a doorway into thanks

On the Subversion of Gratitude

A few days before Easter, one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems began cropping up all over social media; I posted it too, on my Instagram feed.

Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

I read it a few times; it comes from Oliver’s 2007 collection, Thirst, which touches on the poet’s grief over the loss of her partner of more than forty years, Molly Malone Cook; the metabolizing of that grief; and moving forward, tentatively, into the next part of her life.

In the title poem, Thirst, Oliver begins with the line Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. We learn as we read on: this is a poem about prayer and gratitude, and trying to find peace where peace does not yet exist. It is about not knowing and, as I often beseech my students, letting go of the side of the pool; relinquishing control; trusting that one will be carried into safety despite all evidence to the contrary.

It is about a word — a thing — that is tossed around today like leaves in a windstorm: gratitude.

We see it everywhere: on coffee cups, necklaces, tee shirts, the covers of dream journals, on posters. A mutual friend of mine and James Taylor’s tells me he is fond of the phrase Have an attitude of gratitude. He and my friend both are in longtime recovery, and the importance of gratitude in this process cannot be overstated, so I am told. Gratitude pokes a pin in one’s destructive human ego, and pulls one outside of one’s brain-swirl to be grateful for something other than oneself. Gratitude is synonymous with, as the Hazelden people say, a shift in focus away from what one lacks, and it is this perceived (or actual) lack — and experienced pain — that is often foundational in addiction. (Hence addiction being called the disease of more.)

The opposite of gratitude is expectation, presumption, entitlement, neediness. The opposite of being grateful is, as my grandmother would have said, being A spoiled brat. When I got out of line as a child, she used to shake her finger in my face and say Who do you think you are….The Queen of The May? We stand on line at the grocery store and someone steps in front of us like we’re not even there: Who do you think you are, we want to say. Someone sits down in an Amtrak quiet car a few rows ahead of us and holds a conference call at the top of his lungs; we call him an entitled asshole. Who do you think you are to step beyond your place? Who do you think you are to complain about [fill in the blank]?

Taken one step further and perceived lack of gratitude becomes knotted into You ought to be ashamed of yourself for needing/wanting/expecting more.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

In An Absorbing Errand, Janna Malamud Smith writes, Shame heats up when you are perceived to be attempting, even silently desiring, to rise about your assigned caste or station—when it appears you think more of yourself than others think of you. Instead: shut up and be grateful for what you’ve got. For what we’ve given you. For what we’ve allowed you to have. For the seat on the bus. For the job at equal pay. For reproductive rights. For the ability to go to kindergarten and not get shot while studying the alphabet. And this is the dangerous thing about gratitude that no one ever talks about: taken a step too far — beyond the confines of gratitude for food on the table, for love, for good health and good friends, for work one loves, for a roof over one’s head —gratitude shaming can dehumanize, trivialize, reduce.

Gratitude shaming is a scold that exists in lockstep with gaslighting.

This isn’t a contest, but a doorway.

How many people tell us that we are not doing it right: that we aren’t praying right, or hard enough? Grieving right? Moving along in our work at the right pace? How many people shame us for a perceived lack of gratitude for the gifts we have been given?

Who do you think you are to be so griefstricken, a family member once said to me when my father died. I was heartbroken; I had just removed him from life support. I had lost him, and now I was losing her, and she had been like a sister to me. Who do you think you are, she said. She thought less of me, she said. I didn’t want her to be angry with me, so I did the only thing I thought to do: I apologized. I apologized again. I pleaded and begged for her forgiveness. I never got it. You should be grateful that we are allowing you to stay with us, she said, the night before my father’s funeral. But you are ungrateful.

How many people tell us that we are not doing it right: that we aren’t praying right, or hard enough? Grieving right? Moving along in our work at the right pace? How many people shame us — inadvertently or not — for a perceived lack of gratitude for the gifts we have been given?

That was twenty-one years ago. She was a scold; her version of gratitude was a mindfuck, wrapped in cruelty and swinging on a hinge of emotional violence: she was like a coyote who had smelled the blood of my grief. She attacked me every single moment of every single day before my father’s funeral, on the way to the funeral home, when his coffin was lowered into the ground, and every day since. She made me believe that I was too needy, too assuming of her tenderness, too desirous of her compassion. I had simply expected and wanted too much.

Who do you think you are? she said. She backed me into a corner; please forgive me, please, I wept. I’m so sorry, I’m not good enough for you. It has taken me this long to understand why I never received her absolution: because there was nothing to forgive.

This was my first conscious experience of how gratitude in the hands of emotional terrorists can be weaponized. And this is not something we talk about enough.

Gratitude and prayer are closely linked; it seems impossible to have the former without the latter. I am grateful — I really am; with every fiber — for all that I have been given: the love of a wonderful woman, reasonable health after surviving Covid and a stroke, my wife’s surviving cancer, a roof over my head and a home that I love, work that I am devoted to and that I am good at, my wife’s job that she loves and is great at and that provides us with the health insurance that we’d be destitute without, food on my table, friends in recovery who are guiding me along with the patience of Job, amazing students who teach me every day, old friends who stand by me — we stand by each other — no matter what, even when the simple mess and funk of being human turns me, turns absolutely all of us, into temperamental cranks.

But gratitude can, in the wrong hands — like anything — be twisted into a grenade of manipulation and cruelty. It is not, as Mary Oliver wrote in Praying, a contest, but the doorway into thanks.