Faithful Thanksgiving

Today, I presented a paper at SWU’s Faith Integration in the Academy Conference titled, “Faithful Thanksgiving: Gratitude Practices as Faith Integration.” It’s long and personal. Here it is.

Good morning. We’re going to start with the practice that my workshop investigates. If this were my classroom, I would say something like, “It’s 9 am; please stand with me.” As my students stood together, I would summarize what we were going to do that day. For instance, I might say, “Today, we’re going to start with some free-writing and then spend our time evaluating two different writing samples. Let’s do some gratitudes before we get into it.” Then I would say, “Please close your eyes, take a deep breath, and put your hands over your heart where you can feel your heartbeat. As you feel your heartbeat, be reminded of the gifts you’ve been given, like your heart, which you did not have to earn. For those gifts, give God thanks.”

“Now, turn your thoughts to someone for which you are thankful. See that person’s face in your mind’s eye. Feel in your body and spirit what you feel like when you get to be with that person: loved, peaceful, content, free, and joyful. As you see and feel and think about this person, give God thanks.”

“Now, turn your thoughts to something you love getting to do: something that when you get to do it, you feel focused, at peace, excited, and joyful. Remember a time when you got to do that thing you love, and play that memory in your mind as though it’s a movie. As you watch it, experience the feelings you had at that moment, and in that place, give God thanks for the opportunity and privilege of doing something you love.”

“Finally, turn your thoughts to God—the giver of every good and perfect gift. He’s the one who gave you your heart, your relationships, and the experiences that make life worth living. He is the one who knows you and loves you. Give Him thanks.”

I would then ask the students to sit down before leading them through a quick writing exercise. Every single class, I give students a paper copy of the daily worksheet I’ve designed that contains the outlines of my lesson plan. At the top, I leave a space for students to write down gratitudes. Sometimes, students fill in the gratitude box at the top of their worksheet before class. More students do this than you might think. Perhaps it’s the awkwardness of pre-class interactions. I’m not sure. However, I can’t count on every student choosing to write. So, once a week, I will give them two minutes to write down, in detail, three events from the past week for which they’re thankful. I’ll do the exercise too. They can see my list because my writing appears on the gigantic in-room screen. For the past year and a half, I’ve conducted virtual sessions simultaneously with in-person classes. One of the unexpected benefits is that I’ve modeled a lot of writing work during that time. Then, I will ask students by name to share one thing from their list. For this workshop, I will give us two minutes to complete this part of the exercise and then ask four or five of you to share what you’ve written down. I will also tell you what I say to my students. First, aim for concrete details. Give thanks for the nachos you ate on Wednesday night, not just food. Second, explain the reason for your gratitude, not just the person, thing, or event for which you’re thankful.

Let’s get some concrete gratitudes from you this morning. If you would, raise your zoom hand if you did the practice so I don’t shame anyone. I’ll call on four or five of you with raised hands.

That’s the practice. It takes less than ten minutes, and it’s been a consistent part of my freshmen and upper-division courses since I joined Southern Wesleyan in 2018. Here’s the short story of how I got here.

In 2017, my wife and I worked at Charleston Southern University in Charleston, South Carolina. That summer, my wife took a job at Southern Wesleyan University. I had no time to look for a new job in the upstate, so we decided that I would teach at Charleston Southern one more academic year. For the 2017-2018 school year, I lived alone in Charleston during the week then commuted three-and-a-half hours one way to stay with my wife and two-year-old daughter on the weekends. I wasn’t sure what kind of job I could get in the upstate. At the same time, I knew that as I negotiated the uncertainty of the coming year, I needed a specific daily practice to keep me spiritually grounded.

As I’ve done many times before, I prayed. Then I looked to Tony Robbins.

Through one of the numerous Robbins programs I listened to on my way up and down I-26 that year, I discovered a ten-minute morning routine Robbins led listeners through. Robbins designed it to get you primed for the day. At the center of that exercise, Robbins instructs you to put your hands on your heart and give thanks for three specific memories.

