The Beauty and Importance of Gratitude: “My Heart Overflows”

Our world seems a little short on gratitude. We have expectations and demands, and we have entitlements. But we have so much to be thankful for. Perhaps that’s the problem – so many blessings and forgetting what the source is. 

My Heart Overflows: A Treasury of Readings, Poems, and Prayers on Gratitude is a relatively small but beautiful book that reminds us to be grateful. Assembled by the editors of Paraclete Press, the work is 144 pages of artwork and text that each speaks to gratitude, why we feel it and show it, and how we can be thankful for it.

 

You can pray with Francis of Assisi, observe Walden Pond with Ralph Waldo Emerson, celebrate beauty with Gerard Manley Hopkins, consider what you mother has done for you with Maya Angelou, and be thankful for the rain with Luci Shaw. Helen Keller is here, as is John Greenleaf Whittier. 

 

You can feel the evening wind with William Cullen Bryant, read what G.K. Chesterton said about St. Francis, see why you should enjoy life (Charlotte Bronte did), and discover what George Washington was grateful for about his new nation. Emily Dickinson believed there was nothing without gratitude (and she wrote a poem about it). And you can pray and be thankful with Jane Austen and the church father Clement of Alexandria and discover what Abraham Lincoln was so thankful he declared a national day of Thanksgiving (as did James Madison). 

 

The paintings included in the artwork includes those by Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, Albert Bierstadt, Jan Steen, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Giotto, and John Constable, among many others. The book is profusely illustrated, each painting chosen to illustrate the themes of thankfulness and gratitude.

 

I love beautiful books, and My Heart Overflows is a beautiful book. In fact, you could say I’m grateful for the time, care, and attention the editors at Paraclete used to create this volume.

 

Painting: The Thankful Poor, oil on canvas (1896) by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), one of the illustrations used in the book. 

Some Monday Readings

 

Chaos in Aurora – Christina Buttons and Christopher Rufo at City Journal. 

 

The Imminent Russia-US War – Christopher Caldwell at Compact Magazine.

 

Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – poem by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Writing for an Audience of One – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Things Worth Remembering: The Imperfection of America – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

“Songs for Ascent” by David Robert Jones

I read Songs for Ascent: Poems by David Robert Jones, and I was as taken by the beautifully written introduction as I was by the beautifully written poems.

Jones calls this collection “a long series of insufficient prayers for reparation. In fact, one might understand these verses best by imagining them in the context of the pained monologue of the prodigal son during his long walk back home to beg a favor of his father.”

And so they are. These are poems/psalms about redemption and grace, the profound understanding of the separation from God, and the sheer wondrous amazement that the hand still reaches to touch our lives. Read “Debase, My Pharisee Wonder Working:”

the long fall down,

and desperately sweeping and bloodied hands

to press

the lesser—

the broken, the searching, the weak—

down further than myself to keep me always,

in my own esteem, one step above total

destruction.

to wittingly shun the scarred hands that

reached down to

save me, dust me off,

bring me back to higher than I know I’m

missing;

i, profane, take the image as my own

to abscond the hope and destroy it,

lest all these, slaves to oblivion,

find the emancipation i forfeited.

Jones reflects on his own prayers, on callousness, on grace, harness of heart, vanity, pride (a marvelously pointed two-line poem), insufficiency, the fall, and forgiveness. He prays, or sings, for brokenness and writes the next beatitude (“Blessed are the going”).

Reading these poems is to experience a contemporary articulation of many of the same themes and ideas found in the Biblical psalms. It’s a wonderful collection.

Jones, who lives in California, has previously written two poetry collections,  Merika, Love Poems and A Manual on the Human Condition.

The foreword is by author and poet John Blase, who blogs at The Beautiful Due.

Related:

Jones’s web site.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.