Getting to Gratitude
The American Holiday of Thanksgiving was formalized as a national celebration in 1863, although it was largely celebrated throughout the country for quite sometime before. I have always found this extremely interesting, because this was done in the midst of the deadliest conflict in American History. This literally fratricidal war, with all its predations, is unique colorful for both the heroism and depravity present in both sides of the conflict. Although amateurs of history would like us to forget the nuances found in the experiences of our ancestors, what their experience shows us is always valuable to us today. How impoverished we are, if we ignore it!
Perhaps it is appropriate that the birth of Western historiography as we know it starts with Greek writers like Herodotus and Xenophon, who wrote their histories of famous conquests. The great contests of an age tend to stir up the greatest characters present in a generation, and all their glories and defects are laid bare. Yet punctuated in the midst of these grand stories, men and women are born, die, live, love, and go about their daily business. While this may seem tedious at times, such information is a treasure trove to historians, and to those who compose biography or biopics as an art and literacy style. This is because that genre is far more than a presentation of information regarding a life in the distant past. Rather, they are a type of oral or visual portraiture, by which we try to depict a person in their fullness in their life and times.
This is why the formalization of Thanksgiving in the American Civil War has such significance. Abraham Lincoln was asking the nation to give thanks in the wake of near universal devastation and loss. Tensions were high, and blood had been spilled across the land. Unlike what the media histrionically reports today (and, I argue, more as cause than as effect), that our society is dangerously and irrevocably divided, that is not something which one sees outside of what I would call ‘enclaves of grievance’, or places, typically urban, where the population is stirred up, both by the media and by the government, to see each other as the enemy. Meanwhile, the government asserts further control over them all.
President Lincoln wisely saw gratitude as a healing salve for a wounded nation, and gratitude even now, both personally and as a society, is something we must take time to practice, if we are to return to wholeness. Gratitude is something which Saint Paul says we must offer at all times. Yet, it is something which we must especially offer when there is seemingly nothing to be grateful for. This is because of our own tendency to a cognitive bias called relevance sorting, where we tend to reduce the scope of our perception to those things which are affecting us right now. We all know the experience of the throbbing pain of the hangnail or the papercut that seems all-consuming at the time. Yet, if we hear a loud noise or someone makes us laugh, how easily the pain seems to disappear!
Someone who is routinely ungrateful oftentimes is such because of a narrow field of perception. Spiritual negativity, for lack of a better term, narrows one’s spiritual vision. There is also a psychosomatic element to this which I think many people ignore today. Many people’s diet, sleep habits and exercise habits are absolutely inconducive to perceptual expansion. I often find it sad that modern students of philosophy tend to overlook the fact that in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the man who escaped the cave, had to do an awful lot of physical movement. A body in motion is an accelerant to a mind in expansion. Is it any coincidence that the revelation of Emmaus largely took place on a road, or Moses’ reception of the Law took place in the context of a mountain climb, or that the disciples of Aristotle were called the peripatetics, or “those who walk around”? It was even typical in certain religious communities for them to their meditations or their office while walking. Personally, I enjoy the Rosary and the Office occasionally while walking. Gratitude, like prayer, is serious work for the soul. It is important to stretch one’s perceptual horizons for doing such an important exercise.
