Grateful by Diana Butler Bass

Author:Diana Butler Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

THE ECSTASY OF GRATITUDE

Gratitude is powerful. Theologian Lewis Smedes recalls how he felt when he realized that he had survived a life-threatening illness:

I was seized with a frenzy of gratitude. Possessed! My arms rose straight up by themselves, a hundred-pound weight could not have held them at my side. My hands open, my fingers spread, waving, twisting, while I blessed the Lord for the almost unbearable goodness of being alive on this good earth in this good body at this present time. I was flying outside of myself, high, held in weightless lightness, as if my earthly existence needed no ground to rest in, but was hung in space with only love to keep it aloft.

It was then I learned that gratitude is the best feeling I would ever have, the ultimate joy of living.14

As I read Smedes’s account, I realized that I sat up straighter, stretched my arms wide, and took a great cleansing breath. Without intending it, I imitated him. His act of gratitude inspired me to physically move as he had moved and to empathically feel grateful. He referred to the moment as a “frenzy,” but it was clearly a frenzy of wholeness and goodness. Pure joy.

In his book on happiness, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt quotes Thomas Jefferson, who actually speculated on the communal and imitative nature of beneficial emotions:

When any . . . act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also.15

Inspired by this Jeffersonian clue, Haidt and his researchers went on to find evidence that “people really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty” and that beneficial acts and feelings cause others to want to copy them. Haidt refers to this as “moral elevation,” and his team demonstrated that witnessing goodness increased actual biological responses in the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls heart rate and calm breathing. Indeed, gratitude research has pointed to this same effect.16 Gratitude, evidently, is contagious. It can be spread from heart to heart.

Haidt argues that “elevation” is generally a calming response, not the frenzy of gratitude reported by Lewis Smedes. But he also points out that that there is a related impulse: awe, or “the emotion of self-transcendence.” Awe is also a dimension of gratitude. Pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow identified moments like the one Smedes describes as “peak experiences,” where the “universe is perceived as a unified whole” and the person is “flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude.”17 As a result, one feels more integrated, happy, and in harmony with the self and the world. This is the territory of frenzy, or ecstasy, and such experiences are also sought and imitated by others—most often through religion and spiritual practices.

Haidt studied “elevation” and Maslow studied “peak experiences” in individuals. But if gratitude elevates and is related to awe, might its imitative power be expanded beyond individuals to communities? Indeed,

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