Thanksgiving and Spiritual Freedom

How Gratitude is a Spiritual Emotion You Can Cultivate With Practice

This week we celebrate Thanksgiving - a wonderful holiday that offers an opportunity for a reset, as we can engage in gratitude practices that remind us of the thankful attitudes we would like to have all year round.

Since I wrote a book about gratitude, people sometime ask me if gratitude is an emotion or a skill. Is being thankful something you feel or something you do. The answer is both. Gratitude is among the class of spiritual emotions that emerge from the right ordering of our affections, but the right ordering of affection is something that emerges out of good habits.

Habits that foster gratitude might include things like,

• gratitude journaling;
• reframing, as we use scriptural promises to help us interpret the hard providences of life as opportunities for growth, and even as blessings;
• making a point to thank people who have blessed us;
• having specific times of the day where we call to mind something we are grateful for;
• making a conscious choice to begin receiving commonplace blessings – even things as basic as clean water, shelter, and freedom of worship – as gift. This world that we live in is so full of blessings, yet often those blessings come to us disguised as ordinary life. Part of growing in grace is learning to see the world, and the unique circumstances of our life, in its true shape, as gift.

Through these and other practices, we can train ourselves to feel the spiritual emotion of gratitude. (For more information about the relation between skill and emotion with respect to gratitude, see my post "Gratitude is an Emotion and a Skill.")

There is a larger spiritual principle at work here, which can be explained in a series of four-steps. I don't like reducing the Christian life to bullet points, but I recently emailed my adult daughter the following to explain how the Christian life works:

1. Over many years of right behavior and obedience to God’s commands, we come to have good habits.
2. Over time, good habits lead to character traits (virtues).
3. Over time, good character traits (virtues) result in us loving God’s commands.
4. As we love God’s commands, we start to find goodness beautiful, and our affections become rightly-ordered. This is true freedom.

When I was writing to my daughter about this, I explained that the problem with legalists is that they stop at #1 and think that’s enough. So the legalist who wants to progress further in the faith simply adds more dos and don’ts, becoming overscrupulous and finding more things to be fussy about. Legalist don't understand that God actually calls us to a higher standard, namely, to move from the first step to the later stages where God's commands are sweet to us and where our affections are sanctified (without, of course, losing the earlier steps, which is the whole point about habituation).

The sinister side of this is that because of sin, this whole process can also work in reverse. Through wrong behavior and disobedience to God’s commands, we can reach a point where we do not find God’s commands beautiful, but actually come to delight in things that are ugly and wrong. Then our affections become disordered. In our society the disordering of affection is often packaged as true freedom even though it is the ultimate type of bondage. Both Milton’s Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis’s Great Divorce show this process occurring in characters who have come to hate what is beautiful and good. For Milton’s Satan, even the beautiful hills and valleys are hateful to him, while the joys of heaven would be the ultimate torment.

With what delight could I have walked thee [earth] round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of Hill, and Vallie, Rivers, Woods and Plaines,
Now Land, now Sea, and Shores with Forrest crownd,
Rocks, Dens, and Caves; but I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heav’n much worse would be my state.

Satan's emotional repulsion at beauty is the reverse of the freedom experienced by the man or woman whose affections have been rightly ordered under the gentle tutelage of good habits.

When our affections are rightly ordered, the result is spiritual emotions. If any topic has been neglected in practical ethics, it's probably the importance of spiritual emotions. Spiritual emotions are involved in virtues such as peace, contrition, joy, patience, love, and of course gratitude. These virtues certainly involve more than emotion but not less. For example, a person cannot be completely contrite without feeling repentant for his or her sins. You cannot be wholly patient while you’re feeling frustrated and agitated. So growing in virtue involves, at whatever level, the formation of right feelings.

Many modern Christians don’t have the categories for thinking about emotional formation. One of the common misunderstandings is that emotions just happen to us like getting a cold, and thus we disconnect emotion from effort, practices, and antecedents in behavior and cognition. The assumption is that if we have to work at feeling a certain way, or if we have been influenced to feel a certain way by practices or institutions, then the resulting feelings are somehow less authentic, less true to ourselves compared to dispositions that arise involuntarily and without effort. This way of thinking makes it easy to adopt a knee-jerk prejudice against deliberately engaging in practices that work towards virtuous emotional formation. Christians growing up in this milieu may end up under-appreciating the role of effort and struggle in the formation of spiritual emotions like gratitude.

In our society we tend to assume that dispositions arising after a period of struggle are fake. Culture and advertising tell us so many times that we need to just be natural, or that we are at our most authentic when we are being spontaneous. But that just isn’t how the world works. We arrive at the deepest and most permanent dispositions through hard work, including work that may often feel unnatural. This is a point emphasized by Bishop Barron at the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. The Bishop explained that true freedom is not self-determination, but the disciplining of desire through long habituation.

I think the Bishop nailed it when he observed that by disciplining our desire through right action, the achievement of goodness becomes not only possible, but but eventually effortless, beautiful, and attractive. Our world furnishes many examples of this principle. If you think of the joy of a married couple who are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, I don’t think anyone would doubt that such joy is the product of years of right habits, sacrifice, and struggle. Or if you think of the joy a wine connoisseur or an art critic feels in the presence of a particularly special specimen of their craft, we know that those feelings have been preceded by years of training, hard work, and struggle. But in all such cases, this joy is not a merely spontanious reaction produced in the vacuum of self-determination, but the symptom of  habit-forming struggles over years. Indeed, through struggle and habits that may initially feel unnatural, we arrive at our deepest dispositions, ultimately determining which behaviors come to be instinctive and desirable for us.

The habits that form our affections often involve a bodily component. As I explain in my book Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation,

Just as language is the context for thought, so our bodily experiences are the context for knowledge. In much the same way, spiritual states and perceptions also emerge out of processes inextricably linked to time and space. A simple example is kneeling. As modern people, we may instinctively assume that kneeling to say a prayer of repentance comes as a result of feeling penitent; but in the biblical understanding, it is the other way around: we kneel in order to become penitent. Similarly, a man does not kiss his wife merely when he feels affection toward her; rather, he also kisses his wife in order to cultivate affection. In short, what we do with our body has spiritual consequences. Many modern Christians have no problem recognizing that inner states and conditions are mediated through physical processes, yet they hesitate to recognize that this holds true in the spiritual realm.

One of the things I appreciate about the traditional churches is that they institutionalize many of the right habits that lead to rightly-ordered spiritual emotions, and often these habits involve the body. For example, during the Mass we kneel to say prayers of penitence, we bow when the Blessed Trinity is being reverenced, etc.  The Church also institutionalizes various gratitude practices, like giving us prayers of thanksgiving to say before a meal or providing liturgies for the Eucharist (which really is a thanksgiving feast). These practices continually draw us back to thanksgiving towards the Creator. Liturgy is formative, so even when it feels like you’re just going through the motions, you have the opportunity for your affections to be trained, and thus to grow in rightly-ordered spiritual emotions like gratitude that are correlated with true freedom.

Further Reading"

• Want a Good Life? Make Sure You Know Where to Look & How You Might Miss It
• Gratitude is not Escapist 
• Gratitude is an Emotion and a Skill
• How Gratitude Changes Your Brain
• Gratitude in Life's Trenches: How to Live the Good Life Even When Everything is Going Wrong
• Virtue and Classical Education