The Rhythm of Gratitude

by David Orr

In the beginning was the Great Heart of God that set the rhythms of the universe in motion – first the Big Bang…the beat heard through the still-expanding Creation and in the pulsations of energy and light that animate the cosmos.  In the beginning was the Great Heart of God and that rhythm drives the journeys of our little planet around its small star.  Day follows night; one season follows another.  The Great Heart of God beats in the Dance of Life, the ebb and flow of the tides, the migration of birds, the rhythms in our bodies, and the seasons of our lives.  Break the rhythm and our little part of the cosmic dance stumbles to a halt.  But in the beginning and forever:  the rhythm of the Great Heart of God.

But it was not long before others, more sophisticated and clever, realized that they could change the rhythm of Creation.  The heroes of disharmony, men like Bacon, Descartes and Galileo, taught us that we could and should conduct the symphony and in Bacon’s words “put Nature on the rack and torture her secrets out of her to the effecting of all things possible.”  And so in time we learned how to make things never made by Nature; we learned to split the atom and to manipulate the code of life.  In the conquest of Nature (and of humans) the rhythm changed to those of the business cycle, the product cycle, the electoral cycle, the seasons of fashion and style…the rhythms of commerce, greed, power and violence.  But we did not know what we were doing, as Wendell Berry once said, because we did not know what we were undoing.

Now we live in a time of consequences.  Climate scientists have given us an authoritative glimpse of a literal Hell not far in the future.  Scientists fear that we are fast approaching the threshold of runaway climate change – not just global warming but destabilization of the entire planet.  A hotter time will change the seasons, the cycles of Nature, the rhythms of life, and the great procession of evolution.

The rhythm of the Great Heart of God has been drowned out by the cadence of hubris, greed, and violence…and we should ask why.

After reflection I have come to believe that the great Rabbi Abraham Heschel had it right – that the source of dissonance is ingratitude.  “As civilization advances,” he wrote, “the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines…humankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.  The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.  What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”

Heschel, here, connects appreciation with the sense of wonder and awe.  The problem as he defines it is simply that as a “mercenary of our will to power, the mind is trained to assail in order to plunder rather than to commune in order to love.”

We were given the gift of paradise, and thought we could improve it – on our terms.  We thought we could reduce the great mystery of life to a series of solvable problems each contained in an academic box.  We thought that we could rid the world of reverence and so exorcize mystery, irony, and paradox.  We thought that we might change the cadence of Creation and seize control of the great symphony of life with no adverse consequence.

But why is gratitude so hard for us?  This is not a new problem.  Luke tells us that Jesus healed ten lepers, but only one returned to say “Thank you.”  That’s about average, I suppose.  In our universities, we teach a thousand ways to criticize, analyze, dissect and deconstruct, but we offer very little guidance on the cultivation of gratitude – simply saying “Thank you.”

And perhaps there is no cause for gratitude amidst the cares and trials of life?  Shakespeare has Macbeth say that life is “but a…tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Political philosopher Thomas Hobbes similarly thought that life was full of peril and death: “nasty, brutish, and short.”  And many of us find our bodies, incomes, careers, and lives as less than we would like, whatever we may deserve.

But most of us would find life without appreciation rather like a meal without flavor or living in a world without color, or one without music.  So, in the USA, we set aside one day of the year for Thanksgiving, but mostly spend it eating too much and watching football!

To acknowledge a gift is also to admit dependence
on the giver…but there is something within us that bristles at the idea of dependence.  We want
to get along by ourselves.

Gratitude comes hard for many reasons.  For one thing, we spend nearly half a trillion dollars on advertising to cultivate ingratitude otherwise known as the seven deadly sins.  The result is a cult of entitlement to have as much as possible for doing as little as possible.  For another, the pace of modern life leaves little time to be grateful or awed by much of anything.

But there are deeper reasons for ingratitude.  Gratitude does not begin in the intellect but in the heart.  “Intellect,” in David Steindl-Rast’s words, “only gets us so far…our intellect should be alert enough to recognize a gift, but to acknowledge a gift as gift requires an act of will and heart.”  To acknowledge a gift is also “to admit dependence on the giver…but there is something within us that bristles at the idea of dependence.  We want to get along by ourselves.”

To acknowledge a gift, in other words, is to acknowledge an obligation to the giver.  And herein is the irony of gratitude.  The illusion of independence is a kind of servitude while gratitude – the acknowledgement of interdependence – sets us free.  Only “gratefulness has the power to dissolve the ties of our alienation,” as Steindl-Rast puts it.  But “the circle of gratefulness is incomplete until the giver of the gift becomes the receiver; a receiver of thanks…and the greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving.”  Saying “Thank you” is to say that we belong together:  the giver and the thanksgiver; and it is this bond that frees us from alienation.

But all of this is just so many words.  We live more fully in and through stories.  Here are two that continue to be particularly powerful in my own life.  My Aunt Emma, who died just short of her 100th birthday, was a teacher and builder of clinics, schools, and churches in rural Mexico, well into her nineties, when she was diagnosed with what was thought to be terminal cancer.  Even with that diagnosis she did not slow down, and she never complained.  Appropriately, at Thanksgiving dinner a year after the doctor told her she might have a year to live, she turned to me and asked if I could take her to the airport later that afternoon.  I thought she was kidding but finally realized that she was absolutely serious.  I said, “Aunt Emma, don’t you have cancer?”  To which she responded, “Oh yes, I do, and it’s such an inconvenience.”  She flew to Mexico that afternoon and made the long trek up the mountain where she was involved in the building of a community church and clinic.  She died five years later of old age, all signs of cancer having disappeared.  She did not have time for cancer.  She had word to do – gifts to give.  Her entire life was a gift of generosity, energy, and good heart.

My friend Jack Hallock had a life afflicted with one serious health problem after another until finally, at age fifty, he succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease – a disease that kills by inches while leaving the mind intact.  There is no crueler way to die.  I usually spent a few hours each week with Jeff in his final years, reading, talking, and, surprisingly, laughing with him.  He had a great sense of humor and a disposition that made little of his suffering.  As his time shortened, he could not move more than his facial muscles, but his spirit never lagged.  I never heard Jeff complain, though he had every logical reason to do so.  In the beginning I went to see him to do my duty as a friend.  It was only later than I realized that Jeff had given all of us a gift of witnessing courage and grace in the face of death.

Gratitude changes the rhythm.  It restores the cycle of giver and receiver, extending our awareness back in time to acknowledge ancient obligations and forward to the far horizon of the future and to lives that we are obliged to honor and protect.  Gratitude requires mindfulness, not just smartness.  It requires a perspective beyond self.  Gratitude is at once an art and a science, and both require practice.

The arts and sciences of gratitude, which is to say applied love, are flourishing in ironic and interesting ways.  Businessman Ray Anderson has set his company on a path to operate by current sunlight and return to waste product to the Earth.  Biologists are developing the science of biomimicry, which uses Nature’s operation instructions evolved over 3.8 billion years to make materials at ambient temperatures without fossil fuels or toxic chemicals; rather like spiders that make webs from strands five times stronger than steel.  The movement to power civilization from the gift of sunshine and wind is growing at 40 percent per year worldwide.  The American Institute of Architects and the U.S. Green Building Council have changed the standard for buildings to eliminate use of fossil fuels by 2030.  Could we, in time, create a civilization that in all of its ways honors the great gift and mystery of life itself?

Can true gratitude transform our prospects?  Can we harmonize the rhythms of this frail little craft of civilization with the pulse of the Great Heart of God?  I believe so, but gratitude cannot be legislated or forced.  It will remain a stranger to any mind that lacks compassion.  It must be demonstrated, but above all it must be practiced daily.

David W. Orr is Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, USA and author of The Last Refuge.  This article is reprinted with his permission from Resurgence magazine, No. 247, March/April 2008.  All rights reserved.