Gratitude can be a powerful positive emotion, helping you feel more connected to others, reducing stress, and even improving your health studies have shown it is associated with health outcomes such as improvements in blood pressure and sleep quality.

However, gratitude can also be part of a meaningful spiritual practice. Recognizing areas where we are grateful goes hand in hand with thanksgiving, something we practice every Sunday in the Prayers of the People and in The Great Thanksgiving during Communion. And yet, the act of cultivating gratitude can be difficult. It can seem like there is nothing to be grateful for in a world full of bad news. It can be intimidating to imagine sitting down and intentionally listing things you are grateful for. Sometimes it can be hard to find the time to think about it at all. I know that in the past I have vowed to create a habit of gratitude for myself, but it has been quickly swept away in the busy reality of day-to-day life.  

Others have also expressed that gratitude is something they would like to work on, but it can be hard to grow on your own. So, we are launching a gratitude channel on Saint Mark’s 20s/30s Slack. We view the channel as an opportunity to foster a communal sense of gratitude both within Saint Mark’s and in the broader community, as well as to help people who want to make gratitude a habit, with minimal barriers to getting started.  

Feel free to share whatever you are grateful for, whether that is something that seems small, like a beautiful flower on your walk, something big, like a major life event, or something in between. Our hope is that it will be a place for us all to better connect with a sense of gratitude for the wonderful world we live in and to recognize the many gifts of community we have here at Saint Mark’s. 

—Hilary McLeland-Wieser ([email protected])