Against gratitude

[repost]

Okay, not really. But I am personally uncomfortable with overt expressions of gratitude, and while I think this is mainly an emotional limitation on my part, there may be at least the ghost of a reasonable caveat in it.

As a teenager, I took a slightly unsavory pleasure in the science fiction of Robert Heinlein.  He not only entertained but also influenced and repelled me. He once wrote (through a character) that there was something sick at the heart of German civilization, and whether that's true or not, I think that the sickness he condemned clings to him, in a kind of gleeful authoritarianism. At the same time, some fragments of his cracker barrel wisdom stayed with me. One of his quirks, voiced by various favored characters, is an aversion to gratitude. As I recall at this distance, he cast it as a power play of the weak, a form of toadying, or guilt masquerading as love.  I think he's wrong to reduce gratitude to those impulses, though gratitude is certainly alloyed with them.  In a similar vein, though, he ridiculed worship, asking why an omniscient, omnibenevolent  God would require the saccharine praise of human beings. That was the question that really stuck with me. It gets at the heart of gratitude, since worship is mainly an expression of gratitude to God.

Such gratitude is -- should be -- a spontaneous expression of love. That's how those who voice it understand it.  But why does it express itself in "saccharine" praise?  In a Thanksgiving post, Andrew Sullivan's Dish suggested an answer:

Against gratitude

Okay, not really. But I am personally uncomfortable with overt expressions of gratitude, and while I think this is mainly an emotional limitation on my part, there may be at least the ghost of a reasonable caveat in it.

As a teenager, I took a slightly unsavory pleasure in the science fiction of Robert Heinlein.  He not only entertained but also influenced and repelled me. He once wrote (through a character) that there was something sick at the heart of German civilization, and whether that's true or not, I think that the sickness he condemned clings to him, in a kind of gleeful authoritarianism. At the same time, some fragments of his cracker barrel wisdom stayed with me. One of his quirks, voiced by various favored characters, is an aversion to gratitude. As I recall at this distance, he cast it as a power play of the weak, a form of toadying, or guilt masquerading as love.  I think he's wrong to reduce gratitude to those impulses, though gratitude is certainly alloyed with them.  In a similar vein, though, he ridiculed worship, asking why an ominiscient, omnibenevolent  God would require the saccharine praise of human beings. That was the question that really stuck with me. It gets at the heart of gratitude, since worship is mainly an expression of gratitude to God.

Such gratitude is -- should be -- a spontaneous expression of love. That's how those who voice it understand it.  But why does it express itself in "saccharine" praise?  In a Thanksgiving post, Andrew Sullivan's Dish suggested an answer:

Up the Great Chain of Being with Jalal a-Din Rumi

One corner of my mind remains open to the possibility that mystics tap into something real. Here's a poem by the Sufi Jalal al-Din Rumi Rumi (1207-1273), aka Mowlana, that seems pumped out of the central artery:

I died as mineral and became a plant.
I died as plant and rose as an animal.
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: "All save the face of God doth perish."
When I have sacrificed my angelic soul,
I shall become what no mind has ever conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for nonexistence
Proclaims in organ tones: "To Him shall we return."

-- cited in Roy Mattadehedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

"Let me not exist" -- a similar impulse was spun out a bit more than a century later (circa 1375) and a world apart in the anonymous English mystical primer The Cloud of Unknowing, which counsels the contemplative to seek a state in which

..in avoiding of all knowing He who is is always unknown he is knitted unto Him in the best manner; and in that he knows nothing, he is made to be knowing above mind.

Indeed, nonexistence, unknowing, erasure or dissolution of the self in the all-encompassing reality of God, is a staple of mysticism in many times and regions.