Kittenzen: Living in Our Right Mind Part 2--the pleasure of praise

 "To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more, nothing less" (Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, as quoted in Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts). Voskamp's book awakened me to the power and the pleasure of gratitude and thanksgiving, and, as it turns out, to the power of the eucharist, which means thanksgiving ("and when He broke the bread, he gave thanks"). One Thousand Gifts begins when a friend challenges Voskamp to write down 1000 things for which she is grateful and it changes her life. She finds that gratitude itself, eucharisteo, is the path to enjoying life and drawing near to God. It is a way of living that changes how we experience what happens to us, our circumstances, our relationships.

In his book The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis says, "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." Mark and I laugh at the pleasure it brings us to repeatedly tell our cats how beautiful they are, how grateful we are for them, how much we love them. The cats, just by being, help us to live in our "right minds": to delight in Easy's kama sutra positions, to marvel at the discovery of yet more patterns on Mallory's tortoise shell coat, to give thanks for Janey's saucer eyes. We experience such deep pleasure in praising them and never tire of it because, as the old Doublemint gum commercial says, it "doubles our pleasure." I now know what it means for the psalmist to feel such pleasure in praising the Lord. Psalm 150 has come alive for me: let everything that breathes praise the Lord because it puts us in our "right minds" and just feels so damn good to do it!!