I’m not very good at being grateful. That’s what I tell myself anyway. “I’m not good at this.” Gratitude is something I unconsciously add to my list of things I’ve got to do, correct Christian postures to have so that God and other people will love me. It’s mushed in there against things like Joy, Humility, and Not Ever Sinning. If you’re listening to the New Testament in a half asleep state you can come away with this big long jumbled list of more ways to fail. Gratitude always tops that list.
Like love, I’m pretty sure that gratitude is supposed to be an emotion that I feel towards God and others. When the emotion isn’t there it must be that I’ve ruined it and I must work harder to feel grateful. I work and work and slowly get more and more resentful, like Martha, angry in her kitchen.
I don’t bring this up because I think I am alone and I would like you all to stand afar off and deride and mock me. I think it’s very easy for Christians to lug around guilt for not feeling the way they think they should feel. The emotions carry you every which way, ways that you don’t really want to go. You try to examine yourself and find that you’re not where you want to be, and so then you add in guilt, and, particularly at the holidays, you can end up in a corner, angry with God, angry with yourself, disappointed because you were supposed to be grateful and joyful and peaceful and loving and everything on that perfect list.
Whereas, I don’t think gratitude should be consigned to the list of all your perfect Christian attitudes, along side other postures and actions. I think gratitude is the bedrock of the Christian life, whatever your feelings and emotions moment by moment. Remember that terrible story about the man who has his debt canceled only to turn around and demand that someone else pay him? He has all the outward appearance of gratitude, falling down and weeping and saying thank you, but when he goes outside and tries to choke his neighbor, you can see how far it really goes. Not even skin deep.
Gratitude for salvation, at the very least, allows other people to know that you’re even saved, that God has forgiven you and that you know it. Other people can know this when you forgive them, let them off the hook, let them go free from the offense that ought to be repaid. If you aren’t grateful to God for his forgiveness, so much so that you are able to forgive, than Jesus says he might not be able to recognize you. You will come to him and he will turn you away. He doesn’t say this because he wants you to try harder. He says it because gratitude is the interior generator of forgiveness. It shows him that his great gift overturned the mountain of your ego and threw it into the sea.
Gratitude is the great unraveling of human pride. It is the single flashing insight of seeing how it should be, and then seeing that God has mercifully made it so that it won’t be like that. It’s seeing yourself for you who you are and being relieved and amazed that you’re not being treated as you deserve. If you go around steeped in entitlement, pride, self confidence, you might be able to put on the outward trappings of gratitude, to wear them for all the world to see, but eventually other people are going to run into the hard angry nut underneath, to ram their toes on your un-forgiveness.
It’s really revolutionary, gratitude. It’s declaring war on Satan and all his forces. It’s declaring war on yourself even. And that’s why it’s such a hard place to live all the time. And for this reason, I think it’s more helpful to plunk it into the category of something that God gives you, something you need that you have to ask for, rather than something you work really hard to achieve.
I’ve had moments where God gave me the alien gift of gratitude. It left me in a shattered and humble estate for a while. I was able to gather up my pride pretty quickly and insulate myself with entitlement in the usual way. But for those brief bright moments it was pretty glorious. Not only was I really grateful, I felt how grateful I was. It was like my core self could have been described with that word. Therefore, like humility, I don’t like to pray for gratitude very much because it always involves having the heavy curtain of my expectations pulled back so that I see reality. It’s too painful and so I like to keep away from it.
But it’s bound to make you a nicer person to be around at thanksgiving dinner. And it will surely help you cover over and bear with other people’s difficult politics opinions and life choices. If you arrive to the table rightly acknowledging your true state as a sinner needing forgiveness, grateful that God has given you life and not killed you, you might be a little bit more forbearing with all the other sinners around the table.
Or not. The main thing I always think, is that if you look at yourself and find you’re not very grateful and you’re anxious and stressed and it’s all going to be awful is to turn and run headlong away from the guilt and the list and into the mercy of Jesus. Don’t just try to pull up your bootstraps and make it better. Instead, ask God to help you. Ask him to pull you out of your anxious hole. Ask him to help you be grateful and feel it too.
And now I will stop the annoying lecture and go yell at the children to be grateful they get to have a piano lesson. What a great gift I am giving them. What a terrible thing that they are not even a little bit grateful for it but are instead lying on the floor whining and crying and gnashing their teeth. Have a lovely day.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In