The exercise helped me tremendously. I repeatedly remembered my wedding, my dissertation defense, and the moment the chair of CSU’s English Department called to offer me a job as an assistant professor in April 2011. In March 2018, the SWU Provost called and offered me a tenure-track position as part of SWU’s English Department. As I entered the 2018-2019 academic year at Southern Wesleyan alongside my wife, I decided to bring this gratitude practice into my classrooms.

I had intuitive reasons for adding the practice to my classes.

I wanted the practice to help my students prepare to focus and concentrate. I tend to teach classes between 9 am and noon, which is relatively early in the day for a college student. Still, my students were harried and distracted when my class started. The gratitude practice welcomed them to close their eyes and focus on what they loved for three minutes. I hypothesized that the exercise would act as a cognitive and emotional palate cleanser.

Next, I wanted us to prime our imaginations together. The exercise was not about critical thinking or rational analysis. I wanted students to feel something and to have the freedom to choose the person they were thankful for and the experience they loved for themselves. What better way to get their creative juices flowing than to have them use their imaginations to call to mind a loved one or relive a treasured experience?

Next, I thought the exercise would help my students practice writing concrete descriptions. I wanted them to offer thanks for their grandma in Texas, not just their family. I wanted students to give God thanks for trout fishing with their high school buddies on the weekend, not just hanging out with friends. If they could give thanks for concrete people and actions, I felt they could start writing more compelling papers that substituted details for generalizations.

Finally, and most importantly, I thought the exercise would make the connection between faith and education in my writing classes explicit. Every good and perfect gift—including reading and writing—comes from God. We would begin the class by acknowledging God as the source of the concrete gifts of reading and writing. And yes, reading and writing are gifts. They provide us the means to engage with His word and share his love with others. In short, reading and writing are spiritual practices. I laid the groundwork for my students to understand that through this small exercise. 

The gratitude practice turned into much more, however. Soon, it became the cornerstone of my classes, and that’s because gratitude is relatively simple to practice but profound in its implications. I’m going to survey my classroom practice’s theological and psychological underpinnings. Scripture supports the exercise, and several peer-reviewed articles do too. However, I don’t want it to seem like I knew about this support before implementing the practice. The fact that the theological and psychological foundations for what I was doing were so deep was another instance of God’s grace.

I’ll begin with James K. A. Smith, whose work has deeply influenced my vision for education. His 2009 book Desiring the Kingdom occasioned a seismic shift in how I thought about my teaching. Here is a quotation that captures the book’s central point.

The renewal of the church and the Christian university— a renewal of both Christian worship and Christian education—hinges on an understanding of human beings as “liturgical animals,” creatures who can’t not worship and who are fundamentally formed by worship practices. The reason such liturgies are so formative is precisely because it is these liturgies, whether Christian or “secular,” that shape what we love. And we are what we love.

In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith argues that if we want to educate our students holistically, we must consider their hearts, not just their minds. The classroom operates as a cultural liturgy, something analogous to the church’s liturgy, and this order of worship concerns what we love, not just what we know. If I want my students to desire God’s kingdom, I must attend to their spiritual formation, not just the class’s information that I want them to learn. God’s kingdom is a matter of the heart, not just the head, and the path to our hearts is through our bodies. When I read this book in 2012, I realized that, if I looked at muted video footage of my classroom sessions, I would see static bodies. True, I varied the kinds of intellectual exercises my students performed. Still, while we weren’t doing one task for all fifty or seventy-five minutes, my students’ bodies remained in the same position. The problem wasn’t necessarily that I had failed to incorporate something like performative dancing into my literature classes. It was that I hadn’t considered my students’ bodies at all.

