On gratitude and hope
Some scattered reflections as we prepare, each of us, to enter the stable to encounter the Christ Child in the manger
I’m calling an audible. I won’t be writing any new SK posts during the holy season of Advent—because some things are more important than exposing falsehoods to help save the Republic, and I want to give myself the opportunity to be fully present to God and to my family and friends during that time. I encourage you all to find some special way(s) to mark this wonderfully rich liturgical season. Here is a good starting point, laying out some ideas.
Personally, I’m planning to work my way through Pope Francis’ apostolic letter “Patris Corde,” written for the Year of St. Joseph, and Pope (emeritus) Benedict XVI’s “Spe Salvi,” as well as to pray the St. Andrew Christmas Novena. To that end, I would be honored to pray for your intentions; feel free to reach out.
Thank you all for your support of this venture. Please, continue to spread the word about my work here.
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving, and a very merry (early) Christmas, to you and yours!
—DAK
You’ll be reading this, I hope, having experienced a day filled with grateful revelry, shared with those dearest to you—gatherings made all the more joyous precisely because amoral busy bodies like Dr. Anthony Fauci would love nothing more than for them to never happen again, unless you have their express permission, of course.
(I know it’s too early for a Scrooge joke, but I really can’t resist musing that Dickens got it wrong by writing him as a banker. As we’ve sadly learned, when the holidays arrive, the true misers are not those who hoard their material wealth but, instead, those who—in the name of “science” and “public health”—insist that you cannot enjoy spiritual treasures like family, fellowship, and faith because someone, somewhere, might die if you do. All sense of proportion is jettisoned because of a monomaniacal, society-wide germaphobia. I hereby formally float the idea of a title change: Holiday wet blankets are no longer to be called “Scrooges” but “Faucis”—e.g., “Don’t be such a Fauci, Aunt Karen! It’s very good for us to gather for Christmas.” Discuss—in the comments, if you want.)
To preserve mere bodily life, the many Faucis that stalk our world (perhaps even people you know) suck the joy out of everything wholesome and anchoring, and they rob us of what makes life worth living. But this is deeply perverse. As Aristotle instructs, the city-state—one’s political community, or polis—“comes to be for the sake of life, and exists for the sake of the good life.”
Or, in American parlance: “Give me liberty or give me death.”
As difficult as it is for many modern Westerners to fathom, there are indeed fates worse than death. Imagine never having loved another fully, or sacrificed for a noble goal, or gave something your very best across the whole span of your life; imagine merely consuming and criticizing those who built the world you now ungratefully inhabit and calling it virtuous.
For my part, I’ll take death a thousand times over before I slide into becoming such a person—or, worse, actively parade around, patting myself on that back as though being such a person is morally praiseworthy rather than ugly, shameful, shameless, and sad.
The last 19 months have been apocalyptic, in the original, Greek sense of the world: to uncover. Ever since the first lockdowns were instituted in March 2020, much has been revealed, most of it distressing. We have been forced to accept that certain noble sentiments and convictions—that we’ll have either freedom or death; that boldly to experience abundant life is better than timidly eking out mere survival; and that it’s proper to recognize the primacy of the spiritual over the merely temporal—have been forgotten, or are merely empty rhetoric. Perhaps they’ve really even been lost.
In any event, such things are paper tigers, trotted out only when it’s convenient (like when elections roll around). They folded in the face of a virus with a survival rate of more than 98 percent.
It would be fair to say that we’re in dire straits.
But there is cause for optimism. I want to suggest that gratitude is a necessary component of the journey forward, toward hope, and that the two—gratitude and hope—are connected in important ways. And, by embracing both, we have a chance of pushing through these troubled times into a better reality.
Gratitude
We can either intentionally cultivate a posture of thanksgiving for the blessings we have, or we’ll become angry, envious, and resentful. There is no neutral ground. We are always trending toward one pole or the other. Love it or hate it, it’s just moral physics.
Gratitude is the simple (but by no means easy) act of recognizing and appreciating what we have—even if what we have might be somehow more or different than it really, actually, is, or it’s not what we’d prefer if we could choose for ourselves. A posture of gratitude springs properly from a key spiritual insight: Everything is a gift from God.
