Her world ended in the 10 days she was in the hospital with her newborn daughter, Tamar, Dorothy Day wrote a little dramatically many years later. 

“If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt more the exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms,” she wrote in the preface to her book Therese, a biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

This feeling led her to God and thence to the Catholic Church. “Such a great feeling of happiness and joy filled me that I was hungry for Someone to thank, to love, even to worship, for so great a good that had been bestowed upon me. That tiny child was not enough to contain my love, nor could the father, though my heart was warm with love for both.”

She described the feeling this way in her autobiography The Long Loneliness: 

The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.

Many conversions begin with gratitude like Day’s for gifts that feel like gifts even to people who don’t yet believe in a divine gift-giver. Their gratitude gives them either a hint or a recognition of transcendence. It points them to God and makes belief easier.

The gifts may also feel like gifts to those, probably more numerous, who believe in a vague way in God, who created the world we have and seems to have something to do with it now. They see God more as a force than a person, but feeling gratitude and wanting to thank someone, they may come to see that the force must be a person, a gift-giver rather than an impersonal provider.

Chesterton’s Gratitude

G.K. Chesterton also came to Christianity and eventually the Church through being grateful for the world. He felt gratitude long before he became a Christian. The idea of “taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted” was, he wrote about a year before he died, “the chief idea of my life.” If he were ever to be canonized, he should be made the patron saint of gratitude.

“The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom,” he wrote about his youth in his great book Orthodoxy, written in 1908 when he’d become a conscious Christian, though apparently an unobservant Anglican. (He wouldn’t enter the Catholic Church until 1922.) 

“Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets,” he wrote. “Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?”

Chesterton didn’t think this because he’d never had problems. In his youth, he’d suffered a deep despair and an encounter with the diabolical, when he felt the world meant nothing and life was not worth living. A renewal of his feeling of gratitude for the cosmos helped bring him out of it.

After telling his closest friend about it, he wrote him, “A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, ‘How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter.’ Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.” At about the same time he wrote a short poem called Evening:

Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?

In the course of his life, he wrote hundreds of pages like that.

The Thin Thread

At the end of his life, 27 years later, Chesterton wrote in his Autobiography that in the despairing days of his youth, he had held on “to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks.” It kept him alive, perhaps literally.

“I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered.” (Swinburne and Henley were agnostic poets, the first a pessimist and the second an optimist.)

He described in the Autobiography the theory of things he’d come up with for himself. “Even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting,” he said. “Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare.” 

He could not help but be thankful for that magnificence and could not help looking for the One to thank for it.

Many people felt the same sense without realizing it, if they felt “any sort of peace or confidence or repose, even unconscious confidence or repose,” he thought. The feeling should lead them to God, especially if they saw their beliefs didn’t justify the gratitude they felt. 

Chesterton saw this in the nature mystics of his day (whom we have with us today). “Even the nature-worship which Pagans have felt, even the nature-love which Pantheists have felt, ultimately depends as much on some implied purpose and positive good in things, as does the direct thanksgiving which Christians have felt,” he explained.

The pagans and pantheists believed the “fairytale” that nature is “a sort of fairy godmother.” 

He believed that fairy tales point to truths and can be the way people find their way to the explicit statement of the truth. In this case, “there can only be fairy godmothers because there are godmothers; and there can only be godmothers because there is God.”

Gratitude and Conversion

Gratitude for what you have and especially for the life and the universe you have, puts you on a slippery slope to belief, though not everyone slides all the way down the hill to Christian belief, much less to Christian belief in its fullest form in the Catholic Church. 

I don’t see how we can truly feel grateful without trying to find the person to thank. You feel a deep gratitude that demands expression and demands that you find someone, more particularly Someone, to thank for what you’ve been given, knowing you don’t deserve it. You will feel frustrated until you can say “Thank you” face-to-face. The search forces you to think more deeply about the world than you might have been inclined to.

That gratitude becomes a way of living, because you know that God never stops giving you the cosmos and all the good things in it. In All Is Grace: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, Day’s biographer William D. Miller explained that she understood that conversion “occurred when the person, out of gratitude for life and the hope of life fulfilled in eternity, turned to God and sought to do His will. The seeking went on as long as life — a continuous study, a continuous effort to enlighten understanding and then to will that understanding into the actions of one’s life.”

As St. Augustine might have said, our hearts are restless until we give our thanks to thee.