The Subversive Power of Gratitude with Diana Butler Bass

REV. PAUL BRANDEIS RAUSHENBUSH, HOST:

From Interfaith Alliance, this is The State of Belief. I'm Interfaith Alliance President Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush in New York City. 

Happy Thanksgiving! This week, we are observing the holiday with the theologian who literally wrote the book on gratitude, Dr. Diana Butler Bass. The book's title is Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks, and it sets the stage for our conversation about gratitude in a troubled time. More than a moral gesture, giving thanks is nothing less than a survival strategy when the world seems to have gone wrong. That's coming up on The State of Belief. 

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So for this week's State of Belief, I wanted to interview my own kids, my sons, Walter and Glenn, and talk to them about gratitude and thanksgiving and see what was on their minds. What are they grateful for? One of the things I'm grateful for is, of course, my children and my husband Brad. But also my kids go to a school where gratitude is part of the curriculum, along with caring and kindness. They have, literally,caring, kindness and gratitude as three really important themes of what it means to go through elementary school, and I'm really grateful for that. I'm grateful for my public school, my public school teachers, and all of those who are involved in the education of my children. So I hope you'll enjoy this conversation that I had with my kids right before Thanksgiving this year. 

Okay, I'm here with Walter and Glenn and we're going to start with the prayer that we say at night when we pray, which is Now I Lay Me. You guys, can you do that with me? Okay, ready?

ALL:

Now I lay me down to sleep. Thank you, God, for your love so deep. Thank you, God, for another day, a chance to learn, a chance to play. Thank you, God, for the love we share. Thank you, God, for your world and care. When in the morning light we wake, teach us the path of love to take.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Walter, you start…

GLENN: Amen!

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Amen, that's right. We forgot to say that. Okay, so now, Walter, what are three things that you're grateful for? 

WALTER:

Here are three things that I'm grateful for. The first one is my friends. The second one is my family. The third one is being able to play chess. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

All right, awesome. And what about you, Glenn? 

GLENN:

Mine is going and having playdates with Sean and having playdates with Jacob and also playing chess with William. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

So here's a question for you, Walter, which is the toughest question:what does it mean to be grateful when it's not for things or people? Is there a way to be grateful if you maybe don't have as much to be grateful for? I'm just curious what you think about that question. 

WALTER:

Hmm. It's tough. I think, like, even if you don't have that much to be grateful for, just being able to breathe and think, anyone should be grateful for at least being able to touch something or breathe or think or walk and being able to live, really. Being able to live life. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I think that's right, and sometimes just being grateful is, you know,all we can do is say “yes" to life. But I will say right now to both of you, Glenn and Walter, that we, Daddy and I, are so grateful that you are both amazing kids and really the best thing we ever did. So grateful to both of you. 

Hey, could you say Happy Thanksgiving?

WALTER & GLENN:

Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving!

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

All right, continuing the theme of family praying, I am going to offer you a prayer that I really love from my great-grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, who was a theologian 100 years ago - more than 100 years ago, now - and I like to pray this every Thanksgiving; but also, it's just such an important prayer for us to keep in front of ourselves, so I hope you'll enjoy this. 

“Oh God, we thank you for this earth, our home, for the wide sky and the blessed sun, for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills and the never-resting winds, for trees and the common grass underfoot. We thank you for our senses, by which we hear the songs of birds, and we see the splendor of the summer fields, and taste of the autumn fruits, and rejoice in the feel of the snow, and smell the breath of the spring. Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty, and save our souls from being so blind that we pass unseeing when even the common thorn bush is aflame with your glory. Oh God, our creator, who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.”

And now to our guest. Dr. Diana Butler Bass is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher and one of America's most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality. Her books include Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, and Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks, perfect for this holiday. 

Diana, happy Thanksgiving and welcome back to the State of Belief!