Another aspect which is blocking this perceptual preparation is the omnipresence of the electronic screen. The screen, ever since the advent of the television, has long been studied and demonstrated to shut down and to reduce our cognitive and perceptual powers. This has only become worse, as we all have mini-computers in our pockets. Because human nature is designed to be active and not just passive, it makes sense that when an individual is bombarded by massive amounts of information as a passive receiver, yet devested of any agency to influence the outcome, the natural result is anxiety, and increasingly, anger. As a confessor and counselor, I often like to call anxiety spoiled worry. Worry isn’t the best thing in the world, much like fear, but fear and worry can be important things in that they can motivate us to take action so that we can avoid bad outcomes for ourselves and those we love. That is why God gave us fear as a survival instinct, and why Holy Fear is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Yet if worry sits and becomes stagnant, if it is not processed into something productive, it can turn into something rotten in the psyche of a person. We are seeing this now with very young children, when their screens, the modern-day pacifier, is taken from them. What tantrums they throw! I have spent the better part of my adult life teaching children in one capacity or another, and one particular feature of this young generation I find most troubling is their lack of presence to themselves, their inattentiveness to their own emotions and inner thoughts. Adolescents in particular, with all their creativity and emergent talent, sometimes do find inspiration from different people on social media and other outlets, but they just as soon find their own thoughts, feelings and uniqueness obliterated by the near-ubiquitous hivemind which is the emergent ‘metaverse’. These ‘digital natives’, who do not remember the time before the internet, are in a particular danger, because they precisely like Neo in The Matrix: they do not know a time when they were not ‘plugged in’. They are so acutely sensitive already to social pressures around them, let alone the suffocating pressures of some fabricated meta-youth as presented and curated by TikTok and Instagram.
Nowadays it is not uncommon to see advertisements for ‘mindfulness’ apps on smartphones and on streaming services to help anxious people soothe their troubled minds and to rediscover the benefits of meditation. Of course, we Christians have long had a name for this: Recollection. Recollection is literally the ‘recall’, the returning of ourselves, to ourselves, the returning of our mind and our faculties to the interior life, where God may be found. Whether that is called the deepest part of the heart or the highest part of the mind, that part is the same, no matter the metaphor. Whenever anyone puts himself in this state, or if one is put there, one is dangerously close to having an encounter with the living God. And when anyone begins to give thanks to the One he mysteriously knows inside, a human is dangerously close to touching the source of all joy. This is one reason why the destruction of wonder and play, especially among children, I consider to be especially diabolical: because when children, especially baptized children, loved by an intact family in a sacramental union, experience this fallen garden-paradise with all the awe of their open souls, grace may flow through them as a living spring.
Gratitude, to be sure, is good. In fact, it is so important and good, the Church has two Sundays a year dedicated to talking about it. But asking people to be grateful when they simply aren’t is like asking someone who is depressed to “be happy”. At best, you only invite their derision. To change the mind, to change the soul, it is important to change one’s perceptions, and to also change one’s environment. Then, we can look into changing behavior.
To close, I want to mention that I wrote this mini-essay because as much as I comment about heavy affairs in Church and society, I like also to share spiritual thoughts, and hopefully thoughts that elevate our minds and spirits. It is crucially important in times like these that we not become what G.K. Chesterton called “ideologues”, that is, persons who only can focus on one thing, people who are on the road to become, in essence, madmen. In his Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote that the madman sees the complexity of the world and tries to stuff it in his mind, and his mind, unable to handle it, bursts. In contrast, the poet opens his mind to the world, and becomes enlightened. You and I can see them all around us, these madmen. They are the trolls on internet fora who predictably strike, like spiders, when a piece of prey falls on their psychological web. They are the malcontents who make a living telling you and me whom to hate, and why you should hate them. Then, with our money in hand, they profit from the strife. Above all, in today’s information age, the most dangerous madmen of all are those who claim they can provide us with all the answers we need, but none of the wisdom to interpret it.
To avoid becoming madmen, we must shift our perceptions, and be open to the world-as-experienced, and not to the world-as-imposed, that is, through screens or media. In the world, the natural environment we see and touch, we can act and be acted upon, and that is crucial for embodied creatures who have physical and spiritual needs and aspirations. Gratitude is the great spiritual detoxifier, but we cannot arrive at it until we clear away the obstacles which impede us from receiving the sheer grace of every moment. Awareness of this grace cannot be received through the transmission of a fiber optic cable or a cellular network. It must be received by a searching heart, possessed by the conviction that somewhere, in the treasuries of the soul, a friend, at long last, has broken in.
