gratitude: how God becomes visible

Modern debates where two opponents take a look at the universe and then try to hypothesize what God is or where God is or if God is always come to a dead end not because of what they’re seeing with their eyes but because they are seeing with their eyes. The discussions inevitably drift into red herrings about the age of the earth or the complexity of the human genome or the copyright date of the book of Mark not because of a certain set of empirical findings but because the findings are empirical. Everything becomes a red herring because they have chosen to see with the wrong type of sight. The faculty by which humans can see God is not vision but gratitude.

I’ve been on my biennial G.K. Chesterton kick lately and can’t hope to say anything better than what he already said in his book on St. Francis of Assisi. 

“It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it. He will be forever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back. He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks.”

FYI, because everything theological that you might wish to say in modern America requires a disclaimer, the “debt” to which Chesterton refers is not the dead and deadening notion that Jesus needed to take the beating intended for us by a god pictured as the ultimate grudge holder. It is the realization that occasionally graces us, on days when the sky is clear and our sciatic nerve isn’t acting up, that we had no logical reason to anticipate there would be another onrush of oxygen to our lungs the last time our diaphragm retreated, except that it’s always been there before. Logically, thought, the fact that it has always been there before should impress us more, not less. And who can say that the oxygen, upon arrival, should proceed through our blood stream and behave in our cells the way it always has? If someone wealthy of knowledge and impoverished of thought were to assert, “We know that it will because that’s how it reacts with the loose carbon and hydrogen that results when pyruvate is broken down in the Krebs cycle…” before he has finished his sentence, most small children will have already anticipated the operative question: Why? 

This is not strictly theological thinking. The 18^th century philosopher David Hume (and arguably William of Ockham before him and Zeno of Elea before him) had these same reflections and it led him to question whether there is any such thing as cause and effect. Pessimistically, he would concede that we have nothing that dependable on which to base our well being, only a series of coincidences with a strangely regular repetition. If we should walk out our front door one morning and drop right through the front stoop that had always held our weight before, it may surprise us because of a habit we’d grown accustomed to, but our logic would have no right to be upset by it. Physics just got bored with the same old and decided to behave differently that day.

The psalmists in Israel, equally thoughtful but more perhaps more spiritually imaginative than Hume, worked their way through the same premises but came to a different conclusion. If it’s not logical necessity that air should continue to sustain life as it seems to, they supposed that every breath must be a new word of life gifted from the mouth of God. 

Of course, we can’t know in any empirical sense if God commanded the oxygen molecules to behave a certain way or if they called together a team meeting and hashed out that game plan themselves. But we can make pretty strong judgments about the spiritual and psychological benefits of assuming the former.

Gratitude is finally the joyful shock we feel when it dawns on us that there is nothing we have done or can do to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and make ourselves live.

In the same way that we can most starkly see the effects of the sun by looking at a shadow, the effects of gratitude on the spiritual well being of a person maybe become most obvious when we look to where it is missing.

We’ve all met the person for whom every aspect of creation is unimpressive and every person in it a let down. If you look closely, you can almost see this person’s physical bearing shrink and wither before you as she spews venom at everything from the son who never calls, to the boss who never appreciates, to the neighbor who never helps.

This person is not lying when she says that God, the world, and everyone in it, without exception, have let her down. In a very real sense, they have. Her incapacity for gratitude will not allow it to be otherwise. There is no waterfall majestic enough, no interaction tender enough, no prayer answered enough to penetrate the dark fog that we labor under when we insist on not seeing blessing and giving thanks. 

The upside of this is that gratitude can be learned and its effects are immediate.  What else are meal time prayers, and acts of service, and communion every Sunday but training sessions in which we begin to respond to the world out of a sense of gratitude? And how difficult does it become to fight enemies when you’re thankful for their existence, to go to bed angry when you’re thankful for a spouse, to neglect your health when you’re thankful for a body, to think bitter thoughts when you’re pleasantly surprised to have a mind that’s capable of thinking anything at all?