DR DIANA BUTLER BASS, GUEST:

It's great to be with you, Paul. just always love seeing you.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh my God, first of all, let me just start by saying, you are such a presence online. Many people are like, oh, online, it's terrible. You have made online beautiful. You've managed to do that in a way that I don't think anybody else has in such a way. You've created the Cottage, you have a Substack, you have conversations. You've been one of the few people who's understood this technology… You know, when it first happened, we were like, “Oh, the possibilities of this are amazing!” And you've done such a good job in such a beautiful way. So thank you for that, and you've been really helpful to me in these last few weeks. And so I'm going to start out with my gratitude for you - my deep love and gratitude for you. We have been around together for a while now, close to two decades, and I'm just so grateful for who you are and what you you offer into the world. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Well, it has been a while. Someone was asking me recently about my career, and as it developed. And you know, in the 90s I wrote this syndicated column for the New York Times Wire Service on religion and culture, and I can clearly remember a day that I got a call from a fellow who was the brand-new editor of a brand-new website called BeliefNet, and he was recruiting me away from the New York Times to work for BeliefNet. And I was just going, I don't know about this blogging thing…

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, right? I don't think anything's going to happen with this Internet thing. Remember when we had to argue about that? Oh my God. We had an amazing time together, and then it's just continued. And I just am so appreciative of you. 

So let's start with Thanksgiving. I've already said I'm thankful for you, and that is so important. But I love the title of your book: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks, because I think sometimes people think that gratitude is like kind of the oh, you know, that's the easy one. We'll just, you know, give thanks. What do you mean by the subversive practice of thanks-giving? 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Well, gratitude is a really powerful practice, and I don't think I realized that, because when I was a little girl, my mom would do what most of our mothers did, and that is, write your thank-you notes to your grandparents for your Christmas or Hanukkah presents or whatever. And if you didn't, you got in a lot of trouble. 

And I think we all have that experience of being berated by our parents to write thank-you notes, and so I think I went through an enormous period of my own life where that's what I thought gratitude was: writing thank-you notes, an obligation. Something I had to fulfill if someone gave me a gift. And it wasn't until the last 10 years or so that I began to understand that it's really a spiritual practice; and the way that it is subversive is it rearranges how we understand our own lives, and, even further, our place in the world. And so that title refers to that inversion that takes place as we practice gratitude, and how we learn to see ourselves and the world around us differently. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Say more about that. What is the inversion? Because I think the temptation with gratitude is to do this kind of Calvinist take on it: Like, I have all these blessings - obviously I must be super-blessed by God,because I have a lot of money and I have a lot of… And you know, I'm super popular - and that there's something that feels, I think, to all of us, is that really what this… Parse that out for me, because I think that's really an important shift for us, as we think about: what does it mean to be grateful? 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Most Americans tend to be grateful for things we like. You know, if you get a present you like, or if you get a job you wanted, or if something good happens to you, you say, oh, that's my blessing, and, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you to the universe or God or the person who gave you this thing that you find to be good for your life. But gratitude is not really that. Gratitude is a disposition whereby we understand that all of life is a gift; and that every moment, the good ones and the bad ones, actually hold something for us that can be perceived differently. And I can just give you a great example of this. 

Recently I was with my spiritual director right after the election a few weeks ago. I can say that I am not feeling grateful for pretty much anything this month. It's not a natural feeling. I don't feel like it's a blessing, nothing like that. And I was sharing with her in a very straightforward way how I was feeling about it, and she looked at me and she said, “Well, you know, at least there won't be a civil war next week.”

And I just laughed, because what she's saying is you’ve got to look past your immediate moment of just all this fear and doubt and stuff; and see, look at that, there's a gift! And I actually replied to her and I said, “Now that, I'm afraid, is the farthest-reaching silver lining I've ever heard.”

So, you know, she was looking for something good in the moment. And the gift of the moment is well, guess what? There's not going to be another January 6^th. There's not going to be a civil war next week. There won't be that kind of violence that so many people were worried about. There's going to be something else, but at least we can be grateful for this. When she said that, it really took me back to gratitude. That's actually a really good practice. 

