Gratitude in Life's Trenches: How to Experience the Good Life . . . Even When Everything Is Going Wr

Modern pop Christianity too often deals with suffering through cotton-candy forms of denial. Orthodox Christianity, by contrast, sees that suffering can be for our own salvation—but only if we accept it in a Christian way. Robin Phillips uses Scripture, Orthodox teaching, and stories from everyday life to show how we can not only carry our crosses, but also be made holy by them. Phillips has a gift for making profound wisdom accessible to a wide readership. This book will open closed minds, gladden weary hearts and change people’s lives.

—Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative and author of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents Robin Phillips is a holistic thinker who takes the gems of truth from neuroscience, psychology, sociology and theology to show how to experience the good life. His book is honest and accessible to everyone. This is a book that can change hearts and lives.

—Bishop John, Antiochian Orthodox Bishop of Worcester and New England Perhaps the best way to describe this intriguing and original book is by borrowing the familiar format of an old joke: “A theologian, a monk, a psychologist, and a neuroscientist went into a bar.” Would they have anything to say to each other? Phillips thinks so, based upon a proficient and well-researched familiarity with each interlocutor. He provides an eavesdropped account of the rousing conversation that could be had. But don’t they each speak in their own exclusive and unintelligible language game? Yes, admittedly so, but Phillips proposes two mitigating factors. First, although the jargons are multiple, the subject is singular. They are dealing with one human person, in soul and body, and the universal virtues that make for happiness. Second, this book explores the linkage between theoria and praxis. Theory

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without practice bears no subjective fruit (a dilemma the first two face), and practice without theory lacks objective purpose (a dilemma the second two face). This is therefore not your ordinary self-help book because we are not being told to simply help ourselves, rather we are guided to a long-stemmed tradition, rooted in Scripture and verified by saintly ascetics. Phillips puts the empirical sciences in the service of Christian revelation, making spirituality practicable.

—David W. Fagerberg, professor of theology, University of Notre Dame, author of Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology Robin Phillips has offered a clear and orderly consideration of what it means to be a real human being and live the so-called “good life.” This is a book of testimonies brought together with helpful questions for reflection, presented in a refreshing way to encourage readers to awaken to the value of life-changing gratefulness to God, even without what contemporary advertisements conspire to convince us are essential for happiness. At the heart of the book is the great paradox of Christianity: “We find our true self, not by grasping good things for ourselves, but by giving our self away (Luke 9:24).” Phillips has assembled a diverse group of experienced strugglers, from the ancient voices of St. John Chrysostom and Julian of Norwich to modern witnesses like Mother Theresa, St. Silouan the Athonite, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Viktor Frankl, C. S. Lewis and Nick Vujicic, along with a bevy of contemporary literary figures. They point us toward the deep mystery of God to be found beyond the obvious signposts of pleasure and pain, and mindless avoidance of suffering and loss. What is to be found on that less travelled road? Gratefulness to the God who encounters us in the places we most fear He is absent.

—Rev. Dn. Stephen Muse, Ph.D., pastoral psychotherapist, author of When Hearts Become Flame, Being Bread, and Treasure in Earthen Vessels

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Drawing upon a vast array of sources, both contemporary and through the centuries, Robin Phillips has gifted us with a brilliant guideline for human flourishing, providing much practical guidance for making real in our lives St. Paul’s axiom: “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Tim. 6:6). May this book help bring many to a greater verve for living in the endless grace of our Lord, no matter what our surrounding circumstances may be.

—Dr. David C. Ford, professor of church history, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary, and author of Women & Men in the Early Church: The Vision of St. John Chrysostom In this book, Robin provides well-researched best practices for being overcomers rather than victims. Through these strategies, we can lean into life, manage our difficulties, develop our emotional muscles, and enhance our personal and collective meaning. For Christians, there is an additional Source of assistance, help, comfort, and peace, and Robin reminds us of what this Source offers, and how we can intimately incorporate this Person into our daily living. Robin is honest and vulnerable about his own journey, and shares how he has incorporated these practices into his own life when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. He has integrated truths from psychology, neuroscience, and Christianity into a holistic view of how we can live our lives with hope and victory, regardless of our challenges.

