by Rev Dr Doe West
A Rallying Cry for Gratitude from an Indigenous woman in the US of A, 2024
Scrooge! Grinch! Stakes of holly plunging into hearts across the land!
The antithesis of visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads! Arrg!
The weeping, the gnashing of teeth, the rage, the blaming, the “I WARNED YOU!” cries that have been rampant since the recent election grow louder!
The warnings themselves now sit beneath headlines of their reality.
Each day I receive emails from my students, friends, and trusted public voices (such as Heather Cox Richardson, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow to name only a few) that warn of how Plan 2025 seeks to end all human service programs!
Amidst this, friends and family members are in a time of holiday visits with members who rejoiced and now face unimaginable outcomes they could not perceive as hitting ‘them’ and will turn to the ‘other’ for compassionate response.
I have been among the perceived ‘other’ throughout my life.
I have lived with a lack of compassionate response for those I fight/care for.
“BAH HUMBUG” is a very sugarplum version of what I want to respond!
But then, I hear my Grandmother’s teachings combined with my life long education on how to create meaningful response to the needs of anyone.
Gratitude.
Don’t hiss or spit or decry this option just yet…
Shift your vision to what we still have.
Each of you reading this, I surmise from our platform, still can hear our original unified response to such things.
From my perspective, what is needed is to attune to the soul searing laments of my / our ancestors and contemporaries to regain that harmonic layering of all of our voices in not just unity but a next even louder decibel of harmony.
The reality-based calling out for the creation of the resistance!
But here is the really hard part…
For that to be effective, it will require a cornerstone of GRATITUDE!
Melody Beattie, a survivor of alcohol and drug abuse who became a prolific writer of self-help books, says it well:
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
I include Beattie’s message in my closing lecture each academic year to send my students out to actively work for a world in urgent need of resistance, hope, healing, and action.
The message is the same at the ending of 2024 to each of you/us – just the intensity and unity I now cry out for tastes of blood and salt. I tasted it.
The cornerstone we must lay here needs this imperative understanding of the role GRATITUDE plays in resistance; gratitude that we have been made strong enough for these times.
Like Samurai swords we have been put into the fire and folded over and over to truly merge all layers for optimal strength.
Knowledge, experience, skills, tools – all have been forged over decades of fighting oppression – we must now step mindfully into the fire of the forge to be shaped stronger by such folding that is actually a full merger into unity.
I correct your words and vision: Call US the Grateful Warriors of Unity.
Step closer – we have work to do! Together!
—
Doe West MS, MDiv, PhD, PhD, rose above what she often notes as the “statistical asterisk status” assigned to those who were raised in small villages whose genetics were viewed as setting her ceiling vs providing her foundation. Her Indigenous heritage is her greatest honor in a life others note for the educational, professional, and public service filling it. Her life as a person with a disability puts wheels on her activism!
