Piglet noticed that
even though he had a Very Small Heart,
it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.
~ A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

He who does not reflect his life
back to God in gratitude does not know himself.
~Albert Schweitzer

To be a person is to reciprocate,
to offer in return for what one receives.
Reciprocity involves appreciation. . .
I become a person by knowing
the meaning of receiving and giving.
I become a person when I begin to reciprocate.
~ Abraham Heschel

In the days leading up to and following Thanksgiving, I’ve been especially conscious and appreciative of all that to which, and all those to whom, I am bound by thanks. I imagine you have been as well. I also have been reflecting on how gratefulness is often dismissed or overlooked altogether despite both its constitutive place in the spiritual life and its capacity to transform people and situations. I suspect this is because gratitude seems so obvious, so elementary, so passé. It’s not. It’s the central practice from which all authentic spiritualities arise.

When my daughter was about 1 ½ – 2 years old, her mom, aunt, and I went on retreat to Weston Priory, a small Benedictine community of men on a generous plot of land abutting the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont. One early evening, as the sun had set, we were in the hushed and darkening small chapel for the community prayer. Shortly after the brothers had finished chanting a psalm, and when the space was lush with silence, my daughter offered her own spontaneous chant:

Tank you, God.
Tank you, God.
Tank you, God, oh!
Tank you, God.
Tank you, God.
Tank you, God, oh!

Just that. Before any self-conscious parental objection or a vertical-finger-to-lips mime could be enacted, she already had created and completed her simple melody and song of thanks. In unison, it brought a smile to all the monk’s faces, sent a minor felt-wave of unspoken surprise through the assembly made up of neighbors, retreatants, and a few stop-in tourists, and elicited wide-eyed wonderment and successfully suppressed laughter to the child’s parents.

We have never forgotten the tune and, despite the fact that its simple lyric is susceptible to a militaristic misinterpretation should we be hosting guests not privy to its original context, we still sing it from time to time as a family, in the original toddler vernacular, on such occasions as Thanksgiving dinner. ‘Tank you, God. Tank you, God. Tank you, God. Oh!’

Although human infants are not mechanized automatons constructed to be bearers of thanks the moment they make their first blinded appearance onto the stage of life, I do believe that gratefulness — like wonder and love — is a God-sourced capacity indigenous to the human person. The more that older humans can, on the one hand, avoid getting in the way of the young child’s intrinsic sense of the divine-human connection, and on the other hand, expose younger humans to the sheer enchantment of the earth, to the holy hints of the seen and unseen, to the intricacies, tragedies, and ecstasies of life itself, to the magnificence of the universe and the mystery within and behind it, and supplement that knowing wonderment with human incarnations of love and blessing and encouragement, the greater the chance that we will cultivate humans who receive life with humility, treat others with reverence, attend to the planet with awe, and hold all of it with gratefulness. Rabbi Abraham Heschel alludes to the intimate connection between cultivating wonder, awe, and reverence and growing in gratitude when he writes in the same paragraph, ‘It is so embarrassing to live’ and then later, ‘It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.’1

In the divine-human communion, the loud silence or the oohing and aahing and squeals of delight, the suddenly appearing O of the child’s eyes and the simultaneously widening O of the child’s mouth, the rising on tip-toes or the tumbles and rolling-on-the-ground-giggling antics evoked by some inexplicably earthly marvel are the child’s unrehearsed and heartfelt way of saying ‘tank you.’

And in the circle game of life, what goes around comes around. The delight that goes around, the revolution of thanks that comes around once more through the generous and spontaneous agency of enchanted children, awakens and enlivens us older folks once again to the incomprehensible surprise of being, gives us free entrance into the festival of joy with its seemingly endless line of booths featuring the extraordinarily ordinary and the ordinarily extraordinary delights of daily life and the free raffle-prize that is the opportunity simply to be and to give thanks.

The Spiritual GPS

From a religious perspective, the simple act of saying ‘thank you’ is a self-disclosure and a proclamation of faith. It discloses who we are in relationship to God, reveals what it means to be human, and hints at who we understand ourselves to be within the whole earth community. A seemingly simple ‘thank you’ uttered silently or aloud to the Creator of life or to a friend or to a giant shading oak tree functions like a GPS device. Only in this case, it not only locates where we are on this globe in relationship to other places and persons. It also provides a snapshot of who and whose we fundamentally understand ourselves to be in this ‘one wild and precious life.’2 Giving thanks is a spiritual positioning system.

Gratefulness is one of the surest signs that we are cognizant of and responsive to the mystery of being, to the wonder of who we are, to the beauty of the earth, and to the generous labor of Divine love and hospitality that made it all possible. Thomas Merton maintained that sin was punishment for not knowing God which, he quickly added, is just another way of saying for ingratitude. The antithesis of gratefulness is ‘to take for granted’ – whether persons, places, things, opportunities, the earth, God, or life itself. To be ungrateful is to be turned in on oneself, to act as if one is the creative power behind one’s own existence and to suffer the illusion that manifests itself daily either as entitlement or, what may be worse, nonchalance.

Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century and Merton in the 20th are united by a conviction that ingratitude is, in fact, the primal sin. In essence, they suggest all selfishness and greed, all arrogance and irreverence, all materialism and violence are traceable to a spirit of ingratitude. Neglecting to give thanks is a form of resistance rooted in self-deceit, self-centeredness, and the illusion of separateness and independence. Together these antagonisms create the fantasy of self-sovereignty while they actually reduce persons to being tourists in their own lives and little more than thankless tenants on this earth.