And there's a Buddhist prayer that sounds rather like that. It's included in Grateful; it's been a while since I read it, but it runs something - it's attributed to the Buddha, something like – “I didn't get sick today and so I'm grateful.” And then he goes through all the bad things that didn't happen to him; and finally he said, you know, I'm alive and so I find gratitude. 

And so gratitude is more that. It puts you in touch with this recognition that life is precious, and that all of life holds some trace of giftedness at every single moment. And so that's what a practice of gratitude does. 

It's not like everything is going to be perfect, but as you begin to look for the things around you that well up gratitude, the unexpected gifts, the surprising possibility that's held in every moment, your field of vision really opens and you begin to see a wider frame in which your spiritual life and - frankly, in which you - exist. 

And maybe you can say, on the day after a really disappointing and scary election, well, I guess there's not going to be a civil war next week, because all these White supremacist groups are not, at least, going to be marching in the street next week wanting to go after everyone who voted for Kamala Harris. And so that's the kind of way gratitude works:opens the frame, just says, oh, what's over there and what's over there?Sometimes what happens if you're not feeling grateful, things are coming right at your face. You feel the the level of attack so much more. And what gratitude does is it actually moves things around in your brain so that you can understand that, like I said, there's just more to the picture of every life than what we sometimes see when we feel like we're under attack.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, it creates space, and it both creates a wider aperture but then also really brings it down to the very personal and very moment. 

It's interesting: I wrote this piece for HuffPost a long time ago called, Is Thanksgiving Just for the Haves? We list all these things, even people, even good things to be thankful for, but all of that can be taken away from us. And so then, in the end, what are you left with? And what I came up with was this idea of just, yes to life, and just how important that was. And you know, actually, I recorded this and it's on this podcast, my son, Walter, I posed that question to him and I said, “What if you really don't feel like you have anything to be grateful for?” And you'd be so proud of him, because he thought for a while, he gave it a few seconds and he just said, “Well, you can still breathe, you can still think, you're still alive, you can be grateful for being alive.” And I was just like, wow, it took me two decades of ministry to try to figure that out!

I do think that there's something beautiful about that, and, you know, it's not to diminish the fact that, unfortunately, a lot of Thanksgiving, the way it's commonly understood, is just like kind of a laundry list and who's got the longer laundry list? Oh, you can still be happy for this; you have this, even if they have that.

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

I was going to say one of the things that's really interesting in what you observe there is that it's not uncommon - you can see very clearly that people who have less are often more grateful, and it's fascinating to me that, in African-American churches, if you go worship in in most Black churches, you're going to have really sort of high energy around themes of thankfulness and gratitude, and so people who have backgrounds and traditions and come from less privileged places in society are often more grateful, and that gratitude has been, for many generations, a survival strategy in those communities. 

Sometimes people think of gratitude as just, like, well, just accept your lot in life. That's not really it. In Grateful, one of the things I do is I talk about the deep structure of gratitude, because there's really bad practices of gratitude - and that includes demands for gratitude, when gratitude becomes an obligation, and when someone who is over you demands your gratitude.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

You should be thankful for what you have. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

That's right, you should be thankful for what you have, or, in the case say, of enslavement in the 19th century, gratitude was structured into the system of slavery; and what it meant was, that you had to say, you know, “yes, master, thank you, master,” to the person who owned you. If you're a Black person, and if you didn't, you'd be considered an ingrate. And if you were an ingrate, that was something you could be punished for. That was a terrible thing, for a person who is a person of color, to not say “thank you” to a White person. It was a crime. 

And so that's the kind of gratitude, if it's a top-down demand, then it becomes problematic. But what happened in African-American theology and African-American spirituality is that there was a way of just sort of looking as if they followed the rules in some of these cases, but what was actually happening was this profound redefinition of gratitude on the ground, and that was the idea that gratitude really was the practice that constituted survival. When you could recognize, like Walter did, at least we can breathe. We might not be free, but at least we can breathe. And that means that among that community that has that recognition for that gratitude, you're going to live another day, and you can live another day to be able to fight. You don't know what the future is going to bring. You can participate in all the ways you can in order to bring about freedom. 

