An Ethic of Gratitude

Once upon a time, early on in my ministry, I got into a “letters to the editor” argument with one of the fundamentalist pastors in town. The subject was Thanksgiving — more specifically, who was allowed to celebrate the holiday. My counterpart argued that only Christians, and by grudging extension, Jews, could properly celebrate Thanksgiving because only Christians and Jews had a God to whom they could be thankful.

Audacity!!

My response to the good pastor at that time took the form of a history and theology lecture: a reminder of the freedoms our Pilgrim ancestors had come to this land in search of, the blatant ignorance and bigotry in stating that only his god was both “real” and deserving of thanks, and the irony of making that argument in light of the religious freedom we enjoy because of those very Pilgrims who initiated the practice.

I also made a minor point of noting that “to give thanks” was a verb phrase that did not require an object.

So many years later, while the history lesson of my response is interesting, it seems rather academic in light of the latter point. I continue to be compelled by the idea of Thanksgiving as an intransitive verb. Now, I’m sure that there are many an English major who might take exception to this idea. You can pick nits with me later in coffee hour, I won’t take it personally. My point is that, while “thanks” may go to someone, there is a mental state that leads a person to give thanks, to be thankful – gratitude.

Gratitude, rather than being an action, is a state of being – an emotional state. Like any emotion, it requires no ultimate target. Sure, we can be angry at someone, or happy about something – but we can also simply be angry or happy. Likewise, we can be grateful without ever having to worry about whether or not anyone or anything is there to receive our gratitude.

 More to the point, we must practice gratitude regardless of the existence of non-existence of anyone or anything to hear us. Gratitude, true, deep gratitude, is good for the soul . . . hearty sustenance for our being.

To be grateful is to be open to every gift, large or small, tangible or intangible, that life brings our way.

To be grateful is to be able to learn from the bitter and cherish what is sweet.

To be grateful is to be awake to the myriad and limitless ways in which we are connected to those we know, connected to those we don’t yet know, connected to all that is.

It was the Roman orator Cicero who said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

In other words, gratitude opens the path to a good life, well lived.

Now, gratitude has become something of a fad of late. Touring the virtual shelves of Amazon.com, I find several recent books on the subject of gratitude, all of which seem to treat the subject with a sort of trivial acquisitiveness that the word does not deserve  – seeming to latch on to the resurgent and alarming trend of conflating the spiritual with the crassly material. The gratitude that these hucksters spend so much ink on is a gratitude for things.

Gratitude as a means of obtaining . . . let’s call it “preemptive gratitude.”

“If I’m grateful for what I want before I get it,” the logic seems to go, “then eventually it will come my way.”

Gratitude, then, becomes yet another means of turning the universe into our own personal shopper – a pleasant substitute word for the attitude that, “I’m ready to receive everything I want.”

This is considered, believe it or not, a good attitude for our souls and our mental health.

This attitude is perhaps best exemplified by the Rev. Joel Osteen, nationally renowned guru of the “prosperity gospel,” who once demonstrated to his congregation the way prayer worked by telling the story of being stuck with his wife in a long restaurant queue, until he prayed: “Dear Lord, I thank you for the gift of this hostess, who is about to give us the best table in the house. Amen.”

Preemptive gratitude. As if his “Dear Lord” is the cosmic waiter, sitting up in heaven just waiting for the order. “Well, gosh, he said ‘Thank you’ already. I suppose we’ll just have to give him what he wants. Don’t wanna look rude.”

Now, Meister Eckhart, the 14th century Christian mystic, is popularly quoted to have said that, “If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you,” that would suffice.” Somehow I doubt that’s what he meant.

Gratitude is deeper than mere things. I stand on the side of Cicero.

In a secular world, it is gratitude that ultimately holds humanity together. Gratitude is not merely words, nor is it a superficial nod in the direction of those from whom we have received. Gratitude is an ethical system, as well as a state of being.

Consider this: We all come from the same source. We all share the same destiny. In other words, whether or not one believes in the existence of a deity, it is hard to argue against the notion that we humans are the product of the world around us. Because I exist, I have no choice but to be grateful to all that is.

If I am made up of the world I inhabit, If I am grateful for my existence, then it follows that I bear some responsibility to care for people and the world upon which my existence depends.

This is not a gratitude that relies on an external, supernatural creator. This is a gratitude that fully embraces all our myriad connections – the interdependent web of all existence. This is not a gratitude that merely takes in everything life has to give, but which nurtures and sustains that life that gives us so much.

It is no easy thing to practice this sort of gratitude. Especially in times like these, when so much of our security can feel like it’s in danger of collapsing with warning, when our stress levels rise and life is handing us more than our fair share of uncertainty, it’s not the easiest thing to utter the words, “I am grateful . . .”

Yet, this is the time when we need to practice gratitude the most, when our own lives – our health, our welfare, our sanity – may depend mightily upon the ways in which we nurture the life around us, the way we care for all that is. All that is good, all that will sustain us, will grow out of our practice of the ethic of gratitude.

Where to begin? Start with the little things. Keep your eyes open. Begin each day by naming out loud one thing you are grateful for.

Where to begin? We begin by nurturing the world that sustains us. We begin by caring for others around us.

“What keeps us alive, what allows us to endure? . . . The hope of loving, or being loved . . . we weep when light does not reach our hearts.”

These are the words of the 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart. What he describes is the ethic of gratitude. It is not a new concept. We weep when the light does not reach our hearts . . . and the light that reaches us is the same light we transmit to the world. Because of gratitude, we are at once loving and loved.

If all religion were stripped away in this moment, what would be left to us would be gratitude, and everything that follows from it. After all, it was Eckhart himself who taught that if the only prayer we ever said was “Thank you” it would be sufficient.

So let us practice gratitude, let us begin with this prayer: Thank you.