Gratefulness + Thanksgiving = Gratitude
Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,
There are very few podcasts that I have listened to more than twice, but one of them is Krista Tippett’s 2016 interview with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk and the founder of A Network for Grateful Living. He speaks about how he distinguishes among three words that many of us use synonymously—gratitude, gratefulness, and thanksgiving—and he says he uses these words in a particular way because “we really need different terms for our experience.”
In this Thanksgiving week, I have warm feelings for each and all of you—students, faculty, staff, alumnae, parents, and friends—and for so much that Saint Mary’s College brings to my life. So I particularly appreciated Brother David’s discernment about gratitude as it relates to gratefulness (an inner feeling) and thanksgiving (an expression of that feeling). These are, Brother David suggests,“two aspects, or two phases, actually, of the process that is gratitude.”
He describes how we experience moments of gratefulness as like the water in the bowl of a fountain, welling up inside us and filling our hearts with joy. Just as the fountain fills up silently and then makes exuberant noise when it overflows, so too, when our hearts are ready to spill over, we express ourselves in thanksgiving. These last few weeks, as the fall semester winds down, I’ve been struck by this rising feeling of gratefulness over and over.
I’ll mention just a few reasons. Each day, as I drive down The Avenue, I observe small changes in the landscape—the wild color in the trees becoming thinner, and the winter shades of bark and branch becoming more visible. I value deeply how our grounds crew takes tender care of this beautiful campus. I appreciate the foresight of those early leaders of Saint Mary’s who planted maples and sycamores along The Avenue and had a real vision for the topography and the built environment of the campus.
Our late semester activities are also a source of inspiration and joy. Last week, our Collegiate Choir and Belles Voix Treble Choir had their fall choral concert, and, under the direction of Professor Nancy Menk, they are consistently outstanding. There wasn’t a dry eye when the combined choruses ended the evening with “The Bells of Saint Mary’s.” And yesterday and today, award-winning actress Phylicia Rashad is spending extended time at SMC as part of the Margaret Hill Visiting Artist series. I’ve observed how carefully faculty and staff craft these experiences for students—and also how they welcome the local community to join us. (Thanks especially to Prof. Mark Abram-Copenhaver and VP Redgina Hill for making this event such a success). Of course, alumna Peggy Hill, who established the endowment for this series in 1994, had the amazing foresight to know her gift would grow and give back more and more over time.
Last weekend, I was delighted to travel to the wedding of a wonderful 2015 Saint Mary’s graduate I have become close to through her continued involvement in many of our initiatives. I was reminded, in a powerful way, of the enduring friendships that are forged at Saint Mary’s. Not only were the bride’s friends there in tremendous numbers, but the parents of Belles in her friend group were in attendance too. Several of the moms who are also Saint Mary’s alumnae talked about their own unwavering connection to each other and to the College, and the bride’s parents themselves created a warm and welcoming environment for everyone present. Weddings always make my heart want to spill over, but this one did so for so many reasons.
These are just a few examples. I could mention many other SMC experiences that produce gratefulness and thanksgiving in me. But I want to return to Brother David Steindl-Rast’s suggestion that a season of gratitude like Thanksgiving could really be a lifetime of gratitude. At one point in the interview, he discusses how gratitude is inextricable from the experience of belonging, of radical connectedness. He offers the example of the food that arrives daily on each of our tables: “Most of it was grown, so people had to work on sowing it and harvesting it, packaging it, transporting it. There you have already a couple of thousand people whom you will never see, never know by name, never meet, and yet, without them, there wouldn’t be anything on your plate.” We need to remember that “there is no end to connectedness.”
Brother David encourages an active practice of gratitude, where we feel grateful “not for everything, but in every moment,” and where we remind ourselves to say, giving thanks, “Yes, we belong together.” His work is a powerful reminder that “gratefulness is the source of lasting happiness.” I have felt such delight in seeing first-hand at Saint Mary’s the many ways that we belong together and belong to each other.
I wish all of you joy this Thanksgiving and beyond, with the gift of these final words from Brother David: “Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
Warm regards,
Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President
November 26, 2024