Many years ago, I was channel surfing and stumbled upon an episode of Dr. Oz that was focusing on the health benefits of prayer. Dr. Oz had assembled a panel of experts who presented research showing the significant effects prayer has on both physical and mental health. While, as I recall, most of the episode was focused on petitionary prayer—asking God for health and healing—it also did address prayers of any kind, including thanksgiving. The research they had up to that point showed that praying in any way, including giving thanks to God can have a significant positive impact on your well-being, that an attitude of gratitude is good for your physical and psychological health.
Throughout the episode, Dr. Oz was at pains to emphasize that it doesn’t matter what religious tradition you follow, whether you conceive of God in more generic, esoteric terms, like a force or energy, or in more personal, concrete terms, relationally. But much to Dr. Oz’s chagrin, one of the panelists, a Dr. Koenig from Duke university, kept interrupting Dr. Oz to correct him.
Dr. Koenig led what was one of the largest studies done on prayer up to that point. He kept reminding Dr. Oz that the research didn’t show that all conceptions of God create the same effect. Dr. Koenig insisted that the research was clear in showing that, while prayers of petition and gratitude directed toward any concept of God one holds does create a significant positive effect, that effect is significantly greater for those who conceived of God in personal terms. The research he had done was clear that expressing thanks to a personal God—as opposed to an impersonal one—heightens and intensifies the effect on your well-being.
Subsequent research over the years has only reinforced this point. Even when it comes to interpersonal relationships, while a general attitude of gratitude can have significant physical and mental health benefits, when we express our thanks to another person, those benefits significantly increase. Mental exercises, like running through a litany of things you are thankful for in your head or meditating on good memories, are good for your health and sense of well-being. But expressing thanks to another person is far better.
Applying this spiritually, expressing thanks to a personal God yields a much deeper sense of well-being than showing gratitude to an impersonal one. Ontologically, as the research on prayer and gratitude shows, this is just how we are wired.
When I was in my mid-twenties, at the lowest point in my life, I had a powerful experience of what all this research is pointing to. Pardon me for being so blunt, by my life, the circumstances of it, sucked. To me, it seemed like all my dreams had come crashing down and were a flaming pile of excrement. I was crushed. I had every reason to be miserable. And I was. While I was trying to do everything in my power to salvage any small thread of my dreams, I was incredibly frustrated at the lack of any real progress.
Then it happened, in my moment of deepest despair over all of it. For some strange reason I still don’t quite understand, I started to thank God. I have no idea why I did this—mind you, I didn’t have anything to be thankful for. So I just started to manufacture things to thank Him for, like the air to breathe or the trees outside. Suddenly, I found myself getting caught up in it. I was on a roll, thanking God for all kinds of silly things. Then for some reason I made a huge shift: I started thanking God not for anything He’s done or given, but simply for being Who He is.
I was shocked how quickly I got swept up in this “thanksgiving”. Before I knew it, was balling like an idiot. With tears of joy. No, of euphoria. Just going through this litany of thanking God, not for all the great things that were happening in my life—again, I didn’t feel like anything good was happening—but for whatever simple, little thing I could think of and then eventually for Him, moved me to the depth of my being.
I won’t lie. It was a little scary. Maybe even very scary. I thought I might be going crazy. How could I be so giddy, so happy, as happy as I’d ever been, at the lowest point in my life? But it was so wonderful, I kept going. I was on a “high” from this euphoria of thanksgiving for several days. All I had to do was start a list of whatever mundane things I could think of to thank God for and I’d tear up, overcome with wonder and awe and bliss.
Because it was such an amazing, even transcendent, experience, I’ve continued this practice and while it hasn’t always produced the same intense euphoria, it’s often come close and, at times, even exceeded the intensity of that original experience, even if the effect has never lasted quite that long, at most only hours, not days.
Still, as wonderful as the experience was, I wondered what was happening, if there was something wrong with me that I would be having such a strange, unnatural, and counterintuitive reaction.
In the intervening years, however, as I started to hear about all the research that was being done on gratitude, I realized I wasn’t the only one. That many people have had a similar experience. In fact, when I was teaching religion in a Catholic high school, I would share this experience with some of my classes. In the days that followed, without fail a number of students would share how they had tried it and it worked for them too! As far as I know, it never produced as dramatic results for them, at least in their initial attempts—they weren’t reduced to a blubbering idiot the way I was!—but they found it to be a powerful truth. And they enthusiastically shared how they looked forward to doing it more frequently in the future.
