Psalm 100
In my final year of seminary, I took a senior capstone course on poetry and theology. We read many poems, some of which invoked God explicitly and others more subtly. Some of the poems didn’t speak of God at all, but they certainly pointed to the divine in their lyrical observations of the world and how things move about in it. In all our reading, there was one poem that knocked me flat on my butt: Ross Gay’s “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude.”
Unlike many poems whose titles are cryptic or unrelated to the text, this poem’s title leaves no surprises. It is what it says, a catalogue of thanksgiving, reading like a spontaneous song of praise Gay can no longer keep to himself. He thanks people and things he has experienced, writing at one point about a group of men who he witnesses rushing to help an old lady falling, “holding patiently/ with the softest part of their hands/ her cane and purple hat,/ gathering for her the contents of her purse/ and touching her shoulder and elbow.” He thanks nature itself, writing in gratitude for “false indigo whose petals stammered apart/ by bumblebees good lord please give me a minute…” He even thanks the bittersweet and heartbreaking moments of his life, showing gratitude for the continued presence of a friend who was murdered “for moseying back in dreams where,/ seeing us lost and scared/ he put his hand on our shoulders/ and pointed us to the temple across town.”
Somewhere in the poem, Gay lets us know how the gratitude he is beautifully putting into words is a stream he cannot stop, writing, “I can’t stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak.” The poem, which you should absolutely read (or listen to his spoken-word reading of it with music by my favorite band Bon Iver), ends with one more note of thanks slipped in: “Goodbye, I mean to say. And thank you. Every day.”
I owe Gay’s “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” for reorienting my encounter with the biblical psalms, some of which I read on an almost daily basis. While the psalms encompass the entirety of human emotion, this kinetically wonderful poem echoes the psalms of thanksgiving, including Psalm 100. The psalmist starts by instructing, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing” (v. 1). This invitation not only encourages us to celebrate the Lord’s goodness in worship but also welcomes us to take a seat in the presence of our Creator, restfully reverent of all that God does for us. The psalmist continues by affirming, “It is he who made us, and we are his” (100:3).
Not only are we invited to join in the celebration, but we are also affirmed as children claimed by God. It’s a beautiful turn from invitation to intimacy, reminding us that we sing praises to a God who knows every one of us by our full names. As another psalm notes, God has known us since before we were born (139:13) and knows all the days of our lives (139:15-16).
The psalmist concludes by singing that “the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations” (100:5). It feels as though the psalm is asking us the existential question of how we could possibly come to God with anything but gratitude, for God cares about us on a personal level and is the greatest of all good, faithful to us throughout the many generations in the span of human history. All we can do in response to God’s compassion and love is to give our gratitude to God, in whatever form, without abandon.
So: Thank you, dear reader, for reading the words I initially put together in something that resembles coherent thoughts. Thank you, editor, for taking these resemblances and helping them make sense. Thank you, publisher, for giving my voice a platform. Most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you so much, God, for giving all of us love that exceeds the ends of our wildest imaginations and for caring for each us like a mother caring for her child more than anything else in the world.
Questions for discussion
- What is something you’ve witnessed today that you want to give thanks for?
- How do you like to show gratitude to God, to neighbors, and to the world?
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