I recently saw an article that attracted me because of the title, “The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed.” The author, Maarten Boudry, explains what the piece is about in the subtitle: “We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.” We have no idea just how much we take for granted. Unfortunately, the article is now behind a paywall on the Quilette.com site, but the first couple of paragraphs give us the basic idea of the author’s perspective. Here’s the first one:
In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.
This is primarily an affliction of the left which drinks deeply from the lies of Rousseau and Marx, but a lack of gratitude is a sinful human predilection, and not just for we modern people. My only disappointment with the piece was when Boudry said he’s an atheist. I really didn’t think they existed anymore, but apparently they do, and we’ll discuss that below related to gratitude. But I was inspired by what this atheist wrote to do some reflection on gratitude, and the importance of it for Christians.
Count Your Blessings One by One
This is the title of a hymn from the 19th century, and the chorus says:
Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;
I’ve often thought over the years if I actually did this it could take days. The blessings God has bestowed on us in the time in which we live are innumerable, not to mention all the non-material and spiritual blessings. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Paul also quotes a version of Isaiah 64:4 in I Corinthians 2, and I love it in the King James Version:
9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
The verse in Isaiah says our God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” This includes material as well as spiritual and familial blessings, but let’s focus on the material for a moment.
The reason we take for granted the blessings of living in the modern world is our ignorance of history, and how horribly difficult life was for people, from paupers to kings, prior to the 20th century. Recorded history goes back approximately 5,000 years, and for about 4,900 of those years, death, disease, and starvation were a common feature of life. Just staying alive was a challenge. Clean water and basic sanitation were something nobody took for granted because they were so rare—we think it’s our birthright. Cheap filtered water is available to us whenever we want it, and indoor plumbing is everywhere. For all of those 4,900 years people just couldn’t flush human waste away. Disease was often rampant because of it.
Child birth was perilous, both for the woman and the child, and children making into adulthood was something people hoped for, but didn’t count on. It always amazes me that people had children before the 20th century. God made the sex drive so powerful that despite all the risks, people kept having them. Diseases that are easily cured today with antibiotics and medical intervention, killed people. Plagues and famine were common. If someone had a toothache, they either got it pulled or died. One could go on, but we have no idea just how easy we have it. Are we grateful? Given our sinful nature, we have to teach ourselves not to complain and be grateful; that shouldn’t be difficult, but often it is.
Even in the 20th century the abundance to be found in America and the West was inconceivable to most people in the world. Boudry’s article has a picture of Boris Yeltsin visiting a grocery store in 1989 prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember that, and how the news was filled with stories about how blown away he was by the cornucopia of affordable goods available to all Americans. Grocery stores and modern food production, even as we complain about processed food, is a miracle. Like Yeltsin’s experience implies, people were amazed by it in the 20th century. I worked at a small college in Pennsylvania in the early 90s, and some students from Africa visited for a semester. Going to a grocery store for the first time was beyond their comprehension. They had a hard time believing it was real. We don’t have to grow our own fruits and vegetables, kill and prepare animals to eat, milk the cows, or bake the bread. We go to the store, put it in the cart, complain about inflation, go home and cook it on our gas or electric stove, and keep the rest in a refrigerator or freezer. We can now even have it all delivered to our door for a pittance. Thank you, God!
And it’s amazing what’s happened since I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Back then there was something called the Club for Rome, a think tank established in Rome in 1968. They published a report in 1972 called, “The Limits to Growth,” and it “warned of potential global collapse in the 21st century if growth trends continued unchecked.” This pessimistic assessment assumed a Malthusian perspective, (from 19th century British cleric Thomas Malthus), that we live in a world of finite resources, and the more of us there are, the less there will be for everybody. They and others predicted mass starvation as early as the 1980s. In fact, because we live in a world God created to sustain His creatures, the more the merrier! Poverty and starvation have declined dramatically since the 1980s exactly because of economic growth and increased population. Yet leftists still condemn both, while we give thanks. Now instead of overpopulation being a threat, the problem is not enough children being born!
If you want to cultivate more of an attitude of gratitude, a great practice is to teach yourself to be amazed at common, every day features of life (and if you have children, teach them to be too!). A few years ago, for example, I was visiting my sister and her husband and had taken a shower. I walked downstairs and exclaimed to them: You won’t believe this, but I turned these knobs, and hot water came out of the wall! Can you believe it! They rolled their eyes. Open a refrigerator or freezer, and be amazed. Flip on a light switch, marvel. Turn on your computer or phone, and the Library of Alexandria or of Congress can’t match it. I am surrounded by books in my office, and not only are they affordable and widely available, but I can read them! Most people prior to the 19th century were illiterate. And I have my very own Bible! Something unheard of until the late 19th and 20th centuries. Take a plane, train, or automobile and zip to the other side of town or the state or country, and be astounded. One could go on, but you get the idea.
Lastly, Hollywood. We watch movies or TV shows set in the past, and things don’t seem all that bad. Production designers do an incredible job, and we think we’re getting a real picture of how life was hundreds or thousands of years ago, but we’re not. As good a job as Hollywood does, nothing can capture just how perilous and fragile life was in the past. Remember, count your blessings, name them one by one . . .
