Gratitude Books

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to LIVE FULLY Right Where You Are, Ann Voskamp, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010, 237 pp; Radical Gratitude, Mary Jo Leddy, Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002, 182 pp; The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual, Margaret Visser, Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010, 458 pp.

WN: All three books are rich resources in the profound spirituality of gratitude. They deserve repeated revisiting. Reviewing all three together hardly begins to do justice to their content.

An excerpt, found in all three books, is the citation from Dag Hammerskjöld. Margaret Visser frames it below:

Giving and gratitude, on the other hand, are the beginning and stuff of transcendence: a free response in love to another person, to the group to which one belongs, to all groups in society including one’s own, to humankind as a whole, to the earth, to the universe, and – both finally and first – to God. In 1953, during a moment when he was reflecting on the inevitable coming of death, Dag Hammerskjöld wrote:
“– Night is drawing nigh –”
For all that has been – Thanks!
To all that shall be – Yes!
Willing acceptance of everything to come – as for all of his past – is his thankful and trusting response to God for the givenness of his life (p. 376).

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