“When we faithfully remember and recite God’s acts of love and care we corporately re-live the experiences that have shaped our histories and identities. By remembering gratefully–whether special moments or overall trajectories–we see more clearly the ways in which we’ve been blessed. In this sense, gratitude is often a backward-looking practice–but it also shapes the future in that it allows us to build on the past in hope and confidence.”
Christine Pohl, Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012) 43.