Science, religion and gratitude

My favorite prayer before a meal has always been one sentence I learned as a young girl at the family dinner table. My mother, my younger sister and I would bow our heads, and my father would say, “Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all thy mercies, and make us mindful of the needs of others, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

In a section of prayers titled “Family Prayers,” it’s the last prayer in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I suspect it will be said today over more than a few Thanksgiving meals.

Among those who pray, I’ve heard its words, in one form or another, used far outside its traditional Episcopal origins. The last public version of this prayer I heard went like this: “May we have grateful hearts and remember the needs of others.”

That works for those who don’t consider Jesus their Lord. It works for those who question whether God is our Father and not our Mother ... or perhaps neither or both. It works for those who doubt there’s a God at all.

The value of having a grateful heart and remembering the needs of others is something few people would quarrel about. Whatever their divergent ideas about God, philosophies and religions on the whole hold gratitude and its companion, compassion, in high esteem.

Webster’s New World Dictionary defines “gratitude” as “a feeling of thankful appreciation for favors or benefits received.

Roman politician and philosopher Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

C.K. Chesterton, Christian, author and critic, wrote, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in an essay titled “God’s Fingerprints on the Soul,” asserts, “If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.”

Greek fabulist Aesop wrote, “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,” an idea echoed at about the same time by Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, in these words: “A noble person is mindful and thankful for the favors he receives from others.”

Naikan, a philosophy and practice of meditation, finds value in gratitude for both the individual and society. In “Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection,” Gregg Krech writes, “To live a life of gratitude is to open our eyes to the countless ways in which we are supported by the world around us. Such a life provides less space for our suffering because our attention is more balanced. We are more often occupied with noticing what we are given, thanking those who have helped us and repaying the world in some concrete way for what we are receiving.”

According to Robert A. Emmons, professor of psychology at UC Davis, “the consensus among the world’s religious and ethical writers is that people are morally obligated to feel and express gratitude in response to benefits received.”

Classic and contemporary literature is teeming with titles on gratitude. A search of book titles on Amazon.com returns 425. Several hundred listings into the inventory, the titles are still on topic. I didn’t have the patience to click through them all.

Among the first hundred are: “Moments of Gratitude: Quotations from Mary Baker Eddy” (founder of Christian Science); “Patience and Gratitude,” by Muslim authors Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah and Nasiruddin al-Khattab; and “Sufism V: Gratitude, Patience, Trust in God, “ by Javad Nurbakhsh.

There are children’s books: “Andy and the Lion: A Tale of Kindness Remembered, or the Power of Gratitude,” by James Daugherty; and a Chinese fable titled “The Tigers Pay a Debt of Gratitude,” by Wang Bo.

There is “The Ethics of Gratitude,” by John Milton; and two sermons -- one, “Gratitude Is Always a Duty,” delivered by Jacob Weed Eastman on Dec. 2, 1819, and the other, “God the Proper Object of Gratitude and Thanksgiving a Necessary Evidence of Its Sincerity,” preached by Rufus William Baily in Pittsfield, Mass. on Dec. 3, 1824, on the occasion of the public Day of Thanksgiving in Massachusetts.

Card and gift book artist Flavia Weedn has written and illustrated “Across the Porch from God: Reflections of Gratitude.” And there is even a cookbook: “Sweet Gratitude: Delicious Ways to Bake a Thank-You for the Really Important People in Your Life,” by Judith C. Sutton.

Given this attention to gratitude in literature, Emmons was taken aback as a psychologist by the lack of systematic scientific research on the topic. Several years ago, with the support of the John Templeton Foundation, he set out to change that by chairing a meeting of 13 scholars who gathered in Dallas, Texas, for a conference called “Kindling the Science of Gratitude.”

Perspectives ran the gamut, as Emmons puts it, “from political science to monkey science.” Speakers included Edward Harpham, a political economist, and Frans de Waal, a primatologist who presented his research on reciprocity behaviors in chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys.

Solomon Schimmel, from Hebrew University, gave a history of gratitude in Judaic literature, and philosopher Robert Roberts spoke on the topic from a Christian viewpoint.

Emmons presented findings from his own research, which has attempted to document whether “an intentional, grateful focus, relative to a nongrateful focus, can have a measurable effect on health and well-being.”

Research has shown that it can. Those who literally “count their blessings” by writing weekly or daily lists of things for which they are grateful feel physically better and “better about their lives as a whole” than those who focus on life’s hassles or “neutral events.” They exercise more. They are more alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive and energetic.

According to Emmons, they are also “more likely to acknowledge a belief in the interconnectedness of all life and a commitment to and responsibility to others.” Gratitude has what Emmons calls a “prosocial” affect, motivating those who feel grateful to more readily help others.

Gratitude can apparently be cultivated, developed through activities as simple as Emmons’ intervention of writing down the things one is grateful for.

Michael McCullough, professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University, researcher and participant in the symposium “Kindling the Science of Gratitude,” reported that people who attend religious services, pray or read religious material regularly are more likely to be grateful.

On the other hand, Emmons says, “the perception of oneself as a victim, a sense of entitlement, materialism and a tunnel vision in which the contributions that others make to one’s well-being are shunted aside or minimized” are impediments to gratitude and its natural partner, compassion.

Gratitude and compassion. At its roots, at its heart, those are the things Thanksgiving is all about -- taking stock of our many blessings and how we might share them with others.

Maybe it’s time to start making lists that will “give us grateful hearts and make us mindful of the needs of others.”20051124gzerqeke(LA)