On Gratitude

A Meditation

Apr 05, 2025

Dear Friends,

A number of you wrote me notes of appreciation for my post on kindness, and I felt your gratitude as itself a gesture of kindness. It occurred to me that gratitude is the flip side of kindness. They can be thought of as twins. If someone is kind to you and you respond with gratitude, aren’t you returning their kindness, in kind? We practice this exchange of kindness throughout the day with the simple phrases “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” The moral of this endless loop is that kindness begets kindness just as surely as anger provokes anger.

I turned once again to etymology to explore the wider meaning of gratitude. Its synonym is thankfulness. The word comes from the Latin gratus, meaning “pleasing, grateful.” Gratus is also the root of the word grace, by which we mean the condition of being favored, whether by God or another mortal, or by Fate.

Because gratitude is sister to grace it places us in the realm of the divine. For grace, in our imaginings, originates from God. We say the Lord is gracious because He bestows favors on us, the primary favor being life itself, for which we are grateful. At least most of the time.

There are other ways in which gratitude and grace intersect. What do we do to show gratitude for the food we are about to eat? We say grace. If we avoid an unpleasant circumstance, we might say, gratefully, “There but for the grace of God go I.” “Gracious me!” we exclaim when confronted with a surprising development that seems alarming or threatening. Grace is a blessing we invoke to protect us from the vicissitudes of life.

Grace is also associated with our idea of beauty. A swan is a graceful bird. A ballerina is a graceful performer. Roger Federer is a graceful athlete. The well-named actress Grace Kelly was a beautiful woman. An elegant object, or person, or turn of phrase, or gesture has been favored with beauty, and is a beneficiary of grace.

What does it mean to live a graceful life, a life that is favored? Might it mean living in a way that makes others feel grateful to know us, to work beside us, to count us as a friend? Might it mean performing all our acts, no matter how small or insignificant, out of a sense of gratitude, leaving a trail of beauty behind us?

Finally I would ask, should we not wish to be led by people who are living gracefully? People to whom we can be grateful? And if we are not being led by such people, what does it say about us that we have not chosen them?