—Dr. Graham Taylor, clinical psychologist, founder of the Taylor study method, chief learning officer of Triad Behavioral Health, and host of Triad’s Behavioral Health Today podcast Gratitude in Life’s Trenches is a book I am excited to share with my entire community! Robin Phillips has brought us a timely, not to mention timeless, guide on finding true joy in our lives. I knew this was the perfect book when he said “I came to see that the good life

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is about finding a type of joy that only comes when we give up the pursuit of happiness and pursue meaning instead.” Please purchase this book not only for yourself, but also for the wisdom it will give you when ministering to others who may come to you in pain. I for one cannot wait for its official release!

—Cynthia Damaskos, Holistic Christian Life/Filled With Less Gratitude is his grand theme, but that only begins to describe Robin Phillips’ definitive “self-help” book for Christians. In Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, Phillips has re-invented the genre, weaving seamlessly into his narrative threads seldom found together: Holy Scripture, the Church Fathers, the latest psychological research, studies in neurophysiology, and the wisdom of Christian monks and mystics. Phillips blends anecdote and analysis to produce a narrative that is daring, honest, and relevant—daring in the way he demonstrates to an unbelieving world how the message of the Cross heals us and our relationships, honest in the way he bares himself and leans into his own discomfort (to borrow his phrase), and relevant in the way he offers creative and useful suggestions for finding the right path and staying on it. This book should become a staple of the classical curriculum, and should be read by every young Christian before heading off to college.

—David V. Hicks, author of Norms & Nobility Who among us has not, at one time or another, found themselves trapped in the dark, disorienting trenches of life? When we are at our lowest, what we most long for is not an end to pain, but a lens to help us locate meaning from within it. Like a luminous beacon, Robin Phillips’s Gratitude in Life’s Trenches guides travelers lost on the seas of stress, weariness, chronic toxic thinking, and despondency back to the harbor of gratitude and the peace only Christ offers. By integrating

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contemporary therapeutic concepts including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and logotherapy with historical Christian disciplines like the Jesus Prayer and sacramental living, Phillips affords readers a time-honored toolbox of granular skills and strategies that help reel the restless mind back into the heart in prayer. This book will not change your life, rather it will help change your perspective on the struggles in that life, which (as Phillips, too, has learned) is of infinitely greater value. —Nicole M. Roccas, Ph.D., author of Time and Despondency: Regaining the Present in Faith and Life Gratitude is difficult in a real, broken human life and this is a book that does not gloss over the difficulties. Phillips shows that the classical Christian response of gratitude remains helpful in finding meaning and even happiness. This is a helpful book without falling into bromides. —Dr. John Mark Reynolds, President, The Saint Constantine School

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GRATITUDE in LIFE’S TRENCHES How to Experience the Good Life Even When Every thing Is Going Wrong

Robin Phillips

ANCIENT FAITH PUBLISHING CHESTERTON, INDIANA

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Gratitude in Life’s Trenches: How to Experience the Good Life Even When Everything Is Going Wrong Copyright ©2020 Robin Phillips All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

Published by: Ancient Faith Publishing A Division of Ancient Faith Ministries P.O. Box 748 Chesterton, IN 46304 Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version, ©️ 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Calligraphy and cartoons courtesy of S. Belschner.

ISBN: 978-1-944967-80-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941703 Printed in the United States of America

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For my parents, Michael and Judy Phillips

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Contents Foreword by Cherie Calbom

vii

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

11

Chapter 2: Why It’s Okay to Be You

33

Chapter 3: Grateful for the Smallest of Mercies

55

Chapter 4: What Are You Paying Attention To?

79

Chapter 5: How to Befriend Your Feelings

107

Chapter 6: Eliminate the Thinking Errors That Hold You Back 129 Chapter 7: The Life-Changing Magic of Reframing

165

Chapter 8: The Virtue of Vulnerability

185

Chapter 9: Don’t Waste Your Pain

217

Chapter 10: Struggle to Find Your True Self

247

Chapter 11: How to Cultivate a Sacramental Imagination

273

About the Author

305

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Introduction

R

uth is a friend of mine who is suffering from cystic fibrosis.

