The Daily Pearl
On Gratitude
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”
Psalm 103 : 2
A Prayer for This Morning
Father, I forget your benefits with remarkable efficiency, and remember my grievances by heart. Reverse the bookkeeping. Teach my soul to count what has been given until the counting becomes praise.
Affirmation
I will count what I have been given, and let the counting become praise.
The Reflection
Forget not all his benefits assumes, correctly, that we will. Forgetting is not a moral failure so much as a default setting: mercies metabolise into expectations within days. The manna astonishes on Monday and is a menu complaint by Friday. So the psalmist gives his own soul instructions, out loud, like a woman speaking sternly and kindly to herself.
Gratitude is best kept the way pearls are kept: strung. One benefit recalled is a bead loose in a drawer; recalled daily, named and threaded onto the last, the benefits become a strand, something with weight and lustre that can be taken out and worn on the difficult days. Blessings do not need to be many to be sufficient. They need to be remembered.
In Her Company
St Elizabeth Ann Seton
Widowed young and left with five children, she answered loss with thanksgiving and work, founding schools that taught a nation's daughters.
Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774 to 1821) was a wife, mother of five and widow of New York before she entered the Catholic Church in 1805. She founded the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph's and planted the first free Catholic school for girls at Emmitsburg, Maryland. In 1975 she became the first native-born citizen of the United States to be canonised.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
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