Gratitude: "It Is Good for Us to Be Here"

If you've never watched the lectures of Dr. Iain MacGilchrist on YouTube, do yourself a favor and look him up. I first came across his work in an interview he did with Jordan Peterson, which you can view here (if you have two hours and can deal with Peterson's rabbit-hole brain farts he periodically interjects). Dr. MacGilchrist is a neuroscientist who one of the foremost authorities on brain lateralization (i.e., the hemispheric nature of the brain, the tendency for some neural processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other). 

MacGilchrist has a fantastic book on the subject called The Master and His Emissary that I highly recommend, wherein he discusses hemispheric theory and how hemispheric imbalances in populations over time can shape culture. He argues, for example, that modernity is characterized by a prioritization of left-brained functions that emphasize what is logical, explicit, and quantifiable at the expense of what is intuitive, implicit, and incommensurate. I don't know his exact religious profession, but in the Peterson interview MacGilchrist expresses partiality for Christianity, and if I had to place him, I'd guess he's a "mere Christian" in the Lewisian mold. 

What particularly interested me about MacGilchrist's work is his focus on attention. I had not given much thought to this faculty; honestly I'd always regarded attention as rather passive, like a mental camera lens that scans reality, simply taking in whatever falls under its purview. But Dr. MacGilchrist explains that attention is more active; it doesn't simply perceive reality, it plays a profound role in actually constructing our experience of it. To use the camera analogy, the camera doesn't just pan over reality; it zooms in and out, giving us more or less information around which we construct our view of the world. We have all had the experience of overlooking something that was in plain sight, swearing it wasn't there before. On insisting that we remember an event a certain way only to be presented with photo or video evidence later that proves our memory was entirely errant. These sorts of things happen because of variations in what we choose to focus our attention on. If our mind doesn't give attention to something, functionally, it is as if the thing isn't there.

Experientially, then, reality is constructed out of what we focus on. This is why people living in the same society come to radically different views about things. By choosing to focus attention on different sets of facts, people come to different conclusions about the nature of the world around them. Attention, then, has an active role in determining what kind of reality we experience. What we give our attention to shapes the kind of people we ultimately become.

From a Catholic perspective, this has tremendous import when we consider the virtue of gratitude, which is profoundly connected to how we allocate attention. St. Thomas says that gratitude is a part of justice, whereby we render thanks for some good received; it is a sub-species of justice because it is a way of paying back a moral debt we owe to our benefactors, whether God or men. (STh, II-II, Q. 106, Art. 1). But recognizing our benefactions requires that we be attentive to them: that we recognize them, focus on them, and live in intentional awareness of their presence. This calls for a mindset disposed to see the goodness of Providence in our daily lives. In other words, we cannot expect to cultivate the virtue of gratitude if we never focus our attention on the good things God gives us. Since attention plays such a formative role in how we experience life, we need to make a deliberate effort to be attentive to the manifold blessings God lavishes upon us.

When the Psalmist dwells on God's many gifts, he is overwhelmed with gratitude and exclaims, "What shall I render to the LORD for all his bounty to me?" (Ps. 116:12) Elsewhere he says, "I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me." (Ps. 13:6). Traditionally, these Psalms were written by David, who certainly did not have an easy life, considering the years of persecution he endured, the death of a child, the betrayal and killing of another, the plague that beset Israel during his reign, and all the hardships he encountered. He chose not to dwell on these misfortunes, however, resolving to focus his attention on the blessings of God, which in turn nurtured the disposition of gratitude expressed in the Psalms. 

In the Divine Liturgy, one often hears the admonition "be attentive," not merely because attention helps us to retain what we hear (although it does that, too), but because truly giving our attention to something conforms our inner life to the things we take in. In a certain sense, we become what we give our attention to. This is what it means to "chew" on the Gospel—by giving our attention to the words of Christ, we live in those words deeply, and in time, under the gentle sway of grace, they come to shape us. They become our bones, the structure around which our mental and spiritual life is formed. Hence St. Paul says "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly" (Col. 3:16).

We should keep this in perspective when people say there is “so much” evil. There really isn’t. There are long periods of peace and normalcy punctuated by occasional, regrettable evils. But because of the way our minds work, we tend to pay attention to what is bizarre, abnormal, horrific, or disturbing and ignore what is common, mundane, or unremarkable. Suppose I go out one night and am robbed at gunpoint. The event will no doubt be burned in my memory; I will recall the details of the harrowing experience for the rest of my life. But will I remember every detail of the thousands of nights I was not robbed when I went out? In fact, can you remember what you did in the evening just two Wednesdays ago? Unless it was something out of the ordinary, chances are, you cannot.

Because of the human tendency to pessimism, Scripture enjoins us to maintain a disposition of gratitude. Gratitude is a powerful thing. Have you ever had the experience of coming down with a bad cold, such that your nostrils are completely plugged, and you can no longer breathe through your nose? Have you noticed how grateful you become for the ability to simply breathe through your nose in those moments? You think, “If I could just get better, I’d never take breathing through my nose for granted again!” 

Gratitude can completely revolutionize the way we engage with our circumstances, giving us those “eyes to see” our Lord wishes for us (cf. Prov. 20:12). There will come a time someday, at the twilight of life, when we will struggle with basic mobility, and we will have deep gratitude for the times we could simply run, jump, or move our body with ease through three dimensional space. How hardship has a way of drawing out gratitude! I imagine at the end of life, on the threshold of death, we will appreciate profoundly that simply being alive at all was truly the greatest gift. Existence itself merits gratitude. Like St. Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, we can say to God, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”

Let us, therefore, always keep our attention directed aright. 

"Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Php. 4:8)