Gratitude is an experience of awe and humility at being dependent on what is outside myself for what is best in my life. It is, as G. K. Chesterton puts it, “the highest form of thought ... happiness doubled by wonder.” It is an experience of both the goodness of a gift and the gift’s free givenness, its not needing to be, its favor and grace. To experience even the smallest gift is to be open to the gratuity of the whole world, to be open to being aware of how all of created reality does not exist of necessity but is the expression of free persons’ acts, insofar as it expresses the divine persons’ free acts. It is to experience how reality is good or valuable in itself.
Gifts come in a range of forms, from a small gift like a colleague bringing doughnuts for everyone in the department to a life-changing gift like my wife giving me herself and her whole life in marriage. In each case, when I gratefully receive the gift, it appears good and fulfilling for me. But gifts also reveal an attitude of love in the heart of the giver, which appears valuable or important in itself. In each gift, I receive the other person’s heart – that is, the giver gives his or her self to me – which is, in turn, itself a gift that he or she has received.
Each thing and person in this network of gift-giving appears, when seen through grateful eyes, as something that exists, in its entirety, in the relations of being given and received. To be grateful is to be caught up in this world of dynamically flowing gifts. Everything thus appears as a gift; in this sense, this personalist view can be summed up in St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s famous saying, “Everything is grace.”
To see something as a gift is to see it as beautiful. The beauty of anything beautiful – Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Yosemite Valley, my wife – always appears as something holistic, in which all of its parts harmonize with one another and with the whole; everything in something beautiful fits with everything else in it, and yet the beautiful thing appears as something free, gratuitous, graceful, unexpected, nonnecessary. Not only is it the case that to see something as a gift is to see it as beautiful, but the opposite is true too: to see something as beautiful is to see it as a gift. We can reason from the giftedness of one gift, however small, to the giftedness of all other real things, but we can also directly experience anything as beautiful and as a gift.
As von Hildebrand observes, gratitude is a social act, a kind of act, like forgiving or promising, which in its essential structure aims at another person. One is necessarily grateful to someone. It is possible, as Jean-Luc Marion notes, to experience the givenness of a gift without knowing or attending to the giver. But something is missing in those cases: the self-gift, the gift of a person’s heart, that appears in each gift, and that calls for the return gift of my own heart.
Likewise, to try to be grateful to, say, the sun for shining, or, as people say, to be “grateful to the universe,” is, Guardini suggests, to treat those things as if they were persons – but gratitude only really makes sense when it is addressed to an actual free person, to someone who can make a gift of him- or herself. To be moved to gratitude for all of reality is to find oneself addressing the Giver of all these things. To say to my colleague “thanks for the doughnuts” is implicitly to say to God, “We give you thanks for your great glory.”
To thank God for his glory is to acknowledge not only that God is important in himself, worthy of praise for who he is, but also that his value is an objective good for me, a good I share in anytime I receive a particular gift. The glory of a thing, as the tradition has understood that term, is its beautiful self-lmanifestation, which others can know and in which they can share.
I show my gratitude by awestruck wonder at being able to share in the life of other persons, especially the life of the divine persons. For God to include giftedness in himself, there must be a giver and a receiver and a gift in God – that is, God must be a community of persons, in which there is already receptivity and gratitude. The experience of gratefully receiving any gift is, at least tacitly, an experience of being caught up in trinitarian life; I only fully grasp the significance of the experience of receiving and being grateful for gifts once I can understand that event as a sharing in the life of the trinitarian God. In a Catholic personalist view, any act or experience of gratitude is not only a relation among persons, but is a sharing in – and revelation of – the relations among the highest Persons.
An excerpt from “Manifestations of Gratitude: Wonder, Joy, Festivity, Hope” in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought 27, no. 4 (Fall 2024)