And it took decades and decades and decades, as we well know. But eventually, Black people were not given freedom by White people; Black people pushed and were participants in, and makers of, their own freedom. And much of that came from that resilience that developed out of that subversion of a practice. So the powerful said: “Gratitude is this,and you owe me gratitude; you owe me your life. And the people who were actually enslaved said, um, okay, not really, our lives are really ours.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

If you look towards even the way Jesus, you know, we think about the rich, that you storing up riches on this earth versus riches in heaven - there's very little in our tradition about, “let's just list the things we're happy for.” Ultimately, it's about understanding our gratitude in relationship to God and to one another. And so I just think these are deep spiritual messages, here. But I like the idea of the subversive quality of it. 

Up next, more with Diana Butler Bass, author of Grateful: the Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks. You can hear full episodes of the State of Belief anytime on our website at stateofbeliefcom. You'll find links to topics we discussed this week, as well as transcripts and more. And make sure you subscribe at stateofbelief.com/subscribe. You're listening to The State of Belief, where religion and democracy meet. 

...

Welcome back to The State of Belief, I'm Interfaith Alliance President Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. My guest is theologian Diana Butler Bass. 

You know, we're in a moment. I would say for our lifetime - I won't speak for you, you're younger than me – but for my lifetime, I don't feel like I've quite faced a political moment like this. I mean, we've seen things in the 60s. Maybe this is an interesting question for you to answer, and you've started to answer, but what can gratitude do for those of us who recognize the threat to democracy that we're in, and are recognizing the in-crashing of politics into our lives? How can we think of this holiday as something that will give us sustenance for all of the work ahead? 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

There's really nothing more subversive than a table - because that other form of gratitude that I was talking about, that demand-oriented top-down gratitude, that's a pyramid. Gratitude is structured in a way that preserves the wealth of a few and the power of a few over the lives of the many. 

But Thanksgiving, the most enduring image of it, of course, in American history is that table, and even though there's so much mythology around that and there's no denying the terrible ways that the European colonization of North America impacted the Indigenous people, it's been fascinating to me that that image of happy people around a table endures, people of difference. That is one of the oldest images of what it means to be an American. That they could have the pilgrims and the Indians sitting together at the table and that they were eating together. Now we all know, like I said, mythology and history have a lot to say about that, but that the image appeals to us is really amazing, and to me that's what Thanksgiving promises - and that in itself is a powerful religious image. 

I think that that's really how gratitude was reconstituted in African-American theology and African-American churches as the Beloved Community, but ideally that's been always part of the Christian tradition.In the liturgical churches - I'm an Episcopalian, as I know you know, but we do weekly Eucharist. And Catholics have weekly mass, and we've come over the centuries to think of that as sort of a privatized meal in which we get salvation by eating Jesus and drinking Jesus’ blood. But no, that's not really what it is. When you call it the Eucharist, that Greek name for that meal, what it means is: really great, super good Thanksgiving the best possible ever giving of thanks. 

And so Christianity was constituted as a faith of the table where, as the Apostle Paul said himself - he gets gets so many bad raps, but I'm going to give him a good rap for this. He said around that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for everyone is going to be one. Everyone is one. And so to me, that becomes the alternate vision,is that there is a table. And the table is laden with gifts, everyone is invited, and we pass those gifts around the table and make sure that everyone is fed. 

And sometimes I think about that on a national level. Do you realize that this is the only day of the year where there is consistent and persistent attention paid to make sure everyone can feast? Literally, you can watch social service organizations just opening their doors, feeding people, people being brought off of the streets to make sure they have a meal this one day a year. And I always think: what if we really understood the American table to be that? Everyone, all the time, all around the table, no pyramids allowed. And we literally go out into the streets and pull people in to make sure they are fed. I can't imagine a better holiday,actually.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Yeah, that's a great way to think of this holiday, and that everyone's presence – it was C-E, not T-S - everybody's presence is a reason for gratitude, and everyone has something to offer that we can be thankful for just by their very life, and so I do think that all of that is really beautiful. 

