Gratitude Without Religion

When I made my exit from the ministry (which I have written about previously), the circumstances were ones I once would have called miraculous. I sent out a handful of resumes to the obvious online job sites and got an immediate interview with a local tech company. That interview led quickly to a job offer and then to my resignation from my church position (a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of my start). I have been working in my new field ever since.

The miraculous part (as I would have framed it in the past) is that it is rare to get any response to an online job application, let alone an interview and a job offer, but it happened to me before I was really even trying. As a Christian, I always felt inclined (and somewhat pressured) to speak of an unlikely, positive event as a blessing that could be explained only by the hand of God. But since this blessing was my ticket out of an increasingly ill-fitting professional ministry, I didn’t think of it that way. Instead, I took it simply as an unlikely event for which I was grateful.

Grateful to whom? In the old days, I used to preach that unbelievers couldn’t be truly grateful because they didn’t acknowledge God as the giver of every blessing. Hence, they had no one to thank. I often claimed that Thanksgiving was the most religious of all holidays and that only believers could celebrate it properly.

But this is just wrong, and it’s an example of the kind of thinking that makes sense only within the plausibility structure of belief. (I wrote about plausibility structures here). I could believe this only because I had never associated with people who practiced genuine gratitude without reference to God. But there are many such people (Rich Roll is my current favorite) who know that gratitude is a life-saving, sanity-restoring practice.

In my experience, the pressure to credit God with every good thing sometimes took my focus off the people in my life who had blessed me with their kindness, good deeds, sacrifice, and grace. It also subtly eroded my humility (appropriate humility is another life-saving, sanity-restoring practice) by telling me that good things happen to me because I’m one of the chosen ones.

Still, since my earliest years, religion had provided the structures and rituals of my gratitude. Without that, could I be grateful? More specifically, with the new job, to whom was I grateful? In the years since my hiring, I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and have made the effort to thank the people to whom I owe gratitude, including:

• The people who took the risk of hiring me.
• My wife, who willingly went through the tumultuous transition with me (leaving the ministry was possibly more consequential and painful for her than for me).
• My online teachers (whom I’ve never met) who trained me in my new skills.
• My parents, for teaching me persistence and for giving me lots of grace
• My brother, who reached out and gave me a text-message pep talk on the day I started my new job.
• Even the people at my old church, which includes some very good people and a few close friends.

To these and many others, I owe a great deal of gratitude for the good things I have today, including the skills and opportunity to pursue my new career. And all of this happened without any discernible master plan.

What about the larger context of things that have helped me, things like living in a free country, having some extra money and time to pursue education, enjoying a functional economy, and all the other things that contribute to my good life? My younger self thanked God for these too, and then wondered why God withholds these from so many people. It is at just this point that my need to give thanks always to God stunted my own understanding of the world, because the answers that seemed to fit the best were mostly about American exceptionalism and God’s favor on us as a “Christian nation”. Such a view makes it easy to overlook the truly awful things done on the way to building our present society. It also removes much of the incentive to help others get the same blessings I have. If God isn’t blessing them after all, maybe they have a lesson to learn.

Perhaps the biggest change in my thinking on gratitude is that there doesn’t always have to be someone to thank. When there is, I should definitely thank them. It’s good for us both. But when there isn’t an obvious source — when I have a little extra money, or I hear a great song, or find an empty parking space or have a free evening — I can just take a minute to notice it, and feel grateful.

Today is a beautiful day. I’m going outside now to enjoy it. And be grateful.

Photo by Colton Duke on Unsplash