Gratitude, Grace, Surrender

I have been rereading Kerry Howell's very excellent book Gratitude in Education: A Radical View where she writes about the common tendency in education to equate gratitude with positive emotions, which in turn leads to solipsistic mentality (p.34). Howells proposes a contrast between "gratitude for", which tends to be materialistic and self-absorbed, and "gratitude to" which genuinely reaches out, through actions, to others. In other words, for gratitude to be authentically directed toward someone, it needs to take the form of a humble reaching out or a real gift. It's not enough to say in my head, "I am so grateful for so and so", but that feeling needs to take the form of actions. Howells also warns of the dangers of equating gratitude to mere emotion, such as the tendency to equate negative emotions to a failure to be grateful.
   While I agree with Howells, I think one thing that is missing in her account is what orientations incline people to be grateful and which do not. Howells hints at the role of grace in the beginning of the book, particularly noticing times when she herself could not sustain a grateful attitude all the time and was "saved" by the supportive emotions of another person. Grace works well in certain religious contexts, I have to admit, but I can't help but wonder if it's not simply a reified concept to describe serendipitous moments, and does not have any substantial power in itself. The "essence" of grace, if there is one, is that element of not being able to control or grasp: of surrender, in other words. My guess, although I haven't studied it, is that the inclination most conducive to gratitude would be something like the willingness to surrender (let go) which characterizes meditative practices in particular.
   "Let go of what?" you might be asking. The letting go part is actually letting go of the need to control oneself and the subconscious expectations one puts on others. It is a free gesture, letting the world know that whatever it needs to do, you are willing to go along with it. This idea ties rather amorphously to gratitude but I am thinking that a willingness to surrender allows our actions to truly be gifts, rather than exchanges. And this requires a kind of yielding to a gift of one's own that cannot be taken away from someone. Perhaps this "gift" is about liberation or negation, but it's the secure sense that the true essence of us does not lie in a securing of an idea, an image, an object, etc. In that negation, there is a willingness to give because there is no longer anything to lose.

Howells, Kerry, Gratitude in Education: A Radical View. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers