Andrew Klavan, a novelist and cultural/political commentator, powerfully describes in his spiritual autobiography, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, how a mere three words completely transformed his life. One night, when Klavan was in his midforties, he was reading a novel in bed before going to sleep. In the passage he was reading, a Catholic surgeon named Maturin climbs into bed and says a brief prayer before falling asleep. As Klavan laid the book aside for the night, he reports that he thought to himself, “Well, if Maturin can pray, then so can I.” Klavan was not in the habit of praying; as the subtitle of his autobiography indicates, he was a secular Jew at the time. But that night, he reflected on the many good things that had come to him in his life: his wife and children, already asleep; his writing; the opportunity to travel the world; etc. And so he prayed, and then he fell asleep.
In retrospect, Klavan characterized the prayer as “a small and even a prideful prayer: an intellectual’s hesitant experiment, three words intended to test the waters of belief without any real mental commitment.” But apparently God saw Klavan’s prayer in a different light, for God’s response was, as Klavan puts it, “wildly generous, an act of extravagant grace.”
Klavan reports that when he got out of bed the morning after he had prayed, he was immediately aware that everything was different and that it was because of his prayer. He had changed, and his way of looking at the world had changed. Klavan provides a beautiful and moving description of how the world had changed for him. I won’t steal his thunder by quoting all of that description here (see Chapter 13 of his book), but suffice it to say that, for Klavan, the world was now clearer, brighter, fuller, practically glowing—and all because of a little three-word prayer uttered with some hesitance. And what were those three little words? Thank you, God.
Praying those three words broke the dam of Klavan’s resistance to God’s grace in his life. In some ways, this is not surprising. There is an intimate connection between gratitude and the reception of God’s grace. There’s an etymological connection here (gratitude and grace both share the same Latin root: gratus, which means “pleasing” or “thankful”), but there’s also an ontological and theological connection. Gratitude changes us—sometimes at the deepest level of our being. Gratitude opens up our hearts and minds more fully to God’s grace, to an experience of God’s presence and providence and love in our lives.
He had changed, and his way of looking at the world had changed.
God doesn’t need our gratitude, but we do. We need to give thanks to God. Expressing our gratitude to God helps to put us into, or back into, a right relationship with him. To say “thank you” to God is to acknowledge that relationship and, more specifically, to acknowledge our indebtedness to God and our dependence on God. Expressing gratitude to God helps to remind us who we are: needy creatures who depend on him for every breath we take; indeed, for our very existence. In that sense, to say “thank you” to God is to acknowledge reality. We sometimes like to think that we’re self-sufficient, that we don’t need God, maybe even that we could be God (Gen. 3:1–7). Expressing gratitude to God reminds us that none of that is true. Expressing gratitude to God reminds us where we came from (God) and where we’re meant to be headed (also God).
Grace is multifaceted, but at its most profound level, grace is the gift of God’s own life and love—the gift of a participation or sharing in God’s divine life and love (2 Pet. 1:4; Catechism of the Catholic Church 1997, 1999). God’s grace is always there, always waiting for us to open ourselves up to receive that grace. Gratitude is one of the surest ways of doing so.
Gratitude opens us up to a sense of wonder. Gratitude opens us up to beauty, goodness, and truth. Gratitude opens us up to love, and to Love. Gratitude opens up the sluice gate so that God’s grace can flow, and overflow, into our hearts, our minds, and our lives. And the more God’s grace flows into us, the more it can flow through us and outward into the lives of other people as well.
For all those reasons (and more), it’s really good to get in the habit of saying a quick “thank you” to God throughout the day, every day: for the blessing of one’s spouse and children; for something that went well on a particular day; for a beautiful sunset; for life itself.
We may not all experience the dramatic and immediate transformation that Andrew Klavan experienced when he prayed his prayer of gratitude; God’s grace comes in a way that is tailored to each individual person. But if we pray even a brief prayer of gratitude on a regular basis, things definitely will change. We will change. Gratitude to God always opens up another channel for the flow of God’s transformative grace into our lives.