Krista Tippett: Hello, again. Welcome back. We are nearing the end of our course on hope, but not before we explore the companion to hope that is gratitude or, as our teacher, Brother David Steindl-Rast prefers to say, a practice of gratefulness.

He is a teacher beloved around the world. And he makes such useful, practical distinctions, as a spiritual person, around experiences that are lifegiving and resilience-making but can feel absurd to speak of, at times. He calls joy, for example, “the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” And his idea of gratefulness, his practice of gratefulness, is not an easy gratitude or thanksgiving, like the hope we’ve been learning about and practicing is not an easy hope. It is a full-blooded, reality-based practice and choice.

I had the great pleasure of traveling to Austria in 2015 to speak with Brother David at the monastery where he spends most of each year, at this point in his life. But there is a gravitas to him. And that reality base is hard-won, because he as a human being was formed by the 20th century’s catastrophes — war and refugee crisis, Holocaust and fascism. He was 12 years old, just on the cusp of being a teenager, when his country of Austria came under fascist rule. He will say, “I spent my teens under Hitler.” And what he also experienced in that world is that the church supported, became co-opted by, that political system. And he entered the church as part of his resistance, as part of making the world he wanted to live in.

He has a really interesting perspective on monastic life and the place of monasteries within our world. He calls monasticism “the original spiritual social network.” And he also will say things like, “There’s a monk in each of us.” He thinks that monasteries have a vocation in our time, in terms of what they model as community and network and institution, because his observation is that we have organized our world around power pyramids for thousands of years, and that has come at a price of oppression and exploitation, and that that power pyramid model of structuring life and society is in the process of collapsing. And he offers this intriguing image of how the monastic social network arose and what it models. He says, “Our hope in the future is the hope into well-trodden paths from house to house” — these well-trodden paths from house to house.

And I want to give you a final thought of his, a piece of perspective before we hear some of the conversation I had with him. When he says that every one of us is a monastic or a mystic, he’s saying this — and I’ll start quoting him — “We have this experience of belonging, once in a while, out of the blue. Women often say when they give birth to a child, they have it. Or when we fall in love, we have this sense of belonging. Or sometimes, without any particular reason, suddenly, out in nature, you feel one with everything. And every human being has this. But what we call the great mystics, they let this experience determine and shape every moment of their lives. They never forgot it. And we humans, the rest of us, tend to forget it. But if we keep it in mind, then we are really related to that great mystery, and then we can find joy in it.”

So I want to share part of my conversation with him where we delve deeper into what he means, in a granular way, when he talks about gratitude and thanksgiving — not as a denial of fear and anxiety that may be reasonable, not as a turning away from the gravity of reality and of this moment we inhabit, but as an orientation and a practice. And in this section, he starts to talk about how to do that practice.

There are a few qualities — say, aspects or qualities of the experience of gratefulness and thanksgiving that you’ve noted that I’d love to just draw out. And one of them is beholding — that surprise can be a beginning of being grateful, and beholding and also listening. I mean, I guess what we’re talking about here is attending.

Br. David Steindl-Rast: Well, for me, this idea of listening and really looking and beholding, that comes in when people ask, “Well, how shall we practice this gratefulness?” And there is a very simple kind of methodology to it: Stop, look, go. Most of us, caught up in schedules and deadlines and rushing around, and so the first thing is that we have to stop, because otherwise we are not really coming into this present moment at all, and we can’t even appreciate the opportunity that is given to us, because we rush by, and it rushes by. So stopping is the first thing.

But that doesn’t have to be long. When you are in practice, a split second is enough — “stop.” And then you look: what is now the opportunity of this given moment, only this moment, and the unique opportunity this moment gives? And that is where this beholding comes in. And if we really see what the opportunity is, we must, of course, not stop there, but we must do something with it: Go. Avail yourself of that opportunity. And if you do that, if you try practicing that at this moment, tonight, we will already be happier people, because it has an immediate feedback of joy.

I always say — I don’t speak of the “gift,” because not for everything that’s given to you can you really be grateful. You can’t be grateful for war, in a given situation, or violence or domestic violence or sickness, things like that. There are many things for which you cannot be grateful. But in every moment, you can be grateful — for instance, the opportunity to learn something from a very difficult experience — what to grow by it, or even to protest, to stand up and take a stand.

That is a wonderful gift, in a situation in which things are not the way they ought to be. So opportunity is really the key when people ask, “Can you be grateful for everything?” — no, not for everything, but in every moment.

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Tippett: So many words and themes just in that short passage that echo from across this course, this adventure we’ve been on together: surprise, attending, joy, seeing the possibility of growth through struggle. The invitation here is to be grateful — not for everything, but in every moment. What does that take, and what does it change?

There’s actually truly fascinating scientific study right now, which David Steindl-Rast has been an advisor to and has taken delight in. There’s a science of gratitude, what gratitude works in us, which corresponds to what Brother David says. There are proven health benefits from a simple exercise like spending a few minutes at the end of each day making a list of what you feel grateful for, which creates its own orientation of registering, as you go through the course of your day, what was good. And some of this remarkable list of measurable outcomes from a practice of gratitude were sounder sleep, a sense of peace of mind, less anxiety and depression, kinder behavior, and even higher long-term satisfaction with life.

I was so intrigued, when I first started reading about these studies, that a phrase the scientists use to describe the practice that was cultivated is that people started going through their days and “taking in the good.” That is this foundation of hopeful lives that we have now seen manifest, of taking what is good as seriously as what is failing, as what is dysfunctional, as what is wrong. Brings me back to that notion of Emily Dickinson — “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.”

Brother David also has some interesting observations about why science has discovered spirituality in our time, and in describing that, he has such interesting ways to talk about what “spirituality” really means. He points out that spirituality comes from “spiritus,” and that means “life, breath, aliveness.” He says spirituality is aliveness on all levels. It starts with our bodily aliveness; also means aliveness to interrelationships, aliveness to mystery. Science, Brother David says, has discovered that when people are grateful, they come alive, and you can actually talk about that in terms of measurable outcomes of well-being. What a time to be alive.

In the Pause, we are going to return to that “Stop. Look. Go” exercise as something we can avail ourselves of to build up the muscle memory of gratefulness and its companion, hope. And I will see you next time.