I appreciate that, and we'll be celebrating at my house, but I wanted to go back to what I started with a little bit and talk about how you gather community, personally. I do think you're offering a different kind of ministry into the world, and I don't know if you describe it that way or how you describe what you do, but the gathering of community around the Cottage, your Substack, but then also, you do webinars that I've actually been honored to present at - I don't know if you call them webinars. Whatever you call them, you gather people in in such a beautiful way. And you go out, you put things out there, and invite people in. Talk a little bit about how you feel that this holiday or this idea of gratitude fits into what you're doing in the world right now with all ofyour talents. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Oh my gosh, you know, Paul, I've never thought about that. You're really challenging me to consider why I do what I do. I wrote this book called Grateful during the election of 2016. And I feel like so many people have emailed me in the last couple of weeks and said it's newly relevant. And when I wrote the book, I was really, really, really, really depressed, and by the time I got through the process, my husband actually remarked to me, he said you know, writing this book really changed you. And he listed a couple of things, and I think that they relate to your earlier question. 

In a lot of folks who are in positions like we have, this sort of sneaky entitlement comes in. We might feel like we're being good people, but we also get to feeling like we deserve what we have at some level. “Yeah, I worked hard for that,” you know, or “I went to school for a long time and people should respect me,” or that kind of thing. And I think that that's a particular kind of temptation for writers and for people who are in the public eye, is just sort of begin to elevate yourself in ways that are not really in line with treating everyone as neighbors, and you sort of see yourself in ways that are a little false. And so I think I was falling into some of those temptations. 

So when I wrote the book, it really did what exactly the title said: it subverted, it rearranged my vision of who I was in the world, what my gifts were, and what life was about. And so since then I think pretty much in the last seven or eight years, everything that I've done has really flowed out of those realizations that I had about my own life and this practice and things that I had even given into inappropriately. 

So now I just have fun. I always think of myself as setting a table. No matter where I'm going, no matter who I'm with, it's like I'm either sitting at a table or setting a table. And so then I asked myself: what is my responsibility and what is my leadership - whether I'm sitting or setting -about making sure the food is passed, that all are being fed. And so I do that in every environment: as a writer, as a preacher, in my own dining room, the online community that has, somewhat startlingly and beautifully gathered around my Substack newsletter, and that's been just, really, an amazing thing. I just think of that as total giftedness. 

It mostly grew during the pandemic. I was feeling so isolated and so alone, and so I just started scribbling this newsletter and sending it out to people I already knew; and so from that it's grown to be just a really vibrant, amazing place. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

It's beautiful: the writing is beautiful, it's very fulsome, it feels very nourishing, and so I encourage our listeners to tune in. 

I've also been really just… You know, when four people you really like and you think are really, really smart get together and commit to having conversations - it's you and Robby Jones and Jemar Tisby and Kristin Du Mez - have started something called the Convocation. I will say, all of you have been on The State of Belief, and so I'm very proud of that. But then you started this thing called the Convocation, which has been, also,a way for you all to be in conversation with each other, coming out of different parts of the Christian community, but recognizing that conversations can illuminate and broaden all of yourselves. So talk to me a little bit about how that happened, and what are some of the things that you feel you have learned from that experience of the Convocation. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

You're the first person to ask! Paul, you're just full of questions nobody's asked me before. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, I'm just, you know, they call me the “gotcha guy.” I’m really gettin’ you today, Diana.

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Well, this is actually kind of a fun story. It really fits with gratitude, and I think that people will be able to relate to this. So in the summer - early, early early in the summer, could have even been late spring - RobbyJones just called me up and he said, “What are we going to do about Christian Nationalism?” And I said well, people are doing things. And he said well, you're doing some great writing at the Cottage. We're doing all this work at PRRI. I think we should somehow join forces. And I said,“Well, if you can think of something we can do, fine. Call me back.”