The Theological Grounding for Gratitude
The basis of all true gratitude is in God, the theos in theology, the study of God. Without a personal, sovereign, Creator, and Savior God to whom to be grateful, gratitude can only be a fraction of what it was intended to be. The author of our piece as an atheist can only argue for gratitude on a pragmatic level. It’s better if you are grateful for the benefits of modern life, so be grateful. The atheist, and agnostic for that matter, can be grateful to other people for their role in providing those benefits, but being grateful to a divine benefactor who makes it all possible in the first place is what we were created for. Not to mention the truth that God and not random acts of chance are responsible for all of it. In a sly mocking of atheist pretensions while my kids were growing up, when we would see something amazing, like a beautiful sunset or full moon I would exclaim, praise chance! One has to be educated into atheism because even to a child the created world appears to be, well, created!
One of my family prayers as my kids were growing up was asking God to give us hearts of gratitude. I did this because I know how inclined we are to complain and see the negative. I know this had some traction with them when I’ve heard my daughter, who now has her own growing little family, pray for hearts of gratitude. I also taught them how being thankful, even for the tough things in life, keeps us from falling into self-pity and seeing ourselves as victims. Those two emotions are evil because they reflect a lack of trust in God. In fact, they turn our circumstances into God, as if they were sovereign and He is not. Paul addresses exactly this in I Thessalonians 5:
18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
This was Paul being even more direct than usual. Complaining in any manner, even if it’s just annoyance or frustration (a major challenge for me), is sin. So, I give thanks a lot because I’m so tempted to “trust” my circumstances. My morning prayers always start with repentance and giving thanks, and I try to practice thanksgiving throughout the day, especially when I don’t feel like it. Another verse from Paul is especially challenging in a fallen world living among fallen people in a fallen body, Romans 8:28:
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
I would joke with our kids that Paul couldn’t possibly mean all. Maybe 98%? Nope, all. And notice how Paul prefaces it with, “And we know,” not speculate, hope, but know. We can be certain God will somehow, in some way, use it all, everything and every moment of our lives, for our ultimate good and His glory. It is on this foundation upon which we can obey Paul’s injunction to give thanks in all circumstances, knowing our sovereign Creator God who made us and died for us has our back, always.
Another way to theologically ground gratitude is looking at one of its synonyms, appreciation. To appreciate can connote, “to understand a situation or thing fully,” to appreciate it. When we are grateful in this sense, we understand that the ultimate rationale for a thankful disposition is agreeing with God’s definition of things, not ours. This can be difficult, but from Paul’s perspective gratitude becomes the assessment of reality as it actually is, not what we wish or hope it would be. This is something our atheist friend cannot hope to capture in his perspective of a lonely God-less universe that came from nothing for no reason at all. Not only are we dependent and limited creatures, but our view of things and our reason is clouded by sin. Without God’s revelation to us in Scripture and in Christ we’re in spiritual darkness. As Christians we submit our perspective to God’s omniscient characterization of things, and teach our kids to do the same. Gratitude is obedience.
The Self and Gratitude
The Bible is full of commands to be thankful. But what if I don’t feel thankful? What if the circumstances I’m encountering are really crappy? These reasonable questions assume gratitude is about us, about our feelings and our circumstances. A perfect recipe for misery is to make sure it’s all about us. Who are the most insufferable people to be around? Those who think everything is about them.
Augustine and Luther describe sin as, Incurvatus in se, or being turned or curved inward on oneself. If we are the center of our existence, and if our desires, our ideas, our accomplishments, our comfort, our glory are what counts, we will never be thankful. These things are rightfully important to us, and to God, but they must never be most important. If they are, everything in life will be out of proportion, and reality distorted. By contrast, Augustine defined virtue as “rightly ordered love”:
But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.
Understanding the relative value of things is a big part of curing the sinful inward curve.
Some years ago I came across a wonderful example of someone who understands Augustine, a young Christian mother, 35, who learned she had stage four cancer (since recovered and doing well). Kate Bowler is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School and the author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” She didn’t see much prosperity in that moment. Her insights about how Christians ought to think about life, not only in the face of terminal cancer, but every day are worth contemplating:
When we overly‑instrumentalize prayer, we become convinced we’ve connected all the dots between us and God. To be totally honest, I cannot say things like “It would be better for my son not to have a mom, because surely God is working in all things for the good of those who love him.” That sounds like a lie to me, because I’m working from my desires forward toward God’s.
What I can say honestly is things that work backwards from God’s desires to mine ontologically: God is good, God is faithful, God’s desires for me are good. When I work from God to me I can say true and beautiful things. When I work from me to God, I end up lying.
This is brilliant! These are the two stark choices of existence. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:
Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.
Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:
Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.
Such a mindset leaves little room for living in an imperfect, fallen world. If you want to be miserable, make your life all about your happiness. We will never understand what seems to be a contradiction, how we can be grateful and not happy, grateful and unfilled, grateful and miserable, grateful and dissatisfied, grateful and grumpy, simultaneously. We can’t completely avoid these negative attitudes. The question for us, then, is do our internal responses or interpretation of circumstances actually make them what we interpret them to be?
Gratitude is inextricably tied to God’s definition of things. Rephrasing Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, who are you going to believe, God or your lying eyes? We are simply not capable of any kind of ultimate, eternal, accurate assessment of anything apart from God’s revelation. Unless we frame things in the biggest of big pictures, that which is eternal, all we are left with is distortion. Our perspective is not authoritative, or accurate, merely because it is ours. Thus we give thanks because we agree with God, we trust God, and that in the end is how we develop an attitude of gratitude.
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