So while at Charleston Southern, I introduced what I called a Daily Worksheet, an order of worship for each class. Students received the sheet at the beginning of each class session. On it, they could find an outline of what we would go over that day with space for notetaking and in-class practice. I patterned my class organization on church liturgy. We would begin by standing together and reciting a passage from the text we were investigating that day. We would end class by standing so I could give students a benediction. My blessing would take the form of a basic summary of what we had learned that day, along with a preview of what they could expect the next time they met. My classroom lectures, such as they were, were equivalent to the sermon and received the same amount of proportionate space in the whole service. I modeled classroom discussion on the passing of the peace. I provided time before and after the “sermon” for private reflection.

The model wasn’t perfect, and I wasn’t a stickler for replicating every jot and tittle of the ecclesiastical liturgy. However, I found that this approach had some obvious benefits.

It made me more self-conscious about the structure of my teaching sessions. I wasn’t going to add or eliminate different exercises without thinking about their liturgical ramifications. I realized that reading and writing were deeply spiritual practices. One of my jobs was to get my students to see the spiritual import of what they were doing in a rhetoric and composition class. My methods were inoculations against the temptations of other cultural liturgies. I was trying to habituate them to see reading and writing as forms of worship.

Additionally, the approach forced me to be more transparent with students. Every single time we met, students would get my lesson plan. They could see what I expected to cover that day. You would be lost if you went to a church with a strong liturgy but received no bulletin or order of worship. The printed liturgy provides a covenant for the service. I saw the benefits of this intentional expectation-setting practice in my teaching. Students may or may not like what we had planned for the day, but they appreciated that I had thought about what we were going to do and that they could see it in front of them.

But when I moved to Southern Wesleyan, I had a chance to think about what did and didn’t work about my approach. As I looked over the liturgical shape of my class, I realized that thanksgiving was a vital part of worship to which I was not attending.

Scripture is clear about the necessity of thanksgiving: “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” writes St. Paul in I Thessalonians. The liturgy encouraged thanksgiving as well. Whether through the giving of tithes and offerings or the corporate response to the day’s scripture reading— “Thanks be to God”—thanksgiving was part of how liturgy shapes us to desire God’s kingdom.

I realized that I wanted to begin each class session with gratitude and merge a corporate practice with individual reflection.

I grew up in a charismatic tradition where the liturgy was anathema because it quenched the spirit. Worship was dramatic and spontaneous, not programmatic. I silently absorbed the idea that you worshipped God because you felt like doing it. The expectation was that you would always feel like doing it, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong.  I had a vague sense of the practices involved in this passionate worship: reading the Bible, prayer, singing, and serving others.

In hindsight, however, I can see how even that charismatic church had priming techniques. As a church orchestra member, I had to show up forty-five minutes before service to spend time in the prayer room. Once there, I was supposed to pray out loud whether I felt like it or not. You can probably guess that there were not many Sunday nights when I felt like it. Still, the commitment to showing up and starting with prayer would inevitably affect my saxophone playing.

Worship is, as Romans 12:1 says, our reasonable service, not the service we render based on our affections. God is not more or less worthy of praise because I feel like worshipping him. He always deserves my worship, and in particular, he deserves my thanks.

Students hold a similar view about reading and writing. They think that something is wrong with them if they sit down to work through their assigned reading or pound out a rough draft and they don’t feel like doing the work. They wait to feel inspired, and if that feeling never comes, they figure that they’re just not born readers or writers. If they were to wait to complete their assignments until they felt like it, they would never do it.

The truth is, of course, that the feeling of writer’s block—the real sense that you have things you want to say, but you can’t get them out on the page—is what practiced writers call the experience of writing. The difference is that when confronted with that feeling, practiced writers keep going while amateurs stop. The experiences of flow we achieve in reading and writing are exceptional, not expected.

In teaching reading and writing, I must help my students form good habits that work even when they don’t feel like doing work. The gratitude habit gives us an easy way to transition into that deep work mindset. We begin with worship, by offering thanks to God whether we feel like it at the moment or not.

