Article May 30, 1970 Issue

Both Sides of Gratitude

GODFREY JOHN

There are two sides to gratitude. Gratitude is generally thought of as a kind of response after the fact, as it were, something like a reflex action to good. You do me a service, and I react with thanks or with some deed born of such thanks. This side to gratitude gilds the fabric of all genuine human relationships.

But the presence of gratitude as spiritual power is thus only partially realized. Turn the coin over. The other side to gratitude is found in thanks felt and given before the fact.

The gratitude that stirs in your heart before any human reason may exist to occasion it is like a lens through which you may view the living present, the spiritual actuality of being. Gratitude before the fact begins as a kind of expectancy of experience—experience, that is, of the good that God continuously bestows upon His likeness, man. It is an awareness that springs from the very immediacy of that good imaged in the consciousness of all divine Mind's spiritual ideas.

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