Preview: Chesterton on Gratitude During a Pandemic

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”--G.K. Chesterton

"Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ Our Lord. Amen."--a common form of Grace before meals

Anna Mitchell of the Son Rise Morning Show asked me to talk with Matt Swaim on Monday, November 16 at my usual time (7:45 a.m. Eastern/6:45 a.m. Central). Our Topic (leading up to the celebration of Thanksgiving): G.K. Chesterton and Gratitude. 

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; she plans to repeat it on November 26 during the special Thanksgiving Day episode.

Many people have already gathered thoughts about Chesterton and Gratitude: even specifically about celebrating Thanksgiving Day "like Chesterton", gathering five quotations  or more. So I looked for inspiration for something different to say. I can imagine that someone may find it harder to be grateful after a year of such disruption, loss, death, fear, anxiety, rioting, violence, etc, this Thanksgiving Day. I think Chesterton offers us insights into how to be truly grateful in the midst of so many losses.

First, an episode from Chesterton's life that demonstrates his own gratitude and thanksgiving: Our local Chesterton reading group recently celebrated our ninth anniversary of meeting once a month to discuss a book by or about Chesterton. We are currently reading Joseph Pearce's biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence. We have reached the point in Chesterton's life when he has become a Catholic and his wife Frances has finally followed him into that Communion on November 1, 1926. Once she followed him there, she began to lead him again as she did in so many ways throughout their marriage, so Chesterton was very grateful that they were together again in all essential things. Pearce had offered the great insight that Chesterton joining the Catholic Church on 30 July 1922 was, for Chesterton, a most heroic act, taken without his wife's leadership and with only her mournful permission. For four years, he'd been on his own: He had lost her guidance and her leadership in an essential part of his life, being a Catholic. And then he got that all back when she began her new life as a Catholic. After her conversion, "he could once again rest in total and blissful dependence." (p. 334) 

There's an essential connection between Chesterton's dependence and gratitude: part of being grateful is to recognize how dependent we are on the generosity of other people, but even more on the generosity of God, Who gives us everything even when we don't see it--or even when we've lost it.

Perhaps this essay by Chesterton on "The Philosophy of Gratitude" explains this idea as he defended in 1903 a comment he had made in a previous essay for The Daily News: “No one can be miserable who has known anything worth being miserable about.”:

The remark was written as remarks in daily papers ought, in my opinion, to be written, in a wild moment; but it happens, nevertheless, to be more or less true. What I meant was that our attitude towards existence, if we have suffered deprivation, must always be conditioned by the fact that deprivation implies that existence has given us something of immense value. To say that we have lost in the lottery of existence is to say that we have gained: for existence gives us our money beforehand. It is quite impossible to imagine ourselves as really calling, as Huxley expressed it, the Cosmos to the bar.

He goes on in the essay to describe what folly it would be for a mortal judge to accuse the Cosmos--God the Creator--of taking something away from us, like accusing one old man of stealing a handkerchief from another old man:

Suppose he is convicted. And suppose after he is convicted he is able to say blandly and with unimpeachable argument, “It was my handkerchief.” That is the position of God or Nature, or what you will. Suppose, again, that the judge and the Court are in some doubt about this reply. The man says, still very humbly, “It was my handkerchief; I made it.” “Made it,” the judge will say, “what did you make it out of?” “Out of nothing,” replies the prisoner, and waves his hand. Sixty handkerchiefs flutter down out of the empty air. The judge is startled, and looks keenly at the meek prisoner; nevertheless he continues: “You may have made the handkerchief (though in this somewhat irregular way), and so far, of course, it may be yours. All the same you seized it from this old gentleman.” The prisoner coughs slightly and looks embarrassed. “The fact is,” he says, “the fact is, I made the old gentleman, too.”

The prisoner goes on to demonstrate that he can not only make the old gentleman out of nothing, but the judge himself:

Then the Prisoner, who has made all things, steps up [to] the tribunal, his white hair flaming like a silver crown, and looks down upon the things he has made.

Thus Chesterton offers us a lesson in gratitude in our current circumstances, especially if we say we have faith in God and His Providence:

The whole question in which the existence of religion is involved is whether, while we have feelings about the catastrophic, we are or are not to have feelings about the normal; that, while we curse our luck for a house on fire, we are to thank anything for a house. If we come upon a dead man, we start back in horror. Are we not to start with any generous emotion when we come upon a living man, that far greater mystery? Are we to have any gratitude for the positive miracles of life? We thank a man for passing the mustard; is there indeed nothing that we can thank for the man who passes it, for the great, fat, living, two-legged, two-eyed fairy tale, who, by the mystical avenues of ears and hands, is magically agitated to pass the mustard? Is the offering to us of that creature so small a civility, that we shall not even say a word about it?

No; most men have felt that we should say a word. . . .

Chesterton knew the right words to say: Thank you. Thank you, Good and Gracious God, for all the blessings we have received this year and every other year.