When you stop to think about it, though, this is such an odd phenomenon. It is bizarre, not at all what we’d predict. Why, in the face of the most crushing circumstances, circumstances that pose a real threat to our well-being, would the simple act of giving thanks, especially to a personal God, have such a dramatic effect on both our physical health and psychological well-being? Why, when we don’t have anything to be thankful for, would an attitude of gratitude give us such peace and contentment? Why are we “wired” this way?
As I understand it, there is no selective advantage to such a response. Quite the opposite. If, even in ominous circumstances that pose a real threat to our mental and/or physical health, circumstances where we should be on guard, where we need to take action, we are wired to experience a profound sense of contentment with a simple act of thanksgiving toward a personal God, this doesn’t seem like a very effective adaptive response.
When our ancestors saw a tiger in the wilderness, they ran the other way. They didn’t lie down next to the lion’s den and take a nap. Confronted with a threat, their survival instinct went into hyperdrive to deal with it.
Our circumstances rarely pose such an immediate and dire threat. The “threat” we face from painful circumstances may be more psychological in nature, like depression or despair and their debilitating effects, but such threats to our ability to thrive are serious. As a survival mechanism, finding deep comfort and contentment in the face of serious threats to our welfare like these through thanksgiving seems to be the psychological equivalent of lying down next to the lion’s den instead of fighting for your life. It is just as crazy and counterintuitive as me being so giddy, so euphoric, at the lowest point in my life.
From an evolutionary perspective, we would predict that, in the face of the threat difficult and painful circumstances pose to our psyche, an attitude of gratitude would be met with severe discontentment—so as to motivate us to do something about the precarious situation our psyche finds itself in. We would predict that giving thanks to some god would only leave us more unsettled, rattled, even shaken to the core so that we would get on with the real business of addressing our situation.
The well-documented fact that giving thanks does the exact opposite, that it yields deep contentment which makes it easier for us to avoid the hard work needed to mitigate the danger that is threating our well-being, is, far from being a clever coping mechanism, completely counterproductive, a dangerous delusion distracting us from the potentially debilitating reality staring us in the face. From an evolutionary perspective, it would seem that the only response that would give us a selective advantage is one that would rouse us, heighten our alertness, force us into fight or flight mode.
So why does giving thanks yield better health and contentment in situations where natural selection would predict that our survival instinct would go into hyperdrive, giving us something more like that awful pit-in-the stomach anxious feeling that puts us on edge and gives us an edge in dealing with threats rather than a euphoric contentment that undermines all sense of urgency in dealing with the threats that are staring us down? This seems to be a fly in the evolutionary ointment.
But if nothing in the neo-Darwinian, naturalistic worldview seems to predict that thanksgiving would have this kind of effect on us, neither does anything in the panoply of religious traditions predict that expressing thanks to a personal God would significantly heighten both the physical and mental health effects of an attitude of gratitude. Why is it that, contrary to what Dr. Oz wanted to believe, giving thanks to whatever concept of the Divine one has does not have an equal effect? Why is it that the great religious traditions which conceive of God as impersonal yield significantly less benefit than those traditions who conceive of a personal God are able to?
Almost two decades after I experienced the power of thanksgiving, a pastor I worked with shared a brilliant insight during his Thanksgiving Service Sermon that year. Not only did his insight make sense of what I had experienced, it made sense of what the research shows regarding the relationship between thanksgiving and the concept of God we have.
During that sermon, he pointed out that gratitude is simply the flip side of grace, simply our natural reaction to it. Just think about it: When someone shows us grace, especially when they lavish us with a kindness so extravagant that we could never reciprocate, gratitude naturally wells up within us. Our natural response is to be grateful. In turn, we desire nothing more than to express our gratitude to them. And in the case of an extravagant gift, to thank them profusely.
And here’s the thing he pointed out that was so eye-opening: Because thanksgiving is the natural response to grace, the flip side of it, whenever we give thanks to God—even when we don’t feel like we have anything to be thankful for—we open ourselves up to the flow of His grace. This, he explained, is simply the “ontology” of grace. The nature of it. How it works.
So, in that Thanksgiving Eve Sermon he challenged us to give thanks, regardless of our circumstances, even if we didn’t feel grateful at all, with the sure promise that, when we did, we would be making ourselves more open to the flow of God’s grace which He wants to pour out into our hearts. Thanksgiving holds the key to experiencing the transforming power of God’s grace, which, as I stumbled upon in the darkest moment of my life those many years before, fills us with a joy no circumstance can take away and a peace so profound that it passes all understanding.
Experiencing a deep sense of well-being in the midst of the most challenging and painful circumstances by simply giving thanks to a personal God is completely counterintuitive. But it works. It’s true. Not simply as a dogma of faith. But now as a truth that an abundance of scientific research on the effects of prayer and gratitude is backing up. And the reason it works is because this is the ontology of it, how, against all we would predict, we are wired.
