The power of gratitude

   

  I recall how as a ten-year-old I irritated my parents with my persistent procrastination over saying “thank you” for my grandmother’s birthday and Christmas cards. I would rip open the envelopes and look for the money that was usually there.

  Several days later, with a frustrated sigh, my mother would escort me to the phone and stand over me while she dictated words of thanks for the crisp one-pound notes my fond grandmother had tucked inside. 
  Someone else who went through similar childhood frustrations happens be one of my favorite Christian authors, Diana Butler Bass. She has written a whole book about gratitude: Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks (HarperOne). (The 2019 paperback version carries the subtitle The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks.)

  I was not surprised at Bass’s undertaking, because, as a reporter, there was nothing that gratified me more than an assignment to reflect on the role of gratitude in the world today. Everyone had something to say about it.

So, where to start?

William Arthur Ward: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it” (Charlotte, N.C. Observer).

  C.S. Lewis observed that grateful people are emotionally healthy people. “Praise,” he said, “almost seems to be inner health made audible.”

  G.K. Chesterton couldn’t resist the suggestion that the

 worst moment for an atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to 
      thank.

  And John Updike believed that when we cultivate and practice the habit of gratitude, the experience of gratitude deepens over the years (The Christian Century, November 14, 2012). Thank goodness! I’d say.

  Eventually the feeling of gratitude catches up with our practice of it, and I’m delighted to say my own kids and grandkids are pretty good at it. They’re beginning to feel its transforming power.

  In Grateful, Diana Bass touches on the issue of response to gifts among families without straying from her main purpose which is perfectly reflected in an epigraph from the pen of Maya Angelou:
      “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”

  That truly captures the spirit of Bass’s book. She readily admits that there is no agile fix within its pages. She simply shares what life has taught her about thanks and its practice.

  Neither psychologist nor philosopher, Bass writes about faith, spirituality, history, and culture—about living purposefully and gathering together in a world of compassion, care, and love. She emphasizes that gratitude is a central theme in the Bible and at the heart of all great ethical systems and religions.

  She says her book is an invitation to become aware of gratitude in new ways, with the hope that “if we see more clearly what is at stake, we might together nurture, encourage, and practice the sort of gratefulness that can change our hearts  and our communities.”

  Bass believes it guides us to a new vision—to a way of healing and compassion that shapes our lives.

  I might add that if you put together all the quotations from famous writers and preachers that serve as chapter headings, you’d have yet another publication on gratitude—for which many of us would again give thanks!