She is gradually losing her ability to breathe as her lungs become filled with fluid. When she was twenty-eight years old, Ruth shared on Instagram that one of her hardest struggles was not being able to feel useful. She went on to explain that when she is so worn out that she has to be back in bed by five pm, and when her body is so weak that she can’t even take off her own jeans without help, it’s easy to start thinking her life isn’t productive—even that it lacks value.

Few of us struggle with a chronic disability like cystic fibrosis, but I’m guessing we can all relate to Ruth’s internal struggle. Ask yourself this question: How many times have I measured my own value and selfworth by how much I’m able to get done, or by other external measures such as what other people think of me?

The problem with assessing our worth by external measures is that we always fall short. We may always feel an inner void that comes from never having accomplished enough or never having merited enough approval from others.

Sometimes the Lord lets us come to the end of our own resources precisely so that we can slow down and realize, It’s okay to be me; it’s okay to be limited; it’s even okay to be weak and vulnerable. Not only are these conditions okay, but they are precisely the things God uses to accomplish His redemptive purposes in and through us. It is in our weakness that God’s love, power, and promises can begin to manifest

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gratitude in life’s trenches within us. This brings us back to my friend Ruth and the rest of what she shared on Instagram: It’s one of the hardest lessons God is teaching me through CF: His view of useful and worthwhile is different to my own. He’s given me a body that needs a lot of rest and can’t do a lot of ‘normal’ things and yet all His promises count for me as well. I’m tempted to think that I can be worthwhile despite my weakness, yet He tells me I can be worthwhile even in my weakest moments. How? Because His power is made perfect in weakness.

It’s more obvious to me than most—I can’t live life by myself. I mean, half the time I can’t even get my own jeans off at the end of the day. Being weak makes me see my need. And when I see my need, He is there to fill it. Father, Saviour, Breath-giver. Comforter. Protector.

Burden-bearer.

Ruth’s life is not enviable, and yet she has reached a spiritual state most of us never attain. The reality she describes—utter and complete reliance on God in the face of weakness—is a reality we can all experience, even without a debilitating illness. Although Christ is always there to carry our burdens, to protect and comfort us, we often do not fully understand this until we experience periods of suffering.

Sometimes the Lord allows moments, seasons, or even lifetimes of suffering precisely so that we stop depending on ourselves and turn to Him. Through the crosses of our lives, the Lord teaches us that our value is not based on how productive we are, how popular we are, how pretty or handsome we are, or how useful we are to others.

Rather, each one of us has value based on who we are as a unique creation of God. Pain is never okay. However, the message of the cross is that pain can be transformative. Through the crosses of our life, the Lord shows us that He can work something beautiful out of our pain and brokenness. As the Jewish Catholic writer Léon Bloy (1846–1917) beautifully

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Introduction

commented, “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.”1 I never fully understood this principle until 2016, when I was exposed to an ancient Japanese art form known as kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with a material mixed with powdered gold or silver. Unlike other repair methods that attempt to disguise the cracks, kintsugi illuminates them, embracing the brokenness as part of the object’s history. When broken pottery is subjected to this technique, it actually becomes more beautiful than pottery that was never shattered in the first place.

Often our lives are like that. As much as we might wish for God to heal us, to remove our brokenness, or to fix the circumstances that cause us grief, He sometimes does something far better: He picks up the broken things of our lives and transforms them into something beautiful.

When we find ourselves facing sorrow, confusion, loneliness, vulnerability, and heartache, it takes a lot of childlike faith to believe the Master Artist is beautifying the breaks and shatterings of our life. It is often easier to expect God to offer a “silver-bullet” solution that will eradicate the effects of brokenness from our lives. It takes a lot of faith to believe that the Lord is using us, not in spite of our brokenness, but precisely because of it.

