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Tag: Gratitude (page 1 of 1)

Grievance as Gospel

Hieronymus Bosch – Hell from the Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych (1500)

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis spins a story of hell as a place that souls inhabit by choice. One of the common motivations for remaining in hell is for the nursing of grievances. The same principle is made explicit in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (1961 Preface p. IX)

In a previous post I reflected on Galen Guengerich’s new book on gratitude as a spiritual practice. Grievance is the opposite of gratitude, and, alas, can also take on the character of a spiritual practice. That is, it becomes a motivating value on which our minds fixate.

James Kimmel, Jr, the director of Yale Medical School’s Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, argues that grievances fire up the brain in a way that is very similar to addictive drugs. Dwelling on a grievance activates the same neural reward circuits as narcotics.

A Festivus Pole ready for the airing of grievances
(cc Wikimedia)

There is also a social element to grievance. Grievances help bind communities together. They can spread from one person to another. The desire to share grievances can lead to a kind of grievance evangelism. Groups with a shared sense of grievance can become an echo chamber that amplifies a grievance fixation.

There has been much speculation on the spiritual commitments of Donald Trump. He does come across as the poster child for the grievance-centered life. The Washington Post reports today that “In a cascade of tweets sent after midnight, [President Trump] shared more dubious claims of electoral fraud and falsely insisted, yet again, that he was the true victor.” This leads the mind rather quickly to C. S. Lewis’s description of the “ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell.”

Following this line, Kimmel puts grievance at the core of Trumpism. Trump built his movement around a populist resentment of “liberal elites.” Now, the myth of a stolen election is becoming a binding belief for the true faithful (and a creedal test for cowed Republican officials).

We shouldn’t pretend that grievance doesn’t help bind Democratic partisans as well. Anti-Trumpism is clearly the glue for the diverse views that gathered in the big tent of the Democratic Party of 2020.

Kimmel argues that grievance as a motive force can be highly destructive. This is certainly true, but it’s also essential to recognize that grievances can be about real injustices. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement today could certainly be characterized as organized around grievances. So too, the centerpiece of the American Declaration of Independence was a list of grievances.

John Trumbull’s painting of the Declaration of Independence, being presented to Congress. [Wikimedia – public domain]

There are, then, two key questions to confront. The first is: how do we identify legitimate, and even urgent grievances? The second is how do we manage the pathologies of grievance both on an individual and collective level?

Part of the answer to both of these questions on a social level is that this is precisely what our political and legal institutions are for. That they aren’t always that good at it is a reflection of their inevitable imperfections, and of the enduring difficulties of solving these core human problems.

At the individual level, introspection and self-care are essential. But, let’s also return to gratitude. More important than its place as the conceptual opposite of grievance, a focus on gratitude can serve as an antidote to a grievance-fixation.

And, going back to C. S. Lewis’s description of hell as a place of interminable self-centeredness, work to address the legitimate grievances of others may be a healthy road map for a life of purpose.

Meanwhile, this ties to a central point in my new book manuscript: that the purpose of life is to love and be loved, and that an essential characteristic of love is taking the interests–and thus the grievances–of others as seriously as your own.

The bottom line, still, is the need for an appropriate balance between attention on the important work of addressing legitimate grievances and on a life perspective of gratitude.

Gratitude & Purpose

Thanksgiving is an appropriate moment for thinking a bit about gratitude. Galen Guengerich, the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, argues that pretty much every moment is appropriate for thinking about gratitude.

I crossed paths with Galen in seminary, where we lived in the same graduate student apartment complex and shared many meals and an interest in somewhat temperamental European sports cars.

Galen’s journey from there to All Souls in New York is an interesting one, since he started out as a conservative Mennonite. He recently published a very nice book, The Way of Gratitude, that tells some of that story and outlines his spiritual worldview, which emphasizes the centrality of gratitude. Here’s a quick version of how he conceptualizes gratitude:

Gratitude is the practice of radical openness to whatever comes our way, whether for good or for ill.  It’s a way of living that understands the meaning of our lives in terms of our relationships to the people and world around us.  The practice of gratitude enables us not only to embrace the good experiences in our lives, but also to endure the difficult experiences and seek to transform them.  It points the way from what is present to what is possible.

GALEN GUENGERICH, THE WAY OF GRATITUDE, (2020) 66-67.

Putting gratitude at the center of spirituality connects to my interests in its implications for our sense of the purpose of life.

Cover-The Way of Gratitude by Galen Guengerich

If one were going to tease out a central life purpose in the book, I think it would be the pursuit of joy. Gratitude and joy are intimately related in Galen’s approach. The practice of gratitude is a path to joy–even in difficult times, even in a post-9/11 world well-described by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski as “mutilated.”

While Galen does not explicitly underline the argument I want to advance that love is the purpose of life, he dances around the edges of it, both in his emphasis on the centrality of relationships at the core of life, and in the personal anecdotes that greatly enrich the book.

[O]ur gratitude goal should be to increase the quality of our relationships. As we become more fully and deeply engaged with the people around us, we add more value to our own lives, as well as to theirs.

GALEN GUENGERICH, THE WAY OF GRATITUDE, (2020) 94.

This engagement with the world in a spirit of gratitude requires reciprocity–the desire to give back and support the people, social structures, and even the global ecological conditions that have made possible and enriched our lives in ways for which we are grateful.

If we are fortunate, the people and world around us have given us what we need to develop physical and emotional maturity.  We become spiritually mature as we realize what we owe in return.  Whenever our vast array of relationships includes experiences of pain or even perversity, life invites us to be grateful for what we have been given and to be agents of healing and hope.  When these relationships are beneficial and beautiful we find ourselves experiencing what Carl Dennis called “the happiness that can’t be earned.” The spiritual term for this kind of happiness, in my view, is joy.

GALEN GUENGERICH, THE WAY OF GRATITUDE, (2020) 67.

Galen cites French philosopher, linguist, and feminist Luce Irigaray on the nature and language of a love that requires treating the other as subject rather than object. This point is the key to my argument that women’s equality is a necessary condition for authentic partnership love between adults.