Dat Do, Daddy -- Some Thoughts on Gratitude and Happiness

A huge goal of ours as parents has been cultivating polite responses: please, thank you, excuse me, etc.

Our goal is that by instilling that habit from the outset and then modeling it consistently and joyfully we will ingrain it in a deep way in our boys. And our hope is that by doing so they will be free to say please and thank you in earnest.

 

I think we all can sense when someone is thanking us in a perfunctory way, can’t we? It doesn’t feel good. We ask ourselves, if they’re not genuinely thankful then why bother with the obligatory ‘thank you’? It feels like it’d surely be better to leave it unsaid.

Why is authentic gratitude such a big deal to us?

One of my favorite quotes from the famous Theology of the Body teaching/speaker, Christopher West, comes from a conversation that he had with his toddler, also named John Paul. He shared this story in a talk I listened to almost 15 years ago and it has always stood with me.

He says that one day he was super excited to give his son a cookie, but before he could give it to him, little John Paul snatched it out of his hand. So Christopher knelt down and took it back and said, “John Paul, do not grasp the cookie, receive the cookie!”

Now, is that a bit too philosophical for a toddler? Perhaps. But, I don’t think the heart of it is.

The Theology of the Body talks a great deal about the spousal nature of God’s love. It talks about the Church as the Bride of Christ -- wooed by Him and given life by Him in the sacraments. Thus, the sacrament of marriage is a beautiful image of Christ’s love and union with His bride, the Church. (Check out Ephesians 5!) 

Therefore, the Mass is the consummation of Christ’s love for the Church, in which He makes a complete gift of himself to us, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

With that in mind, it is crucial then that we approach the Blessed Sacrament with a spiritit of profound receptivity and not with grasping. We do not take communion -- just like a husband or wife mustn't demand the marital embrace. Rather, with intimacy, trust and gratefulness, we receive communion as a spouse receives the embrace of his/her beloved.

Receiving and not grasping the Blessed Sacrament may be one thing, but what about everything else? What about our dreams, our plans, our goals? What about our career path, our family size, or even our vocation? Or what about more basic things like our very livelihoods, jobs, finances, health?

Since the start of lent I’ve been slowly and savoringly rereading Fr. Jacques Philippe’s The Way of Trust and Love on the wisdom of St. Therese’s Little Way. In the section I’ve been chewing on this week he says that gratitude is a sure way to purify our hearts.:

That’s because it prevents us from getting tangled up in discouragement, sadness, withdrawal into ourselves, bitterness, dissatisfaction, discontent, etc. Here we touch on something fundamental, unquestionably one of the secrets of the spiritual life that also is one of the laws of happiness. The more we cultivate gratitude and thanksgiving, the more open our hearts are to God’s action, so that we can receive life from God and be transformed and enlarged. By contrast, if we bury ourselves in discontent, permanent dissatisfaction, then our hearts close themselves insidiously against life, against God’s gift.

In a word, gratitude brings about freedom. It sets us free from so many things: doubt, the need to figure everything out for ourselves, the need to provide everything for ourselves, the need to protect and guard and hoard, the need to compare. It brings the simplicity of children who recognize that they are different in the strengths, abilities, and resources that they are given but they are each loved.

When thinking about gratitude, it seems that there is a Christian tendency to over-emphasize our unworthiness to receive anything. For some reason, there seems to be something in us that resonates with that notion.

I don’t remember who it was, but a man I once knew would always respond to the question, ‘how are you doing today?’ by saying ‘better than I deserve.’

In many ways that is a beautiful and humble thing to say. God doesn’t owe us anything. He created us out of nothing, gives us everything we have, holds us in existence from nanosecond to nanosecond. And yet, in the work of Christ, He has made us His children. And so, He delights in giving us good gifts, providing for our needs, the way an earthly father delights in providing for his children.

Ten years from now, if I give my sons a gift and they beat their chests and proclaim their unworthiness I think something will have gone woefully wrong, no? To be sure, if they take the gift ungratefully, I will have failed as well. Nevertheless, the heart disposed to gratitude is a heart disposed to trust and love in the giver. And isn’t that the disposition that our heavenly Father is most earnestly seeking in us? Isn’t that the real core of His work throughout salvation history: restoring the relationship with us that we shattered with doubt, distance and division?

That isn’t to say that life is easy or simple if we are only willing to be thankful. Life will inevitably consist of challenges. Reading the lives of the saints, it seems that those closest to the heart of God are often given an unusual number of opportunities to trust through hardship.

Fr. Jacques says,

The question is how we choose to live our lives. The choice between discontent and gratitude is not the product of what we experience. It goes deeper. It’s an appeal to the freedom we can always exercise.

The saints singing in the concentration camp, rejoicing on the rack, and preaching from the cross are examples of this. Perhaps maintaining the freedom of gratitude in the daily grind of our vocation is in some ways more challenging. The thousand questions from the toddler, the office politics, the traffic jams, the gossiping neighbors, the weight gain from sitting in a cubicle all day, or a persistent illnesses are perhaps tougher to meet with trust and love.

To this challenge G.K. Chesterton responds,

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

If Christ is our master and we’re truly his followers; if God is our Father and we are truly his children, then whether the challenge be nominal or grave it is an adventure that we can embark on with joy and confidence and trust.

I’ll never forget being six years old and camping in Yellowstone with my family. We were there when a massive forest fire started and as the smoke started billowing toward our campground, my sister and I delighted in the adventure. We knew enough to know that there was danger close at hand, but we had complete trust in my parents’ ability, prudence and provision. In the simplicity of gratitude we can be thankful for the opportunity to simply be with God and do life with Him.

When we abide in a place of gratitude we abide in truth, freedom and love. For everything is gift and the giver is good.

We’ve started hearing some authentic ‘Dat do, Daddy!’ and ‘Dat do, mommy!’ And, softy that I am, it inevitably elicits some mistiness. In part because I hear the deeper sentiment of ‘I know that you love me’ and ‘I trust you’. It also fills me with hope because I know that those two little hearts are being molded for a deeper gratitude that will ultimately set them free.