There is no end of self-help books that offer the allure of silver-bullet solutions to our problems. Some of these books offer an escapist path to well-being, on the principle that the pain we are feeling isn’t really that bad after all. Other approaches encourage people to live in a state of denial, as if we could feel better simply by affirming that everything is fine. Still other authors offer the false hope that by following a set of techniques, we can realize our dreams and find fulfillment. Our entitlement culture offers very little to comfort those who are unable to realize their dreams or who

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gratitude in life’s trenches find themselves confronted with the fragility and brokenness that is integral to being human.

I wrote this book for the person who has grown tired of these artificial approaches. I wrote this book to show that it is possible to live a good life in the midst of the pain, messiness, and frailty of real life.

This book grew out of my own struggles with these important questions. While researching for my earlier book, Saints and Scoundrels (2011), I became fascinated by the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who lost his life in the struggle against Hitler.2 My father had introduced me to Bonhoeffer years earlier while he was working on his WWII novel The Eleventh Hour (1993).3 After returning from Germany on a research trip, he acquired an extensive collection of Bonhoeffer’s books, and I asked him if I could borrow his Bonhoeffer library.

As I began devouring Bonhoeffer’s corpus, I was intrigued by his continual attitude of gratefulness. How is it, I wondered, that Bonhoeffer could be so thankful to God in the midst of war, hardship, and imprisonment? By contrast, those of us living in safety and comfort find things to grumble and complain about every day. Bonhoeffer’s life raised the same question as the example of my friend Ruth, a woman of great inner peace and contentment despite a level of outward suffering that few of us can comprehend. What was their secret?

I suspected the answer had something to do with attitude in general, and an attitude of gratefulness in particular. I continued pondering these questions after the publication of Saints and Scoundrels, with Bonhoeffer as a key conversation partner.

From 2012 to 2017 I took a job helping would-be psychologists pass the licensure exam. Working in the psychology industry gave me the opportunity to delve deeper into the cognitive, psychological, and physiological benefits of gratitude. Encouraged by a body of empirical research showing that gratitude can mitigate the impact of negative

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Introduction

emotions, I began promoting gratitude as a powerful instrument for relieving suffering, preventing sadness, and increasing happiness.

But still, something was missing from my perspective. I tended to treat gratitude like a happiness pill people could apply whenever they got the blues. It was almost as if I imagined gratitude offered us a tool for thinking ourselves out of pain. Although I still believe that gratitude and correct thinking have enormous power to make us more resilient to life’s difficulties (chapters 3, 6, and 7), the problem was that I still envisioned the good life in terms of personal happiness.

The Lord used a particularly difficult set of circumstances to force me to rethink this happiness-based vision of the good life. In the summer of 2015, I got news that my doctoral dissertation had been rejected. This blow coincided with a number of other crushing events that put my professional, personal, and financial life into a state of freefall. As a result, I found myself facing high levels of confusion, sorrow, and pain. Psychologically, I felt as if I had been thrown into the trenches.

In the midst of these difficulties, I returned to some of the lessons I had learned from Bonhoeffer. I also began reading some of the devotional literature written by the early Church Fathers and discussing these texts with different pastors, scholars, psychologists, monks, seminary professors, and clergy. Through these books and conversations, I began to catch a glimpse of a much fuller orientation toward the good life.

It comes back to the principle of kintsugi: God wants to reach us in our suffering as well as in our joy, in our negative moments as well as our positive, in our experiences in the trenches as well as on the mountaintops. And even when life is so difficult that we don’t have the energy to count our blessings, the Lord is still there to meet us in our fragility and pain. My friend Ruth once described this by using the language of “bright sadness,” adding that “it’s OK to be sad and find

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gratitude in life’s trenches things difficult. We like to fix people and make them happy again. But life isn’t like that.”4 Gradually, I began to see that God wants to meet you and me right where we are, in the trenches—in real life. I began to understand the message found in so many of the Psalms, namely that vulnerability and weakness play an integral part in the beautiful story God is writing in our lives. Elder Alexander of Gethsemane captured this mystery when he commented that “the amount of suffering that the soul can accommodate is also how much it can accommodate the grace of God.”5 The vision of the good life that began to emerge from these studies was much more complex than I had previously understood. It also involved numerous paradoxes. I came to see that the good life is about finding a type of joy that comes only when we give up the pursuit of happiness and pursue meaning instead (chapter 1). The good life is about learning to be grateful in the midst of life’s problems (chapters 1, 3, and 7), but it is also about learning to be present with God when we are too distressed to see past those problems (chapters 8 and 9).

