By Donnie Yance
“You may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”
Atul Gawande (2014). “Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End”, p.143, Profile Books
You know the drill. Thanksgiving approaches, and somewhere between planning the menu and bracing for family dynamics, you’re supposed to pause and count your blessings. Maybe you even make a list: health, home, people you love, work that sustains you. The exercise feels right, even virtuous. But if you’re honest, sometimes it also feels a little hollow—like you’re checking a box labeled “gratitude” without actually feeling much of anything.
We often think of gratitude only in humanistic terms—I am grateful for my home, friends, family, and good health. But what about seeing gratitude through a different lens: one that’s less tangible, one that might require us to step out in faith, embracing the unknown and connecting us to the universal One and Agape (Divine Selfless Love)?
When Gratitude Is Hard
And then there are the years when gratitude feels impossible. When loss is fresh, when disappointment has settled into your bones, when the world seems to be fraying at the edges. What then? Are we supposed to simply think harder about the good things, to override our sorrow with forced positivity?
The mystic Valentin Tomberg once suggested something strange: that the wider the distance between our sorrow and our joy, the more meaningful our lives become. Not that suffering is good in itself, but that the margin between our deepest pain and our highest gladness creates a kind of spaciousness where meaning can live. It’s a paradox that defies our usual logic. We want to eliminate the gap, to flatten out the extremes. But what if genuine gratitude doesn’t come from pretending the sorrow isn’t there?
What if real thankfulness requires us to hold both at once—the ache and the wonder, the grief and the gift? Not to resolve them or reconcile them, but simply to stand in that wide margin and let it teach us something we can’t learn any other way.
This isn’t the gratitude of the Thanksgiving table blessing, at least not the version we usually practice. It’s something older, stranger, and more durable. It touches the edge of mystery, the place where our small human experience brushes up against something holy we can’t quite name.
If we’re going to talk about gratitude this Thanksgiving—real gratitude, the kind that doesn’t crumble when life gets hard—we need a different framework entirely.
What Paradoxical Gratitude Actually Looks Like
Picture this: You’re sitting at a table that feels emptier this year. Someone who should be there isn’t. And yet—somehow—you find yourself grateful. Not for the loss. Never for the loss. But grateful within the loss. Grateful that you loved deeply enough to feel this ache. Grateful for the years you had, even as you mourn the years you won’t.
This is the strange territory of paradoxical gratitude. It’s not about finding silver linings or spinning tragedy into inspiration. It’s about standing in two truths at once: This is broken. This is also sacred.
Francis of Assisi understood this. He called poverty his bride, not because suffering is good, but because he found God most present in what was stripped away. Eastern Christianity has a name for this space too—Holy Saturday, that silent day between death and resurrection when nothing is resolved and you simply wait in the dark, trusting something you cannot see.
We’re not talking about toxic positivity here. Toxic positivity says, “Everything happens for a reason—just be grateful!” It rushes past pain to get to the lesson. It demands that you perform happiness.
Paradoxical gratitude does something different. It sits down in the mess. It says, “This is terrible. I hate this. And I’m still here. I’m still breathing. There’s still beauty breaking through the cracks (just like the healing plants we often call weeds), and I’m grateful I can see it.”
It’s gratitude as practice, not feeling. A stance you take even when—especially when—you don’t feel thankful. It’s the decision to notice: the friend who showed up, the morning light, the fact that your heart still breaks which means it still works.
But here’s where it gets interesting: When we practice gratitude in the darkness, when we say “thank you” into the void without knowing if anyone’s listening—what are we actually doing? Who or what are we grateful to?
Maybe that’s the wrong question. Or maybe it’s exactly the right one.
Because this kind of gratitude doesn’t require certainty. It doesn’t need answers. It’s more like a reaching, a leaning toward something larger than yourself, even if you can’t name it. It’s the opposite of control. It’s trust without guarantees.
And that trust—that willingness to be grateful even in the unknowing—might be the doorway to something deeper than gratitude itself.
Grateful To Whom?
This is where the question stops being theoretical. Because gratitude that doesn’t reach toward something beyond ourselves—some presence, some mystery we can’t fully name—eventually collapses back into self-improvement. It becomes another way to manage our inner weather.
But gratitude as relationship? That’s different. That’s the kind of thanksgiving that doesn’t require us to feel better or see silver linings. It’s the gratitude that says: I am here. You are here. I don’t understand, but I’m not alone in this.
In the contemplative traditions—Franciscan, Eastern, the mystics who learned to pray in the dark—this kind of gratitude isn’t about answers. It’s about presence. It’s standing before the Holy with empty hands, with your grief and your joy both visible, and saying: This is what I have. This is where I am. Not because God needs the report, but because you need to stop pretending you’re holding it all together.
The practice isn’t complicated. It’s simply this: pause. Let yourself feel what you actually feel—the sorrow, the beauty, the fear, the strange flicker of joy that appears even in hard seasons. And then, without fixing or explaining any of it, offer it. Not to an idea of God, but to the Mystery that holds you whether you understand it or not.
This doesn’t make the hard things easier. It doesn’t resolve what’s unresolved. But it changes where you’re standing. You’re no longer alone with your own thoughts, trying to think your way into gratitude. You’re in relationship—with the Divine, with the moment, with what is.
Maybe that’s what Thanksgiving could be. Not a day to perform gratitude we don’t feel, but a day to practice standing in the presence of the Holy with everything we carry. The margin between sorrow and joy isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the place where we meet God.
And maybe, in that meeting, we discover that gratitude isn’t something we manufacture. It’s something we receive—quietly, unexpectedly—when we stop trying to make sense of everything and simply let ourselves be held.You don’t have to understand it. You just have to show up.
Blessings to you this week and always,
-Donnie