But again, when you think about it, being wired this way is so bizarre, such an unnatural reaction?
The peace and joy we can experience through this simple act is so alien to our nature, to the way we would naturally predict we would respond. Miserable circumstances should make us miserable. Life situations that pose any kind of threat to our well-being should make us profoundly discontent with them, to put us in fight or flight mode, to do everything in our power to change them and, when circumstances are truly out of our control, to offer stiff resistance.
Naturally, painful life situations should put us on edge, on high alert, with every fiber of our being galvanized for resistance. And they often do. But that all changes when we adopt an attitude of gratitude. Then the natural, predictable reaction disappears. This very natural, very predictable survival response, the one best suited to give us a selective advantage by overcoming very real threats to our well-being, instantly evaporates in the simple act of giving thanks and is instead replaced with a disarmed contentment that leaves us less mobilized to deal with these threats. How can this be?
How can it be that without ever following an exercise regimen or some self-help affirmation program, but simply by adopting an attitude of gratitude, we can see improvement in our physical health and gain a greater sense of well-being?
How can it be that even in the most depressing and intractable circumstances we can be content, even blissful?
Through the lens of atheism, of naturalism, of materialistic, neo-Darwinian evolution and natural selection, this response is too counterproductive to be an effective adaptive mechanism. From this perspective, an attitude of gratitude is dangerously close to resignation, making us obtuse to the forces that threaten our ability to best adapt to our circumstances. Contentment is no motivator for adaptation. Thus, it offers no selective advantage. Thanksgiving should produce the opposite response, a repulsively negative reaction that causes us to reject it as an appropriate daptive response—one that fills us with agitation, not contentment, one that heightens our defenses, that stirs us to action and won’t let us rest content until we do. This is not what the evolutionary worldview would predict.
But neither is this what a worldview that assumes all religions are, deep down, basically the same would predict. There is a clear difference in the research between those who pray to a personal God and those who don’t. The positive effects for those who believe in a personal God are significantly greater—which, given the nature of grace, makes sense.
Because there is such an intimate and inextricable relationship between grace and gratitude—gratitude being the natural response to grace, a function of grace—gratitude toward the Divine can only be fully experienced in relation to a personal God. Indeed, grace itself can only be produced by a personal God.
By definition, grace is a free gift. And a gift can only be given by a “Person”, someone who has agency, who freely decides to bestow it on another. An impersonal God can’t exercise grace—because grace requires agency, calls for an act of will, and involves the bestowing of a gift. And among those religious traditions that conceive of God in personal terms, only one emphasizes that grace, or unconditional love, is at the center of God’s nature.
As the research on gratitude suggests, my pastor colleague was on to something: Ontologically, this is the way we are made. This is how things work. Grace begets gratitude. And gratitude, in turn, opens us up to the flow of grace. No matter what we face, we thrive most as human beings when we open ourselves to the grace, the unconditional love, of a personal God. According to the research, this “alien” peace, joy, and even euphoria comes to us most abundantly in reference to a personal God of grace.
So how else can we explain this unnatural, unpredictably bizarre way we are wired unless it is by design? Unless there is personal God who made us this way? Unless that God is a God of grace, the very God uniquely revealed in Jesus?
I’m not trying to present this as a major argument for the existence of God. There are far better ways and much stronger evidence to make that case. But I do think it is a fascinating clue that, when considered alongside other more substantial evidence, provides some intriguing corroboration: If the God of Jesus Christ is real, then this is exactly how we’d expect to be wired.
In stark contrast, if atheism is true, then we wouldn’t predict we’d be wired this way. It can’t account for this bizarre, counterintuitive but widespread feature of our nature.
This bizarre, counterintuitive quirk in our nature speaks of a God of grace, the God that is uniquely revealed in Jesus. It adds another note to the cacophony of other good reasons for this same God.
So, even if you doubt thanksgiving matters, even if you’re skeptical about God, especially a God of grace, the God of Jesus Christ, this Thanksgiving I encourage you to give it a shot. Even if you feel like you have nothing to be thankful for, try giving thanks. Even if you have a hard time believing God exists, just imagine He does. Imagine Him to be the God revealed in Jesus, a God who is so extravagantly gracious that He would give His life for you. And then see what happens.
I pray you have wonderful Thanksgiving. I pray that you have much to be thankful for. But even if you have nothing to be thankful for, I pray above all that, by opening your heart to His grace through an attitude of gratitude, you will experience for yourself that profound peace that passes understanding and unspeakable joy which no circumstance can take away.
Happy Thanksgiving!
