a Month of Virtue: Gratitude: 30 Days to More Thankful Heart

Most of us think we know what gratitude is - a warm feeling that rises when something good happens, a pleasant mood that visits on good days and disappears on hard ones. The Catholic tradition knows something different: that gratitude is not a feeling at all. It is a virtue. An act of truth. The creature's proper answer to a God who gives everything freely, and who asks for nothing in return but our glad acknowledgment.A Month of Virtue: Gratitude is a thirty-day Catholic formation book that takes that answer seriously. Each day offers a short reflection drawn from the Church's treasury of tradition - from Saint Thomas Aquinas on gratitude as an act of justice, from the Ignatian Examen as a daily gathering of gifts, from Saint Francis of Assisi praising God for Brother Sun from a hut where he lay nearly blind, from Blessed Solanus Casey's counsel to thank God ahead of time, from Our Lady's Magnificat as the model of a soul that has received everything and returns everything in praise. Each reflection is followed by a verse of Scripture (Douay-Rheims), a single concrete resolution to carry through the day, and a brief closing prayer.This is not a gratitude journal. There are no prompts about what made you smile today, no techniques for training your brain to look on the bright side. The gratitude this book forms is theologically ordered: it runs toward God, not toward the self. It is rooted in the Eucharist - the great thanksgiving of the Church - and in the long tradition of souls who gave thanks not because life was pleasant but because they knew who the Giver was.The month moves in four stages: what gratitude really is (and why ingratitude is a root sin, not merely bad manners); gratitude before God in prayer and worship; gratitude with others, including those who have corrected or wounded us; and gratitude with oneself, closing with a consecration of the whole life as a continual offering of thanksgiving. By Day 30, the reader will not have mastered the virtue. But they will have begun to see their life differently - as something received, not constructed - and that seeing is the beginning of everything.Written for Catholics who want more than the world's version of thankfulness. Small enough to read in a few minutes a day. Faithful enough to carry for a lifetime.

Pagina's: 159, Paperback, Independently published