Gratitude uplifts as it reflects our reality

A quality of soul that must be cultivated... Photo: Source

During my more-than-a-month-long break away from the keyboard involving travel in the United States, I noted the generosity of many individual Americans and, conversely, their attention to saying thank you, even for any minor thing done by way of displaying the good manners that oils daily interaction.

However, in many ways, the spirit of the worldwide culture is one of narcissism and entitlement, so that gratitude has fallen from favour within the mentality of large swathes of society, especially among the young, who have been taught to believe they have a right to a life without difficulty. 

I want to tap into words of wisdom on why gratitude should be cultivated in our life:

Gratitude, of course, has many counterfeits, but the genuine article is worlds apart from either social ‘smoothery’ or self-interested charm. Genuine gratitude is, as it were, written into our DNA, into the ‘depth-grammar’ of our nature. It is almost a self-evident good, needing no support from argument, a quality of soul, a virtue, in the classical sense of a disposition that inclines us to act for the good naturally, with ease and even with pleasure. 

Gratitude and its opposite crucially define our character and decisively determine our outlook on everything, especially ourselves and our lives, marking a far more deeply definitive difference than any other distinction. Total, ingrained ingratitude is more a pathological condition than a moral failing. 

But gratitude is much more than an individual attribute: like courtesy and kindness, and generosity and compassion, gratitude is an indispensable condition of civilised existence. A world without gratitude would be a terrifying, brutish, dangerous place. A world where ingratitude was valued over gratitude would be the nearest thing to a definition of Hell. 

No wonder that ingratitude cuts more deeply and more painfully and is more shocking than almost anything else: hence Lear’s lament: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child.” The whole of King Lear could be read as a meditation on the catastrophic social and political impact of ingratitude and how only gratitude counters the negative and ultimately destructive effects of resentment, the most destructive and demoralising of all human emotions, and regret, the most negative. 

But gratitude figures in our lives so deeply because in every particular expression of gratitude, we give implicit expression to our sense of the given-ness of existence itself, no less real for being so difficult to articulate. And that gratitude for the given-ness of everything which lurks in the metaphysical undergrowth of every particular ‘thank-you’, concerns – to steal a line from Wittgenstein – not how things are but that they are. And, by extension, not how we are, but that we are.   

To see life as a gift, something that need not have been, is to see it, implicitly, as purposefully brought into and sustained in existence – created, in other words - as opposed to being the result of a random concatenation of meaningless events. A world whose existence is not an a priori necessity is a world for which, despite its shadow-side, it is impossible not to give thanks. 

And if to feel, almost as a default setting, an overwhelming sense of gratitude, is to affirm implicitly the gift of existence itself, it also implies the existence of a Giver. The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), catches the same intimation when he says of someone in a similar position to the grateful leper [one of a total of 10 lepers healed by Jesus] that “He felt gratitude: so, he couldn’t not believe in God.”

That’s why gratitude is so closely allied to reverence and respect, wonder and awe. It is a prime candidate for what an American sociologist of religion in the 1970s, called “a signal of transcendence”, an aspect of ordinary life which, even if we find it near impossible to say how or why, constitutes a source of meaning and value, written into and read off from our everyday experience of the world, but pointing beyond: an inkling of something more.

All of this is present in this particular gospel where, as always, everything is more than it seems; and this is why Jesus gives such extraordinary weight to the grateful response of the Samaritan leper. His gratitude is an expression of faith, even if unacknowledged, the more remarkable, because the detested Samaritan would have been, from a Jewish point of view, the least likely person to exemplify faith. But, Jesus says, it is precisely his faith that has healed him. 

Faith and gratitude, then, if not exactly interchangeable, are certainly correlative, in that both see and savour the miracle and mystery of being, finding it impossible either to take it for granted or to be anything less than awed. Faith, in its essence, sees through ‘giftedness’ to a Giver. 

To conclude, there are two other elements of our modern view of gratitude discussed by the esteemed writer of the words I quote that deserve noting. First:

Until Christianity, gratitude wasn’t prized in anything like the same way. Aristotle, for instance, thought it was demeaning, that it rendered us inferior. Cicero thought the purpose of gratitude, as well as the exchanging gifts, served only the purpose of furthering one’s career. And, with his sense of Stoical self-sufficiency to the fore, Seneca felt that, since you must never be in anybody’s debt, you should equal, if not exceed, the gift given by a greater gift in return. 

Seneca's lack of a sense of generosity is, perhaps, evident again in Western culture. But the second point worth noting is this:

The source and object of all gratitude, whether acknowledged or not, is God, the ultimate cause and goal of existence and the ultimate source and goal of love, however and whenever we genuinely experience it. God is Love Itself, Goodness Itself, and Being Itself; and [to paraphrase Acts 17:28], “it is because we are loved that we exist”.

Gratitude is a quality of the soul, and it is a measure of our understanding of reality in all its dimensions.

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