Gratitude Is the Key

"I learn by going where I have to go..." 

All of life cannot be planned. Our life is God's and gratitude is its key.

Giving thanks to God is good psychologically to keep our thoughts light and full of energy. It is not true, psychologists tell us, that we think the way we feel. On the contrary, we feel the way we think and thoughts can be changed.

Giving thanks to God is good spiritually. That is the beginning of contemplation.

Giving thanks to God is good socially. It makes us a positive presence in a group. (Only negative people want to be around negative people.)

We need to stop and thank God–consciously–for the good things of the day. We spend so much time wanting things to be better that we fail to see our real gifts. There are banquets in our life and we don't enjoy them because we are always grasping for something more: the perfect schedule, the perfect work, the perfect friend, the perfect community. We have to realize that God's gifts are all around us, that joy is an attitude of mind, an awareness that my life is basically good. Dissatisfaction is too often a sign of something wrong in me

RELIGION AND HAPPINESS

What, if anything, does the average person learn about happiness from religion, the only discipline whose entire intent is to describe eternal happiness?

Religion, unlike any other system on the planet, sets out to teach us how to live, how to make choices and come to decisions that are, in the end, eternally good ones. However much religion may have dabbled in other systems along the way, it is not about the governance or economic security or intercultural relationships or the business of national growth. It is the only institution on the planet that makes happiness primary and takes happiness seriously. Religion, in fact, puts happiness first and foremost, beyond everything else on its agenda. Religion purports to be what Aristotle insisted was the very essence of life—the meaning and purpose of life.

The fact is that religion shapes attitudes. It directs us to elements of life that we should be developing, or it closes some of them off to us. It can set out to develop us as moral agents and spiritual adults, or it can suppress the religious imagination to the point of religious servitude.

Cultivating within ourselves the ability to distinguish one response from another has something to do with becoming both psychologically whole and philosophically astute.

What religion teaches us about happiness and how we can achieve it will, in the end, shape our very notions of life and growth. More than that, perhaps, it has the capacity to lead us through the darkness of pain and enable us to recognize pleasures that offer more than dulling boredom or inadequate and immature spiritual development.

The role and place of religion in life have both a personal and social impact. Religion's definition of happiness and the way to achieve it is no small concern for the world. It tells us a great deal about ourselves and even more about the God we believe in but cannot see except, perhaps, in the shadows we cast for one another because of the religions we say we follow.

— from Happiness by Joan Chittister (Eerdmans)