The practice is highly repeatable. We follow the same routine every class. I may provide more or less guidance for a particular section of the practice. For instance, I gave more instructions to you today than I would for a class that I’ve been teaching for two months. Still, students can rest assured that we’ll do this same ritual every time we meet and that the ritual is one they can repeat before they do work outside the class. I don’t take a class vote to see whether or not students feel grateful before deciding whether or not to go through the exercise. I know there are things for us to be thankful for, whether we feel like it or not, so we give thanks.

Next, it means our classroom practices are rooted in scripture. I purposefully invoke the theological concept of grace by asking students to start the practice by thinking of something God has given them that they did not have to earn. The ultimate example of this gracious gift is salvation, not just our physical existence but our renewed spiritual lives in Christ.

In my gratitude practice, I allude to Psalm 100, the song that tells us to enter the Lord’s gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Verse 3 begins, “Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” which I allude to when I call God “[t]he one who gave you your heart…” I also directly invoke James 1:17, which says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” This verse asks students to connect their gratitude for their significant other or family member with God.

Finally, my directions point them to their physical life through their heart, something I took from Tony Robbins’s practice. Robbins’s point was a profound one, so deep in fact that I had not been conscious of it. In his book A Peculiar People, Rodney Clapp writes, “The grace of God is not something we naturally recognize. It is not a theory pieced together from naturally observed phenomena. It is instead the result of God’s reaching out to us in mercy.” I take Clapp to mean that being able to recognize God’s gifts is itself an act of grace. We must train ourselves to see obvious blessings.

The practice gives students a place where their body, mind, heart, and soul can meet. I want students to begin tapping into their emotions. I want them to leave the exercise, having awakened their feelings by dwelling on a person they care for and an activity they love.

I turn now to psychology. As I mentioned at the paper’s beginning, I did not come to this practice through peer-reviewed research. I came to it through Tony Robbins.

I read more personal development books than your average English professor. I could give you key quotations from Steven Pressfield and Zig Ziglar that have affected my life. I could talk to you about what I’ve learned from James Clear and Tim Ferriss. I could tell you why I think every academic should be reading Seth Godin. I own the Tony Robbins infomercial staple Personal Power series. I’ve read Steven Covey and David Allen. I’ve got thoughts on Matt Perman’s What’s Best Next?, a Getting Things Done book for the Christian productivity crowd. I’ve recently enjoyed Cal Newport’s books—So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. These authors and content producers have been vital in helping me navigate the pandemic landscape.

That is, I came to my gratitude practice with the mindset of a life hacker. I was drawn to the practice because it was easy and scripture mandated it. My personal experience confirmed its power.

The psychological explanation for gratitude made intuitive sense to me. Through Shawn Achor’s TedTalk and his associated book, The Happiness Advantage, I learned that gratitude encouraged happiness, which supported brain productivity. Achor’s core insight is that success does not lead to happiness. Instead, the brain works more effectively when it is positive rather than negative, neutral, or stressed. Happiness leads to success. When Achor gets to the million-dollar question, “How do you encourage happiness?”, gratitude is at the top of his list. Specifically, he recommends writing down three things you’re thankful for each day, citing Emmons and McCollough’s groundbreaking 2003 research.

The psychological research supporting gratitude is robust. First, it provides definitions for terms that, until now, I’ve used ambiguously. What, for instance, is the difference between gratitude and thankfulness? I’ve used them as synonyms. Are they? While the terms overlap, they are not the same.

Emmons and McCollough distinguish between the two this way: “Being grateful is a state. Thanking is an action.” Again, “personal gratitude deserves to be called thankfulness because it typically expresses itself in thanks given to the giver by the receiver of the gift. Transpersonal gratitude deserves to be called gratefulness, because it is typically the full response of a person to gratuitous belonging.” In being thankful, we encourage gratefulness. The research shows that the more we act thankful, the more we will feel grateful.