And within like two weeks he called me back and he said, “Well, now I've been talking to Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby, and I think the four of us should do something together.” And so we came up with this idea of having a cooperative newsletter called the Convocation, in which we would share our writing on a single platform about, mostly, Christian Nationalism, mostly religion and politics. It's three historians and one sociologist - we make a lot of jokes about that when we're together. And then I started thinking, as we were working on this over the summer, I said hey, you know what? We're beginning to kind of sound like the Bulwark of faith and politics, if you know the website the Bulwark.

I said, they actually go out places together where they put their writers up in front of a synagogue or a church, and they talk about stuff that's really important. Said, I wonder if we should do that. And the next thing, I knew, Robby had come up with this idea to have sort of a fall Faith and Democracy tour, where the four of us would go on the road, and in churches talk about the relationship between faith and democracy in a nonpartisan way - because a couple of people are in 501c3s, and plus we were in churches - and so we wanted to model the fact that the Johnson Amendment and the separation of Church and State really do matter, but you can still talk about faith and politics even with the separation of Church and State. And so we started doing this. 

That meant we were together all fall, and we were on the road. And as the election unfolded and sort of every step of it, we found ourselves together and supporting one another and just so grateful that we were in common conversation. And then the election happened and, interestingly enough, they were the first three people that I reached out to. We were texting all night on election night, and then we had another event right afterwards. And we got together, and the single thing that all four of us said after - we had a big event in Atlanta, it was really beautiful, super well-attended, had these great musicians that were with us, people we brought in from Nashville who are all Christians, who are also worried about Christian Nationalism, and they're just great, great singers. 

And so we we had this wonderful time together, and we sat around the table afterwards and every one of us said ,you know, I'm so grateful that we've been together these last six months. I don't know how I would have made it through all of this without you. And that was odd because, you know, we started with a community of basically academics who all had Substack newsletters, and we wanted to warn people about Christian Nationalism. And through, I think, our own sort of flexibility and listening to the callings of our lives and just being tender to the moment, we became something else. We actually became friends, and we became people who have learned together how to set a table of conversation and bring ourselves to that with the different gifts that we have, and be strengthened through those relationships. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Well, I think there's going to be lots of opportunity for the Convocation, Interfaith Alliance, and the many, many people - there are so many good people out there who are really concerned about this - and you know we have a really strong religious tradition that has worked against religious extremism and Christian Nationalism in the past, and I think it’s going to be time to really fire up our imaginations and how we're going to show up in this moment. And so I'm looking forward to having lots of good conversations about that. We're certainly firing up at Interfaith Alliance,and I'm so glad that I view you and actually all four of the Convocation as people I can really rely on, who I trust very much, and I'm very grateful to each of you, and I'm especially grateful to you. 

I'm grateful to Richard, who I understand is making this conversation possible, your husband, for doing some duties while you are just having the time of your life talking to me. So I want to shout out to Richard, who is just an amazing guy. None of us operate alone. We all have people around us, and I'm just so grateful for all of that.

Let me ask you one more thing. Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving blessing or prayer that you love to do either at the table or with friends?

DIANA BUTLER BASS: 

Well, I actually wrote one that's really become kind of popular. It's been turned into a liturgy in some churches. I've been told that over and over again, and I know people have used it as their table prayer with their families at Thanksgiving. That's a prayer called “We Choose to Be Grateful,” and people can just say like Google in Thanksgiving prayer or something like that, and my name, Diana Butler Bass, and it will probably pop right up. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to do it that way. We want you to read it. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Oh, but I wanted to read you another one, because I love this one. This one shapes me, but if you want me to read it, I guess I will. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Okay, you can read two. Diana Butler Bass, I'm going to do a special allowance because I'm filled with gratitude and it's making me super generous. I'm going to give you this special opportunity to read your own prayer of gratitude, and then also another one. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Okay, oh, now I have to figure out what order to read them in. You can tell that this was not planned in advance, that we're really flying by the seat of our pants here. Well, you know, people forget we're all human beings. When you get to be on a podcast, sometimes people forget. But look, they really are friends. 

Okay, so this is a prayer that I wrote for Thanksgiving 2016. “God, there are many days we do not feel grateful. When we are anxious or angry, when we feel alone, when we do not understand what is happening in the world or with our neighbors, when news is bleak and confusing, when there are threats, injustice, violence and war. We struggle to feel grateful. 