It’s the attitude that propelled Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J. (1904-1984), through his hellish, 20-year ordeal as a Soviet captive—five years in solitary confinement in the infamous Lubyanka Prison, followed by 15 years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag. As he noted, the will of God is not something “out there” to be found out, some abstract puzzle to be solved; rather, the concrete details of my life and your life just are the will of God, and everything—every person, every circumstance, every happening—is a gift, directly from His loving Hand.1
Gratitude provides us with a firm basis upon which to construct a happy life. When we’re grateful, we’re content with what we have, especially with the realization that these things, these circumstances—painful or not, joyous or not—are precious because they have constituted and are constituting our life. They add up to make our life what it is, and we come to love it precisely because it’s our life.
Gratitude shows me that if I were to swap out my experiences with some others, even more pleasant ones, they’d be alien additions, intrusions, inauthentically and extrinsically grafted onto “my life,” not grown from within my own experience and valuable for that reason.
We would not be happy with “another life” because we’d see it for what it is: an imposter life.
Gratitude is the starting point, the foundation, for anything good that would come later, for no other reason than that it’s simply the accurate assessment of our lives and circumstances. Unless we know where we are, we can’t get to anywhere we’d want to go.
Gratitude is realism at its best.
Hope
Hope is “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” It’s forward-looking. It trusts God’s Providence and surrenders to it, secure in the knowledge that
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. [Is. 55:8-9.]
God knows what’s best. He makes all things work together for our good, for our salvation (Rm. 8:28). We are precious in His sight (Mt. 6:26). He will not abandon us (Mt. 28:20).
Hope is not grounded in the efficacy of human action, planning, or power. It’s not a hope in “progress” for progress’ sake. It’s not directionless, or whatever the powerful, or the many, happen to prefer at any given moment in history—including this one.
Hope has a fixed end: union with Jesus Christ, Who entered history and took on flesh as a baby, was born of a Virgin, and Who “has come to His people and set them free” (Lk. 1:68).
We can hope completely in Jesus Christ because by His life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven, He has destroyed evil—utterly and totally. In Him, we have all the grace necessary to avoid sin and live in truth and charity; we can be actively receptive to that grace and thereby live in ever greater imitation of Him. And because of the God-Hero, we no longer need to fear death, man’s greatest foe:
“Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?” [1 Cor. 15:55.]
Because we have hope, the “sure and steadfast anchor of the soul . . . that enters . . . where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf,” (Heb 6:19-20), we need not be afraid of anything. The greatest threats have been neutralized, having been taken up in and swallowed up by Christ’s wondrous Passion. Those who purport to have the power to wield them against us are tyrants, yes, but they’re fundamentally powerless if we have entrusted all of our exterior goods—our health, finances, relationships, possessions, property, job, earthly success, and very life—to God. In His hands, they belong to Him, and they cannot be snatched away by anyone, including the Evil One.
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt. 16:24-25).
That’s hope in action, in a nutshell.
Better together
Where gratitude is presentist and concerned with our having the right relation to our temporal circumstances, hope is future-oriented and has the next life in mind. But the two are intertwined.
Gratitude, in a sense, allows me to hope. It’s because I see God’s goodness in the here-and-now minutiae of my earthly life—whatever that may be, it’s different for everyone—that I can hope for its fulfillment in the hereafter. Gratitude enables hope; it gives me “eyes of hope.”
And for its part, the light of hope shines down, illuminating all the ways in which gratitude is called for. It’s because God has revealed Himself as Jesus Christ, lowering Himself, “taking the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7) in order to be nearer to us, that I’m capable of being grateful—because I can see everything, no matter how small or painful, as a gratuitous gift of a good and gracious God Who loves me so much that He endured His Passion to save me from own sins.
Gratitude and hope synergize beautifully.
With that twin foundation in place, it becomes possible, in gratitude, to resist, on the one hand, the poisonous resentment of social-justice-obsessed progressivism, and, on the other hand, the unhelpful and pathetic myopia of modern-day conservatism, which cannot see a path forward beyond merely absorbing the body blows of the ruling class and trying (if they try at all) to slow their advance, never daring to advance a positive vision of the common good.
We can and must be grateful for the beautiful Baby in the manger, Who came down to Earth that we “may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10), even as we hope for his Second Coming in glory, by which all things will be renewed and redeemed, and through which “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. [For d]eath will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more . . .” (Rev. 21:4).
Let us beg the Lord for an increase in gratitude and hope this Advent, that, with them, we might chart a new path forward into “a new birth of freedom” as “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
You should read his book, He Leadeth Me, which details his spiritual journey. It’s life-changing (well, it was for me, anyway).
A lovely reflection, Deion. It serves as a great bridge between the holiday we just celebrated and the season to come. Thank you for your posts, and may you have a blessed Advent--I'll keep you in my prayers throughout.