Gratitude involves being realistic about the Lord, seeing the Lord in our lives as the Lord really is: loving, generous, attentive, always on the look-out to do good for us. Living in gratitude to the Lord also involves our relating to the Lord as we really are. But how does that work out in practice? What attitudes, what virtues, what mindsets must come into play if we are to spend a lifetime being grateful to the Lord?

What does it take to be a grateful believer?

First and foremost, we have to be believers. We will be dealing with the relationship between gratitude and faith again later in our series, but from the beginning we have to be clear that if we are going to be grateful to God, we need to know God, we need to accept God's offer of love for us, we have to understand and assimilate what God teaches us about himself, about us, about our need for salvation, about the meaning of our present life, about the destiny that is in store for us.

And we have to relate to God on a person-to-person basis, on the basis of loving friendship. We can't be grateful to God if we look upon God as an abstraction, a faceless power that brings us into being and then leaves us alone to find our way as best we can. Nor can we be grateful to God if we see God exclusively as a stern legislator or cosmic policeman, watching us carefully so that we can be punished regularly. That's not the God of our Catholic Christian faith. The God we profess is a loving God as well as a just God, a God who has come to be among us, a God who pardons and saves. That's the God to whom we must relate if we are going to be able to be grateful.

Another basic ingredient of living in gratitude is humility. Humility doesn't mean continuously reminding ourselves that we are worthless. Rather, humility means having a clear and realistic grasp of who and what we are. We are sinners but sinners that God wants to forgive. We are limited in our capabilities and dependent on God for the accomplishment of any good there may be in our lives, yet capable of great good with the help of our heavenly Father. We don't deserve God's gifts, yet God gives them to us anyhow. Gratitude involves gratuity, the conferral of something good, something beneficial that we have no right to but which God chooses to give us nonetheless. If we deserve everything that God gives us, if we have a right to it all, then our response to God's giving is not gratitude but the acknowledgment of a kind of commercial exchange: God's paying off what we are owed and our acknowledging receipt. That's not the way things are. We can't deserve God's gifts. God doesn't owe them to us. We can only accept what God freely gives us, not because we are deserving, but because God is generous. That involves humility, and without humility there can be no true gratitude.

Gratitude also involves consistency. Gratitude is a way of thinking and living rather than a distinct action that we exercise now and again as circumstances seem to require. Christian gratitude is real and healthy only to the extent that it is part of the fabric of the believer's life.

The reason for this is quite clear. Gratitude is our response to the goodness and generosity of God that is exercised in our world and in our lives, and that goodness and generosity is ongoing. God isn't kind and loving once in a while, thus eliciting gratitude once in a while. God is ever kind and loving - all day, every day. Consequently, our response to God's kindness and love has to be ongoing and consistent, too. Gratitude is always appropriate, indeed, gratitude is always required simply because God is always busy giving us reason to be grateful.

Finally, gratitude requires practice. We are limited creatures. Our attention span is narrow. We are easily distracted from our good intentions. We can intend to be grateful. We can resolve to be responsive to God's ongoing generosity to us, only to find at the end of the day that we have been concerned almost exclusively with other things, not necessarily sinful things, but things that have very little to do with responding to the generosity of the Lord. The habit of gratitude, the virtue of thanksgiving is something we have to work at, not because God's goodness is arcane and hard to recognize, but because we are so easily distracted from it.

Gratitude is not difficult to build up in our lives, provided we base it on the right foundations. Knowing God and ourselves as we are, consciousness of the consistency of God's care for us, awareness that we can acquire good habits only by practice: these are some of the basics that go into the lives of grateful believers.