spirituality of Living Gratefully

Living gratefully is a spiritual practice that comprises spiritual acts because what is spiritual is life-giving, generative, and meaningful. It is not stagnation but aliveness. Living gratefully is spiritual in all the ways the word implies. 

Spirituality comes from the Latin word spiritus, meaning life breath or aliveness. That means what is spiritual is in opposition to all that is deadening and deadly. Yes, there are many people, institutions, ideas, theologies, and individual and collective behaviors that are purveyors of death. But the wise and the awakened among us can often sniff out these maladies of the heart. For the rest of us, we require practice so that we do not fall asleep in life or get swept up by conditions that can easily harden us. We must practice throughout our days so that we can always say yes to what is life-giving and reject what is deadly for ourselves and others.

It is no surprise that the word spirituality can get a bad rap here in the 21st Century, but it bears no responsibility. False prophets and sellers of hate masked as spirituality have long roamed the earth with ideas that claim to know the truth, but they do not. The skeptics among us may tingle or twitch at the word spiritual because they associate it not with humility and courage, but with those purveyors of deadly things they’ve seen in the past. But when you ignore or neglect your spiritual self — the invitation to be fully present and embrace all that accompanies this aliveness — this only hurts you. 

If done wholeheartedly, living gratefully is a spiritual commitment requiring serious acts.

Instead, simply ask yourself: Do you want to be awake to the beauty and amazement of life along with its inevitable agonies? Do you want to see all of the inexplicable mysteries that make life precious and interesting? Do you want to experience all the love and joy that precede grief before a relationship is lost? Do you want that second chance in life when you were sure it was over? If your answer is yes to any of these questions then to live spiritually and gratefully is your “how to” because each requires you to be more fully present to your life.

If done wholeheartedly, living gratefully is a spiritual commitment requiring serious acts. This is not a neutral, passive, or cheery path to frolic through life. How could it be when it encourages you to have the  humility to be grabbed by awe, the compassion to have hope, enough openness to find joy where there is sorrow, and the courage to invite in rather than cast out?

Our ongoing invitation in life is to say yes to its fullness, and the practice of living gratefully provides the perspective and attitude of the heart to act.

A grateful heart cannot walk away from a literal or metaphoric near-death experience, say thanks, and then return to old ways of being. A grateful heart understands things about life and people because it is deeply attuned. The philosopher Stephan Darwall says, “Attitudes of the heart — forgiveness, love, gratitude — express desire for a mutual responsiveness.” Gratitude as an attitude of the heart understands relationality and requires the courage to plead for mercy by speaking compassionate truth to power. It seeks responsiveness to life for the sake of one’s own life and the life of others. It is not a solitary act that serves the self, but all of us.

Our ongoing invitation in life is to say yes to its fullness, and the practice of living gratefully provides the perspective and attitude of the heart to act.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi

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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