“But this Thanksgiving, we choose gratitude. We choose to accept life is a gift from you, and a gift from the unfolding work of all creation. We choose to be grateful for the earth from which our food comes, for the water that gives life, for the air we all breathe. We choose to thank our ancestors, everyone who came before us, for their stories and struggles. We receive their wisdom as a continuing gift for today.

“We choose to see our families and friends with new eyes, accepting them for who they are. We are thankful for our homes, whether humble or grand. We choose to appreciate and care for our neighbors, whatever our differences or how much we feel hurt or misunderstood by them. We choose to open our hearts to those who dwell among us in the shadows of uncertainty and fear, recognizing their full dignity and humanity. We choose to see the world as our shared commons, our home now, and the legacy we will leave to generations to come. 

“God, this Thanksgiving we do not give thanks, we choose it. We will make this choice of thanks with courage, knowing it is humbling to say ‘thank you.’ We choose to open ourselves to your generosity, aware that we live in an unending circle of gratitude. We are all guests at your hospitable table, around which gifts are passed and received. We will not let anything opposed to love take over this table. Instead of giving into fear, we embrace grace, love and the gifts of life at this table. In this choosing, in the sharing of this meal, we are strengthened to pass gratitude on to the world. Thus, with you, with all those gathered here at this table, with those at tables far distant, we pledge to make thanks, and we ask you to strengthen us in this resolve. Here, now, and into the future. Around our family table, around the table of our nation, around the table of the earth, we choose thanks.“

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Amen. And what's the next one? 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Well, that one is the one that I wrote, as I said, in light of the election of 2016. And this is one that influenced me greatly when I was writing the book Grateful, and I love it. It's from David Steindl-Rast, who is a benedictine brother who is now, I think, 96 or 97, and he has the most ever-viewed Ted Talk on gratitude over at Ted, if anybody wants to watch that for Thanksgiving. And these words come from that talk, and it's a prayer in the middle of the talk, or it's an observation, kind of a prose poem, in the middle of the talk:

“If you're grateful, you're not fearful. And if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of ‘enough’ and not a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and you are respectful to everybody. And this changes the power pyramid under which we live.”

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Diana, Diana, Diana. You are amazing, Diana Butler Bass. You can find all of her work at the Cottage. And what is the website that people should go to? I know they can sign up for your sub stack. There's just so much that you offer but also buy every single one of Diana's books. I'm a fan, I am a supporter, and I'm grateful to call you a friend. So tell us where people can find you. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

The easiest thing is the website. That's just my name, www.dianabutlerbass.com, and that takes you to all the places, except I haven't put up my new Bluesky account, and I should probably do that.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Oh yeah, you and I are both on Bluesky, now. That's fun, Bluesky is fun. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Much more fun than the old place. 

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

Than the old place, the bad old place. All right, Diana Butler Bass, thank you so much, and happy Thanksgiving to you and all of yours. 

DIANA BUTLER BASS:

Well, happy Thanksgiving to you, as well; thank you, and, oh my gosh, I hope that you and your family just experience the many gifts that are surrounding you this Thanksgiving.

PAUL RAUSHENBUSH:

I'm sure you know someone who'd get a lot out of this conversation, so please share The State of Belief with them; and be sure to subscribe to the State of Belief at Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. We need your help to keep making the State of Belief. If you'd like to make a financial contribution, go to stateofbelief.com. That's stateofbelief.com. The views and opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service or Religion News Foundation. The State of Belief is produced by Ray Kirstein, whom I'm so grateful for today, and is a production of Interfaith Alliance. Become a member today at interfaithalliance.org.

And be sure to join us next week. I'll be in conversation with religion scholar Dr Matthew D. Taylor about the Christian Nationalist influence on the proposed cabinet appointments for the incoming administration, and hear about the important documentary Bad Faith from members of the creative team. I can't wait! Until then, I'm Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on the state of belief where religion and democracy meet. 

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