Morning Prayers of Gratitude

The first minute of the day is the easiest to give to God and the easiest to lose to a phone. These are short enough to say before your feet touch the floor.

A new day is a gift nobody earns. Lamentations, written in one of the darkest moments of Israel’s history, finds the reason for hope in that fact alone: God’s mercies “new every morning.” This prayer gives thanks for the day before asking anything of it.

Every morning, in its official Morning Prayer, the whole Church sings the same song of thanks: the Benedictus, the canticle Zechariah sang when his son John the Baptist was born (Luke 1:68–79). It begins with blessing God for what he has done, and it ends with the sunrise:

Waking up is so ordinary that it takes an illness, a close call or a funeral to notice it is a gift. The psalmist noticed: “I laid myself down and slept. I awakened, for the LORD sustains me.” (Psalm 3:5). He wrote it, according to its heading, while fleeing from his own son.

Some mornings begin with dread, before the eyes are even open: the meeting, the diagnosis, the bills, the silence of someone who is angry with you. Gratitude on those mornings is not pretending the dread is not there. It is refusing to let it have the first word. Psalm 143 asks for exactly that: “Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning, for I trust in you.” (Psalm 143:8). And Psalm 30 promises that the night does not last: “Weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

The people at the breakfast table are the easiest gifts to take for granted, because they are there every day. A morning prayer of gratitude is a good time to see them again.

Work can feel like the opposite of a gift, but having work, strength to do it and something to offer is a gift many people are praying for this morning. Psalm 90 asks God to make the day’s work count: “Establish the work of our hands for us.”

Jesus kept a morning habit of prayer: “Early in the morning, while it was still dark, he rose up and went out, and departed into a deserted place, and prayed there.” (Mark 1:35). Most people cannot manage a deserted place before dawn. They can manage one minute before the phone. A habit that many find they can keep:

1. Before the phone. Leave it where it is for one minute. The emails will wait; they always do.
2. Sign of the Cross. Begin the day in God’s name before your own.
3. Three thanks. Name three specific things: one from yesterday, one about this morning, one person.
4. One offering. “Lord, I give you this day.”
5. One request. Ask for the one grace today most needs: patience, courage, rest.

The Catechism says prayer lives “in the events of each day,” and that “it is in the present that we encounter him, not yesterday nor tomorrow, but today” (CCC 2659). It also proposes daily rhythms of prayer, “such as morning and evening prayer,” precisely so that prayer does not depend on mood (CCC 2698). A minute every morning does more than an hour once a month.

Because the first thought of the day tends to set the tone of the rest. Scripture keeps putting thanks and praise at dawn: “I will sing aloud of your loving kindness in the morning.” (Psalm 59:16); “Wake up, my glory! Wake up, lute and harp! I will wake up the dawn.” (Psalm 57:8). Isaiah describes God himself waking his servant: “He awakens morning by morning, he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.” (Isaiah 50:4).

The Catechism teaches that “every event and need can become an offering of thanksgiving” (CCC 2638). A morning prayer of gratitude simply starts that early. It thanks God for the day before the day has had a chance to go wrong, and it trains the eyes to keep looking for gifts once it has. People who begin the day with thanks do not have easier days. They notice more of what is good in the ones they have.