Furthermore, the research provides support for coupling specific actions with thankfulness. The most effective of these actions is called the gratitude visit. Participants write a thank you letter to someone and deliver it in person. The researchers sum up their conclusions this way: “Individuals who completed this activity reported large gains in happiness and reductions in depression up to one month later…To date, the Gratitude Visit remains the most powerful positive psychology intervention in terms of degree of change.” I want to highlight that the most powerful gratitude practice in volves writing. Researchers have started to encourage making specific gratitude interventions in the classroom, each involving writing. We need more research on gratitude in the higher education classroom and discipline-specific applications of gratitude practices. However, researchers have done enough work in schools to support further exploration. In short, gratitude makes a positive difference.

In figuring out how to apply this more general research, we find two categories of benefits: internal and external. When you are grateful, you experience “positive emotions more often, enjoy greater satisfaction with life and more hope, and experience less depression, anxiety, and envy.” But since thankfulness is about sharing your gratitude with someone else, we would expect gratitude to encourage an external or social benefit as well. That’s precisely what we find. Bono, Krakauer, and Froh sum up the research this way: “The expression of gratitude increases the chances that a benefactor will respond benevolently again in the future, just as the expression of ingratitude can anger benefactors and discourage them from acting benevolently again.” Additionally, “gratitude serves as moral motive because its experience motivates recipients to then behave prosocially or inhibit destructive behavior toward a benefactor in return or toward others.”

As we think about implementing gratitude practices in our classrooms, which benefit should we emphasize: internal or external? Our answer to this question shows how faith integration can offer something that predominantly secular research cannot. When students thank God for their blessings, they understand that gratitude is not just about personal or social benefits. Instead, their gratitude is a natural response to the gift of being made in God’s image. God deserves our thanks and praise. Our response has obvious internal and external benefits, but it’s also a moral imperative. We do it because it’s right. It’s another act of grace that God has designed this necessary spiritual exercise to benefit us intellectually, emotionally, and socially as well.

When I introduced this practice into my classes, I thought it would practically affect my students’ moods and their ability to conceptualize concrete details. I didn’t consider how physical the exercise was. By asking students to put their hands on their hearts, I implicitly reminded them about their bodies. Rhetoric and composition, indeed all of education, involve the body and mind. My students weren’t coming to class to have me pour information into their heads. They were learning that the road to their heads was through their hearts.

The most concrete way I experienced the spiritual effect of this practice was through what it allowed me to start doing in class: pray. Despite my desire to present the liturgy in the classroom, I had never been able to find a way to pray in the class without it seeming awkward. I would say a prayer for students before an exam. I would also offer a special petition for a sick student or an urgent situation at the university. Still, I never figured out when or how to pray regularly as part of the class session. On my first day in a Southern Wesleyan classroom, as I walked my students through the gratitude exercise, I realized that the session begged for a prayerful conclusion. I had unwittingly discovered a way to pray before every class. Of course, my prayer began with thanks. Then I could ask God for help in making the time we had together valuable for the students and that our time together would train our hearts for kingdom work. I consistently pray, “Take what these students learn today and, with it, help them to better love you and others.” The gratitude practice occasioned a more traditional spiritual discipline. This is one reason my faith integration scores at SWU are consistently high. Students notice.

Finally, the research I discovered in preparing for this workshop inspired me to end the semester with a gratitude visit assignment. Students have to send a thank-you email to a SWU staff member or professor and send me a copy of the note. Thus far, I’ve seen notes written to math professors, freshman seminar instructors, chapel credit coordinators, and even the cafeteria head. The assignment brought together topics we had dealt with all semester: audience awareness, email etiquette, rhetorical memorability, and spiritual discipline. The practice has helped me say thank you to my students and colleagues more often. I’m thankful for having had the opportunity to share what I’ve learned with you this morning.

I’d love to hear from you now. Do you do anything similar in your classes? How do you apply the benefits of gratitude to your particular disciplines? Is there anything I can clarify?