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As we enter the holiday season we give our attention to the gifts our sacred traditions call us to celebrate, even as we feel gratitude for those blessings. These include everything from light overcoming darkness to the birth of great beings who served as vehicles for the light of grace to enter the darkness of our hearts and minds. We celebrate generosity and welcoming the poor stranger with no place to stay; we celebrate peace on earth and good will toward all; we celebrate being protected by Divine grace and being given a way to free ourselves and others from suffering through sacred paths of love. There are countless blessings to be grateful for. Even the warm autumn sun coming through the window, giving my heart and chest a gentle glow, brings waves of gratitude.

These are the readily available and easily celebrated types of experiences we feel grateful for. They're wonderful. And, we're capable of, in fact called to, much, much more.

We can strengthen and expand our abilities to feel deeply grateful for the challengning people, events, and circumstances that at first are completely beyond the limitations of our ordinary sense of gratitude. If we're blind to the gift then we are deprived of the gratitude.

Once I was at a talk given by a Tibetan lama who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for nearly 20 years and survived what to me was unimaginable abuse, torture, illness, and starvation. Yet this humble and wise human being had no bitterness, no anger, nor any resentment in his heart or countenance.

What he spoke about was gratitude, gratitude! And compassion. He was genuinely grateful for having his beliefs and practices so challenged, day in and day out, week after week, month after month, year after year, with no hope of it ceasing, because of the Buddha's teachings and practices, which he felt was his extreme good fortune to have learned and practiced, stood by him, walked with him, even carried him when his body failed and nearly died. He felt grateful for those gifts and for being shown that they can withstand even the most horrific adversity if they have been established, rooted, and cultivated in our heart.

He said the only thing he feared wasn't more torture or more pain or more deprivation, it was that he might lose his embrace of compassion, kindness and patience above all else. He looked at his torturers, the Chinese prison guards, and saw their pain and their afflictions and felt tremendous compassion for them. They knew no better. But he did. And we can.