Supernatural Gratitude

It was extremely late when the hospital staff fell quiet. The night seemed to pass without a major incident. Wide-eyes, stared out at the innocuous city as it slept quietly. Who was out there asleep? Who was out there awake, healing from their last hurt, or plotting vengeance against those cantankerous mischief-makers?

The Moon was all aglow with a tinge of orange, bringing broader focus to the season. Then it happened. “Code Blue” rang out over the public address system, and the Beaver Moon brightened as it stared at a night about to become unexpected. The double El Niño’s grip loosened like a businessman unloosening his tie after a busy day at the office, just enough to let the seasonal November breeze blow through the freshly opened doors. Quickly behind, paramedics shouted orders, vital statistics, and emotion-filled instructions to the approaching medical staff.

This is yet another stark reminder of our world in 21st-century America. The moon speaks to the late hour in America. This sudden uptick speaks to the boiling rage and vengeance alive and real in our country, and to the quiet that preceded the upheaval. The quiet, though, was only a facade, an illusion soaked in manipulation, erasure, and the theft of human dignity, collecting lethal clots of lives turned into half-lives because, beneath the mirage, nobody really cares.

My spirituality, founded in my Christian belief, won’t allow me to bail on this present-day American experiment gone horribly wrong. Welling up within me and many others is a strange but very familiar sense of supernatural gratitude. I don’t know where it came from, but it was there, as though it always had been. A sense that everything will work out, even if not immediately; deep in my soul, I feel a smile and a song. Or at least a song inspirational enough to push up a smile on my face.

But is this gratitude in me, around me, or am I conceived spiritually by it? Is it something that binds all marginalized communities of color together in a complex network of “in spite of”?

This kind of gratitude is, at times, healing for the hurts of hundreds of years passed down through generations and poured into the petri dish of my life, and for many others who share a similar ancestral story, creating new complexities. At the same time, new vaccinations for our weathered existence, surviving through the generations of a history that America still struggles to come to grips with. For many of us, it’s like “A Song In The Night.”

Gratitude described in the figurative sense is the most accurate way to describe supernatural gratitude

Figurative gratitude uses imagery, metaphors, and poetic language to describe thankfulness as a physical or emotional force rather than a simple statement.

Common Metaphors for Gratitude

• An anchor: Grounds your mind during stressful or turbulent times.
• A life-raft: Keeps you afloat when stormy circumstances threaten to overwhelm you.
• A fountain: Pours out endless positivity and emotional support to those around you. [1, 2]

When resourced and then emptied from the deepest places of the human soul. This kind of Gratitude rocks the troubled existence into a solitude of an unrehearsed rhythm completed in the groan of the spirit, pregnant with hope though circumstances would no wise leave any such notion. All these ascending profoundness paints the perfect picture of A Song In The Night.

In all of this, scripture reminds us:

Psalm 77:6: “I remember my song in the night; I meditate in my heart; and my spirit makes diligent search.”

There is a reason why, in the face of impossible odds, generations of enslaved people, sharecroppers, and victims of Jim Crow atrocities that even required the lives of many through brutal lynchings, as they, as a people, journeyed onward toward the road of freedom, it was the song in the night that wouldn’t let those ancestors bail on the idea that all men are created equal. They embraced the concept of a just Creator who would emancipate them.

Scripture also reminds us:

“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” [1]

1Corinthians 10:13

Healing is available along the temptation-laden pathway toward our purpose, one step at a time, for individuals and the greater collective. The temptation to quit brings isobars of reasons to proceed no further, throw your hands up, and capitulate. That is just when the intangible supernatural generosity begins to overtake us from the inside to produce another song, testimony, and sustenance to inch us closer to traversing the length and breadth of that moral arch which is at times long the medicinal qualities that have caused me and you to exist beyond the color line of privilege and acceptance. Yes, you beautiful diaspora of color: “You can bear it”

Gratitude has birthed the most powerful and influential genres ever to happen in America, inoculating this land and preserving lives through the gospel rhythms, jazz, soul, funk, and R&B of hope through Supernatural Gratitude. Like medicine for the soul that healed descendants of slaves, as it did their ancestors, it embraced what seemed impossible and made it possible. Whether we are talking emancipation, escape from poverty, oppression, second-class citizenship, or shortened lifespans, bracketed to the mere 100 years of the Americas’ 250 years of true freedom and sovereignty, this ethnicity took to heart the Exodus of the Bible and how Moses set the captives free. From the Hush Harbors of the Black Church, from the dual-purposed negro spirituals, the coded songs that pointed toward freedom, to the powerful Gospel melodies that birthed much of America’s popular music, they all served as medicine for the souls conceived through A Song In The Night.

Before America had a Constitution, Congress, or flag, Native peoples were already cultivating, healing, governing, and building sophisticated societies. Potatoes, corn, beans, squash, chocolate, and generations of botanical knowledge remind us that much of what sustains us came through Indigenous hands and wisdom. Their traditions teach us something deeper: creation is not merely what humanity makes; it is what we are entrusted to recognize, protect, and pass forward. Perhaps that is part of the song we hear in the night—the quiet reminder that the Creator was present long before our borders, institutions, and histories were written. Native peoples were never simply part of America’s past. Their knowledge, resilience, and relationship with creation challenge us to listen more carefully, remember more honestly, and walk forward with humility.

AAPI and Latin Americans have also contributed greatly to the healing of American culture. Now, all of a sudden, keeping all so-called foreigners out is the popular tagline for many. However, the fact is that we are a nation of immigrants, and our creator’s providence has made us the greatest nation to ever exist on planet Earth.

However, Phill Visscher puts it this way, “Think about it: these two groups were the only two groups of people that weren’t given a choice whether or not to live in white America.” Supernatural gratitude is the elixir for the soul, best expressed through A Song In The Night. It is free, liberating, and a song everyone can sing.

Sources & Further Reading

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unlock-your-appreciation-10-creative-metaphors-nlock-marine-

https://www.thewritetribe.com.sg/post/thankful-phrases-for-composition

Online resource

How Native Americans shape the American experience Anthropology Associate Professor Brian McKenna

https://umdearborn.edu/news/how-native-americans-shape-american-experience