Gratitude can best be defined and understood as the only possible response to a gift, to something recognized as utterly, freely given. Gratitude is the vision—the way of seeing—that recognizes “gift.”
Our culture seems on the verge of losing the meaning of the experience of gratitude, in part because we have lost all sense of “gift.” Our ritual occasions of giving, from the traditional birthdays and anniversaries to the industry-created special days for everyone from grandparents to secretaries, mean that there is always handy some occasion to give “a gift”—with the result that a true gift is never given. For a gift is something freely and spontaneously given. A true gift is inspired rather than occasioned.
The experience of gratitude has been lost, too, because we tend to think of it primarily as some kind of “feeling.” “Do you want a shivery-warm feeling that makes you tingle all the way through your body?” Linus asks Charlie Brown in a famous cartoon parody. “Well, go pee in your pants.”
Gratitude is not a feeling but an ongoing vision of thank-full-ness that recognizes the gifts constantly being received. A feeling is fleeting, an emotion for the moment; gratitude is a mind-set, a way of seeing and thinking that is rooted in a remembrance—the remembrance of being without the gift. As the philosopher William Barrett reminds: “ ‘Think’ and ‘thank’ are kindred roots, and the German word andenken—literally ‘to think on’—means to remember; hence, think, thank, and remembrance are related notions. Real thinking, thinking that is rooted in Being, is at once an act of thanking and remembrance.
Gratitude is the vision that “sees” gift and recognizes how gift-ed we are. This vision has always been recognized as a core experience of “spirituality.” Those who seek spirituality, that is to say, see reality differently. It is not that they see things that others cannot see, but rather that they see what everyone else sees, but in seeing recognize in all reality its aspect of gift.
The joy of living comes in the experience of gratitude that flows from a vision of one’s life as a reality received, a gift given freely and spontaneously. Such a vision removes self from the center, thus healing self-centeredness by revealing the folly of the illusion of control.
As the example of Alcoholics Anonymous attests, it is in the giving up of claims and demands to control that serenity and peace of mind begin. The “First Step” of the A.A. program reads: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.” Only then is the first part of A.A.’ s Second Step possible: “[ We] came to believe….”
The program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous emphasize gratitude because A.A. members experience their sobriety as a gift. Each had tried, promised, struggled to “never drink alcohol again,” or at least never to get sickeningly, obnoxiously drunk again. And they had meant it. But all their will, all their effort and sincerity had gone for naught, had achieved nothing. And so they gave up, gave in, in one way or another surrendered and came to Alcoholics Anonymous. And there, in A.A., the first thing that they heard was that they could not stop drinking … on their own or by themselves. Some resisted that truth and kept up the struggle, now against A.A. as well as against booze. And so long as they fought, they lost. So long as they tried to gain and to get—even to get sobriety—they lost. Finally, they gave up. Then, and only then, was sobriety given to them.
That story, although a maddening mystery to control-oriented moderns, repeats the most familiar plot in the history of spirituality. Those who long for freedom attain it only after experiencing release—and release is a gift. For those who discover that in the only way possible (by experiencing it), gratitude becomes the cornerstone of spirituality, the enduring vision that undercuts the miseries of failure with the serenity that recognizes in failure itself the grounds for gift—so long as that failure, that imperfection, is accepted.
For the issue here is not strictly “misery” and “happiness” and their relationship to “failure.” Once again, thinking in terms of “either-or” can lead astray. The essential point has to do with control, with its demand not only for “all at once and right away,” but for all the time. “The addict,” critic Stanton Peele observed in his study of Love and Addiction, “wishes to escape from the realization that it is impossible to be ‘all together’ all the time. He thinks there must be some way, if only he can find it, to make things perfect always.”
This tendency resides not only in Peele’s “addict” but in all human beings: we want to do away with all misery and be happy all the time. Perhaps one source of our tendency to think in terms of either-or is our choice of words, for happiness and misery are “either-or.” The traditional terms joy and sorrow better express our essential paradox, for we recognize both joy and sorrow as normal experiences; both, then, have a part in any spirituality. The attempt or the claim to experience only one will always be false—fortunately—for the person “in control” of everything is incapable of receiving a gift.
“Joy” and “sorrow” … their relationship to control, and therefore their relationship to spirituality, was once brilliantly elucidated by a woman who trains alcoholism counselors. Speaking to a group of nuns who were seeking deeper understanding of the realities of addiction in their own communities, Bonnie noted their concern about the pressures placed on them to constantly radiate “joy.”
“It’s too much,” one participant inserted, almost angrily. “There is sorrow in our lives, as in all lives. How can we be ‘always joyful’?” Discussion moved around the group, each participant adding a thought or a vignette that seemed only to deepen the quandary. The pauses grew lengthier.
Finally Bonnie spoke, attempting to sum up what she knew of both the tragic results of confusing vision with “feeling” and the treachery of the trap of control: “We can experience both joy and sorrow, even at the same time, for joy and sorrow are not opposites,” she began. “It is not joy and sorrow, but their opposites, that cause damage—for the opposite of joy is cynicism and the opposite of sorrow is callousness. “Cynicism,” she continued, “is rooted in the assumption that everyone is always in control. Callousness is the inability to feel that follows from the fear of losing control.”
Spirituality itself is a gift. No one “earns” spirituality, no one can acquire it or possess it, for spirituality is a reality spontaneously, freely given, and gratitude is the only possible response to that gift. In that gratitude, from that understanding of how much has been given us and how gift-ed we are, we become able to see at work some reality higher, larger, greater than ourselves. That vision, which comes only to those who in some way have given up trying to control, makes possible a further giving up of claims and demands to control. We give up control because we finally understand that we are not in control. And yet …
Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory!” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever man lets him in.”