World Peace and a Bag of Chips
Thomas Merton wrote, “Those who are not thankful soon begin to complain of everything.”
What I love about this is that he takes thankfulness for granted. He assumes it.
It’s such a hopeful expectation for human being: thanksgiving as our essence, complaint as an aberration.
I like to think that my gratitude practice is pretty solid most of the time. But as I mulled over this quote, I realized that I usually relate to thanksgiving not as my natural state of being, but rather as my fix. Thanksgiving, for me, usually is a course correction. It’s deliberate. I do it when I need it. When I’ve finally had it up to here and I’ve got to find and focus on something for which I can be grateful, in order to counterbalance all the crap for which I’m definitely not grateful.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with intentional gratitude like this. When I look for good, I do discover lots and lots of beautiful things, and it always feels surprising, sweet, and wonderful. And for sure, doing it on purpose like this is better than never being grateful at all.
But as I think about the gratitude-complaint spectrum, I notice that my movement on it tends to be in the opposite direction from what Thomas Merton presupposes. Typically, I go from complaint, when it gets bad enough, to gratitude, when I need it. Most of the time, my default orientation to life and the world is complaining about everything wrong with it.
And believe you me, I’ve got reasons! Like everyone else, I’ve got real problems. And I can present evidence for the brokenness of our systems and the failure of our institutions, and examples of corruption and injustice and humanity’s fatal flaws everywhere I look. Complaint seems perfectly reasonable, like the only sane response to a crazy world, and we can find a lot of comforting agreement in it. We bond with others over our shared complaints, and they become a twisted intimacy. It feels normal.
Only when the mess of it all gets to be too much do I — hopefully — remember to pull a little gratitude out of the medicine cabinet to try to freshen up my perspective.
Gratitude, then, feels exceptional. Transcendent. It’s an ennobling discipline to lift us out of the quagmire of our common, workaday dissatisfaction. Again, that’s not wrong; it’s not a bad fix; it still feels mighty fine.
The problem is, I don’t want thanksgiving to be so rarefied. I don’t want it to be the exception. I’d much rather it be my equilibrium, my expectation, my ordinary experience of life. I want to wake up every morning and go to bed every night saying, “Thank you, Life, for that and this and everything…”
If only I could do that without sounding like I’m kidding myself.
A few years ago, during the height of the pandemic, our community was hosting weekly check-in calls on Zoom. [We still do them, monthly now, on first Thursdays; they’re lovely and everyone is invited]. Anyway, I was wrapping up one of our calls with a prayer. And I remember that I was really into it that evening, really feeling it, and the words were just pouring out without much thought at all. I started riffing on the idea of answered prayers. They’re always answered, I said, and the answer, invariably, is: “I love you so much.”
When this came out of my mouth, it brought tears to my eyes.
PRAYERS ARE ALWAYS ANSWERED, AND THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS, “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.”
In that moment, that answer, that promise became the very thing for which I was able to express boundless and unconditional gratitude. Gratitude not just for relief from my challenges, not just in hopes of a fix for the world’s problems, not only for the “good” stuff. Not instead of anything. But gratitude, rather, for the love of the entire Universe through it all. For the love of the entire Universe with each of us through it all.
I’ve gotta admit that I don’t spend a whole lot of time in that state of unequivocal appreciation. I mean, I get the idea of it. Sometimes I even believe in it, the power and possibility of it. But I don’t go about my days immersed in it.
In that moment of prayer, however, accepting the blessing, “I love you so much,” as the ground of my being and all being — this felt very different from counting my blessings. Very different from my usual approach, which is more like chalking up a gratitude list to try to compensate for or cancel out my complaints.
I think this might be a key to unlocking the type of gratitude about which Thomas Merton was writing.
“I love you so much” as the universal response to our every hope and fear. “I love you so much” as the divine answer to who we are and what we do, to our stumbles as well as our victories. “I love you so much” as an invitation to each one of us to engage wholeheartedly in big dreams and marvelous imaginings alongside the practical nuts and bolts of it all. “I love you so much.”
Earlier during that same Zoom call, one of the participants had checked-in and requested prayer for a particular personal situation, then added, “…and also world peace.” The rest of us were delighted by that, so we all took it on. As we went around the circle, each of us affirming our good, declaring answered prayers for ourselves and our lives, we all tagged it with “…and world peace.”
The Love that loves us so much lets us have it both ways. We can adopt gratitude as a both a presumption and a conclusion — the place from which we come as well as our destination.
When we recognize that the response is the same, whether we’re praying to heal the planet or a hangnail. Whether we’re just trying to make it through these difficult times, or we’re discerning some glorious plan amidst it all. Whether we’re cleaning up our messy back yard or working for social justice, preparing dinner for our family or feeding a nation of hungry people, wishing for one gentle night’s sleep or for harmony and grace the world over.
It can be both. It can be all. In fact it always is. All that and a bag of chips. A bag of chips and world peace. And I love you so much.
I wish you and all your loved ones a beautiful Thanksgiving. Thank you, Dear Hearts. XO, Drew
©2025 Drew Groves
