A few decades ago, before I had any gray hair, I was a missionary in Peru and worked among people who lived in huts without electricity or water -- huts that lined only one side of the dirt street because the other side was an open ditch where they threw their garbage, including human waste. Every sunrise those who lived in this area of Lima were greeted by a stark reality: to make it to the next sunrise they had to work without respite to feed themselves and their children.

When I went to work with this very poor community I was afraid of having to deal with sadness and despair. How wrong was I! No where have I witnessed more joy and gratitude than among the poor. Their endless struggles for the bare essentials of life meant they lived life with great simplicity. I believe it was this simplicity what made them appreciate the greatest gift of all, the most valuable gift: life. And they were grateful every day, every hour, and every minute for such a gift.

No, come on! I am not romanticizing the poor and their struggles. I might want to in order to ease the demands their struggle makes on me. But Latina women of the community with whom I worship, whose religious understandings and practices continue to be the main source of the theological work I do, they do not allow me to paint pink the material reality that limits their lives. Like the poor people in Lima did in the 1960s, today Latina women in the USA insist that life has been good to them, that as long as they have strength to struggle they can say, they will say, they do say, GRACIAS! Their heartfelt gratitude for everything they have, for every day they live, makes me realize how much gratitude is a human virtue before it is a religious or civic virtue.

As a human virtue gratitude is about recognizing how much life is a gift—how much my life depends on those around me. Being human is being fully among others, with others, for others; it means breaking out of the false individualism that suffocates many of us.

If we would embrace gratitude as a civic virtue, those of us who live a life of privilege—who do not have to worry about how we will survive today or tomorrow—would realize how as a people, no matter in which country we live, our destiny is inexorably linked to the destinies of people all over the globe. Gratitude as a civic virtue makes us always embrace gratefully the rest of the world even when they make demands on us, instead of objecting to them.

For me to insist on gratitude as a religious virtue—and remember that virtue is a habitual way of acting—is the icing on the cake. “Thanks you, God,” is the culmination of gratitude, which means it is also the source of human and civic gratitude.

May we recognize how much we have to be grateful for!