The good life is about improving our lives through baby steps and good habits—including making incremental strides to increase attentiveness (chapter 4) and right thinking patterns (chapter 6 and 7)—but it is also about learning to simply accept ourselves for who we are right now (chapter 2).

The good life is about being able to look after our needs with proper self-care (chapter 2 and 9), but it is also about learning to forget about ourselves and live for others (chapter 10). The good life is about learning to get in touch with our feelings (chapter 5), but it is also about learning to see our feelings in perspective and not get swept away by them (chapters 6 and 7). The good life is about serving God by being weak for Him instead of being strong, through being poor rather than rich, and by attempting small things for Him instead of great things

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Introduction

(chapters 5, 8, and 9). Above all, the good life is about allowing God to meet us exactly where we are, in the messiness, brokenness, and pain of the present moment. Sometimes we need to commit the ultimate heresy of our feel-good culture and actually lean into the pain we would rather be struggling against (chapters 5, 8, 9, and 11).

Finally, a disclaimer may be helpful, especially for my Orthodox Christian readers. In 2013, my family joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. The spirituality and theology we encountered in Orthodoxy, rooted in ancient expressions of Christian piety, resonated with something deep within us. At the time of this transition, I was writing for clients about “secular” matters while occasionally publishing Christian material in outlets like the Colson Center and Touchstone Magazine.

After our move to Orthodoxy, well-meaning church friends were disappointed that I did not start writing directly about Eastern Orthodox Christianity. When I did make occasional forays into Orthodox spirituality with the blessing of my priest, I received pushback from critics on the other side, who were concerned that I was allegedly setting myself up as a teacher. “Stay in your lane and write about matters of this world,” they said, “and leave others to write about the faith.”

My own inclinations generally aligned with these critics, since I have always considered myself a baby in the faith, a spiritual seeker rather than someone with sufficient wisdom to venture confidently into spiritual waters. Accordingly, when I began the present book, I originally intended to simply address issues of psychology and neuro­ science without reference to my Christian faith. Yet I quickly found that it was impossible to address any of these issues, let alone questions about suffering and the good life, independently of a theological reference point.

One reason for this difficulty is that all truth—even the truth we misleadingly refer to as “secular”—finds its legitimacy in Jesus Christ; consequently, if we delve deep in any field of human knowledge,

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gratitude in life’s trenches including those fields that are ostensibly nonreligious, we will necessarily find them intersecting with theology. As various thinkers from Alexander Schmemann to John Milbank have shown, the concept of the “secular” as a freestanding realm where questions can be discussed independently of religion is a comparatively modern invention lacking coherence.

For these and other reasons, I found it increasingly difficult to conceal the theological reference points of my thinking as this project progressed. But while the final product is unabashedly theological, I would caution my readers against looking to me as an authority on the faith. This, finally, is the disclaimer I promised earlier. I am neither a theologian nor a spiritual teacher. Rather, I am simply a fellow student trying to pass on what I have learned from men and women much more advanced in the faith than myself. All the spiritual teaching in this work is derived either from the Church Fathers or from teachings I have been blessed to receive from the clergy in my life. At the same time, please be assured that any errors are entirely my own.

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Introduction

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Léon Bloy, cited in Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 1951), 6.

Robin Phillips, Saints and Scoundrels (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2011).

Michael R. Phillips, The Eleventh Hour: The Secret of the Rose # 1 (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993).

Ruth cited in Sharon Barnard, “Living with a Life-Limiting Illness,” Woman Alive, March 13, 2018, www.womanalive.co.uk/stories/view?articleid=2780, accessed March 15, 2020.

