Article November 16, 2009 Issue

'I'M GRATEFUL'—MORE THAN A CATCHPHRASE

BY BERT HOGAN

The concept of gratitude has a special place in my heart. But it wasn't always this way. I used to be a bit of a gratitude "Scrooge."

I grew up in a big family, and all of us attended Christian Science Sunday School as well as Wednesday evening testimony meetings at church, where we'd hear accounts of healing given by those at the service. And what I learned through my formative years was that students of Christian Science love to end their testimonies with, "I'm so grateful." Or so it seemed to me.

Because of this, I developed an aversion to using the words grateful or gratitude and came to disdain it when others said them. I thought those words were just so unoriginal! So, when I gave testimonies, I would purposely use other words that hit the approximate meaning of gratitude, such as appreciative. Obviously, I wasn't seeing gratitude for what it truly meant, but as just a word in the dictionary. I didn't really have an understanding of what the power of gratitude can do, and what it means to those who have experienced healing. But this all changed rather dramatically for me back in the 1980s, in my senior year of high school.

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