As I write this the day before Thanksgiving, what floats up for me, amidst many thoughts of people and things I am grateful for, is a radical prayer that was also my beloved grandmother’s favorite quote. It’s by Dag Hammarskjold, from his book, “Markings.”
“For everything that has been… Thank you.
For everything that will be… Yes!”
I describe this as “radical” because it does not split hairs; “everything” means, well, everything. I remember being at a workshop where the leader and I discovered our mutual love of this quote. He spoke of the breathtaking acceptance and resolve here, the completeness of saying “thanks,” to “everything.” Including the heartbreaking, the awful, the unplanned and the unwelcome. Can we ever really mean a thank you to everything, he wondered.
I don’t think that offering up a thanks to your whole picture, tragedies included, is some passive, rosy version of a Pollyanna acceptance. No, I think it is a leap into the mystery, a radical trust, a deep knowing that to change one thing in your life—to remove one nasty—would be to change everything. Gives a whole new meaning to Thomas Merton’s phrase “a hidden wholeness.”
On some level, I believe we are asked to sanctify the whole of our lives, to not assume we fully know what is good and what is bad. Look at your own life in terms of retrospect: how has time shifted your view of what has happened—or not happened—to you?
And the rest of the quote. After the gulp of this massive giving of thanks, there comes the welcoming of the future... the ongoing leap of yes, a never-ending improvisation into more mystery.
Which leads me to my other favorite Dag Hammarskjold quote, in case you think you have to do all this thanking and leaping all by yourself:
“I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence was meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”
I wish you a holiday season of Yes, and of meaning, and of that palpable sense of both question and questioner, and your own sacred meaning.