Praying for Gratitude
Among the many things I notice as I foray into the jungle of social media, that artificial jungle red in tooth and claw, is that nobody appears to be grateful for anything. Women look upon men as their oppressors, while men aim sour jokes at the faddish victim-pleading of women. You gain status by expressing disdain for your forebears and hatred of your nation’s ways. If you are a member of a church, you raise yourself a-tiptoe as you enter the Temple of Right Thinking, saying, “Lord, I thank thee that thou hast not made me like other men, such as this so-called Christian here. He tries to follow the laws of morality that you and your apostles preached, while I, in my great faith, break them all and encourage others to do the same, so great is my love for them.” No one will acknowledge a gift unless the acknowledgment is actually a barb for their opponents to swallow.
I am reminded of that sad and brave song in As You Like It, sung by one of the lords in exile who has followed his master the duke into the forest of Arden, where food and a dry covering for your head are not easy to find:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind;
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the holly,
Most friendship is feigning, most loving, mere folly;
Then sing heigh-ho, the holly,
This life is most jolly.
The irony there is that the amiable singer is himself a loyal and grateful man, as is the duke, who, though he was dispossessed by his wicked younger brother, never grumbles, never meditates revenge, but finds, even in his suffering, cause for gratitude:
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
“This is no flattery. These are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
“I would not change it,” says the singer, the duke’s closest friend, and if on stage he shivers and slaps the arms of his coat to warm the blood, so much the truer and better. That is the voice of gratitude, the virtue that makes us most like our Creator, who brought into existence from nothing at all, and for nothing he needed from it, all this marvelous creation. To the ungrateful heart, or the small hard kernel of self-regard that passes for a heart, the whole universe is a dreary affair, a vast collection of meaningless nothings, but to the grateful and expansive heart, to a heart in truth, it is worth being born just to see one dewdrop of great price, shining on a blade of grass.
Demanding More of God
We should pray for gratitude, then, as we should pray to be made anew like children, for of such is the kingdom of God. To resist is quite mad; it is to resist a mansion of infinite rooms, each beautiful in its own way, and each different; it is to resist being invited into the life of the all-giving God. But we do resist, or we demand too little of God, satisfied with the mud-houses we ourselves can make, just because they are ours.
But what if we whom God has showered with gifts were spurred by those gifts to demand even more, even the one gift without which all the others would come to nothing? What if we prayed for gratitude? It is the question that the poet George Herbert poses, in the ironical but just guise of a beggar who will not stop knocking at the door till he gets what he wants:
Thou that hast given so much to me,
Give one thing more, a grateful heart.
See how thy beggar works on thee
By art.He makes thy gifts occasion more,
And says, if he in this be crossed,
All thou hast given him heretofore
Is lost.
“You had better make me grateful!” he cries, and justly so, “or else what good will all your gifts have been?” Obstreperous prayer, in a yet-to-be-grateful man! But God has expected this behavior from us. Herbert is thinking of the parable of the insistent friend who will not stop knocking in the night, and of Jesus’ promise, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Here God is whimsically portrayed as the master of an immaculate house, pestered by beggars, as he knew he would be:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
29.5—Sept/Oct 2016
on the Loss of True Community & Rising Political Desperation by Karl D. Stephan
33.2—March/April 2020
Encounters with Faith & Forgiveness in Communities of Faith by Nicole M. King
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