Given that there is no such person who is a self-made man or woman, to be ungrateful is to thumb one’s nose at the One in whom we live and move and have our being.3 To be ungrateful in relationships, whether with other humans or with the other-than-human world, signals that a person is a taker, whereas a grateful person understands him or herself firstly to be a receiver (of gifts given) and then to be a giver (of thanks or care or aid). The opposite of taking for granted is receiving gratefully and graciously. The only real reciprocal response to the fullness of life, is gratefulness. Since life itself is not a given but a gift, the grateful person knows that any giving is always a giving back. Just as the evangelist John asserts, ‘We love because God first loved us [into being],’4 so too we give because we were first given to. As poet Jane Kenyon writes: ‘It might have been otherwise.’

OTHERWISE

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise. 5

So who we are, first of all, are receivers of a gift who, in turn, are gifted with the opportunity, privilege, and joy of responding in kind. After all, it might have been otherwise, and sooner than later, it will be otherwise.

To be indifferent or ungrateful are not only to dishonor the Source and Giver of life, to depreciate the importance of other persons in our lives, and to disregard the earth by whose generosity we also live and move and have our being. It also is to be a stranger to oneself, to violate and live at a distance from one’s deep center where the fullness of grace resides within each person as sacred image. For as the 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich writes, ‘Thanking is a true understanding of who we really are.’

To Be Human is to Be Bound by Thanks

In 1998, desiring to write a song that offered an ‘extremely universal, simple sentiment,’ singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant penned a personal song about gratitude titled ‘Kind and Generous.’ She sings:

You’ve been so kind and generous;
I don’t know how you keep on giving.
For your kindness I’m in debt to you.
And I never could have come this far without you.
So for everything you’ve done
you know I’m bound, I’m bound to thank you for it. 6

Merchant has it right, I believe. To be human is to be indebted. And, though grossly out-of-fashion, whether in the divine-human, human-to-human, or human-to-earth relationship, gratefulness comes from a sense of existential indebtedness. First, to the Creator who brought the universe and us into being, and secondly to all others, dead and alive, human and other-than-human, to whom we are knowingly and unknowingly obliged and who have made our life, and our blessings possible. In this sense, and in the sense that Merchant means it, indebtedness refers to appreciation born of awe and humility in response to generosity and benevolence.

In the spiritual life, at the deepest level of existence where what matters matters most, indebtedness has nothing to do with some notion of an anthropomorphized, passive-aggressive God who acts the part of an exacting, ruthless accountant keeping tabs, asking for what could never be repaid in full to be repaid in full. Here to be indebted is to be bound by thanks, not by the fulfillment of a required payment. As humans, we are indebted to God not because God demands remuneration but rather by virtue of our own humanity, by the natural inclination of our creaturehood, the inner wisdom that obliges us, and by the felt sense of the sacred ‘whenceness’ of our being.

We are created with the capacity to be grateful, to give thanks or withhold thanks. We think this is what makes us who we are. And it does, as St. Julian notes. But even more so, it’s what makes God who God is. For only such a generous Creator would give so superfluously as to recast indebtedness into freedom, into a capacity not to repay but to respond or not respond. We choose. That being said, gratefulness is the fullest response a human being can make for the grace by which we live because it is the gift into which we put all of ourselves.

Knowing we can never pay God back for our lives, knowing we cannot pay others back for the good they have done for us without negating and dishonoring their gift by disrespectfully turning it into a loan or a transaction, we offer gratitude. And that is everything. This is most likely why Ms. Merchant sings ‘thank you’ nearly forty times in her song of gratitude leaving a mantra of thanks implanted in the listener’s mind and heart. Unlike ‘I am sorry,’ or ‘Please forgive me,’ which when spoken sincerely and wholeheartedly only need to be said once, ‘thank you’ can never be said enough, not because the one receiving the gratitude demands or expects it, but because humans are made to give thanks and are enlivened by it when we do.

Grateful People Practice Gratefulness

The visible secret of thanks is that it always points to a ‘you.’ The thing about thanks and the thing about a gift is that neither is what it is meant to be until it is given away. The ‘you’ is everything. This necessary and intimate communion between ‘thanks’ and ‘you’ is the overlooked obvious. It is the ‘you,’ whether named or unnamed, Divine or earthly, known or unknown, pleasant or painful, that makes thanks giving a prayer, gives gratefulness its power to transform. Saying thank you instead of the more casual and informal thanks is more than a matter of etiquette or mere semantics. It indicates encounter, conveys intimacy, alludes to the oneness that makes siblings of us all, and sets in motion or furthers every time we say it a revolution of kinship by which we re-member ourselves to the holy communion of life and the grace from which we all come and to whom we all belong.

Benedictine monk and teacher Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and the co-founder of the Network for Grateful Living, emphasizes that happiness does not make us grateful. Gratefulness makes us happy. Happiness, contentment, and joy are not the preconditions, pathways, or guarantors of gratefulness but rather the fruits of gratefulness.

Whereas gratefulness is the ideal and most resonant response to life and the Giver of life, it is the conscious and intentional practice of gratefulness that keeps gratitude alive, that converts our innate capacity to an incarnated reality. The most grateful people are not those most frequently touched by good fortune. They are those who consciously and intentionally make a practice of gratitude. Not just by saying ‘thank you,’ but by living it. Not by trying to balance some imagined celestial account but by reciprocity. And not merely by reciprocity but also by paying it forward in acts in which our gratefulness is transposed into the fullness of kindness, compassion, generosity, and joy.

1 Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, p. 5.

2 Mary Oliver, “Summer Day,” in New and Selected Poems

3 Acts 17:28

4 1 John 4: 19

5 Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise” in Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1997. 

6 Natalie Merchant, “Kind and Generous,” on Ophelia, Elecktra, 1998. To listen to Natalie Merchant’s song of thanks, CLICK on the blue title immediately above.