Elder Alexander of Gethsemane, cited in Stephen Muse, James Burg, and Halina Woroncow, eds., Pain, Suffering and Resilience: Orthodox Christian Perspectives (Alhambra, CA: St. Sebastian Orthodox Press, 2018), 11.

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Chapter 1: Questions for Reflection 1. For thousands of years, philosophers have discussed the elements that go into “the good life.” What does “the good life” mean to you?

2. If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?

3. Are the things you would like to change about your life things you can control, or are they matters that depend on other people or circumstances outside your control?

4. Do you know someone who has a positive outlook on life? If so, what are some reasons for this person’s positive approach?

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Chapter 1

The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning Every time that a man finds that his heart is troubled, that he is not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow—a resurrection out of the night of troubled thoughts into the gladness of the truth. For the truth is, and ever was, and ever must be, gladness, however much the souls on which it shines may be obscured by the clouds of sorrow, troubled by the thunders of fear, or shot through with the lightnings of pain.

—George MacDonald1

O

n July 21, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) was in the sick bay of the Tegel prison listening to Nazi radio.

A year earlier, the Lutheran minister had been sent to prison after the Gestapo discovered a financial irregularity arising from an operation to smuggle Jews into Switzerland. Though a prisoner of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer knew he was safe as long as the Nazis did not discover the full extent of his seditious activities. He also knew that longlaid plans to assassinate Adolf Hitler had almost come to fruition.

Any day he hoped to receive word that Hitler had been killed.

The hope of assassinating Hitler went beyond merely wanting to end the war. The world needed to see that there was a Germany

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gratitude in life’s trenches independent of the Nazis. They needed to see that thousands of Germans were appalled by Hitler’s atrocities.

Careful plans had been laid for an alternative government that would be ready immediately to assume power and negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies. Through this plan, the conspirators hoped to avoid the inevitable destruction that would accompany an Allied invasion. Bonhoeffer played an important role in these plans. While pretending to work and travel on behalf of the German military intelligence organization known as the Abwehr (who thought he was posing as a pastor), Bonhoeffer had actually been reaching out to the British government (unsuccessfully) on behalf of the conspirators.

By the time the assassination (known as “the 20 July plot”) was attempted, all the Nazis knew about Bonhoeffer was that he had conspired to rescue Jews and that he had used his role in the Abwehr to advance the pastoral agendas of his church. But on July 21, as Bonhoeffer listened to the prison radio, his heart must have sunk as he realized the game was up. The radio announced that Hitler had survived an assassination attempt the previous day.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a Roman Catholic and a secret opponent of the Führer, had successfully deployed a bomb in a conference meeting at Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. The bomb, which had been smuggled into the meeting in a briefcase, exploded as planned shortly after the colonel quietly excused himself from the room. Even though four people were killed by the blast, Hitler received only minor bruising.

No doubt this news dealt Bonhoeffer a heavy blow. Not only did it mean that the war would now be drawn out to its destructive finale, but it virtually guaranteed that Bonhoeffer’s own involvement in the resistance would be discovered. As the conspirators were rounded up one by one and tortured, it was only a matter of time before the trail of information would lead back to him.

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

At the end of the chapter we’ll return to Bonhoeffer and see how he reacted to this devastating news.

The Power of At titude In the autumn of 2016, I received an invitation to speak at a conference for members of the caring professions. The conference—attended by doctors, nurses, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, hospital and army chaplains, marriage and family therapists, and students— was on the topic of pain and suffering. The conference organizers asked me to give a seminar on the topic “Gratitude during Times of Suffering,” and my marching orders were clear: explain how it’s possible to remain thankful in the midst of suffering.

I didn’t tell the conference organizers, but I’ve never been particularly good at being thankful when things go wrong. If I have trouble sleeping, I grumble the next day. If I don’t have enough money to buy something I want, I inwardly whine and complain about it. If I have a physical injury, everyone in my circle of friends is sure to know about it.

So expecting me to give a talk about practicing gratitude during times of suffering would be like asking John Wayne to dance Swan Lake.

To put it bluntly, I found my assignment daunting. How could I teach other professionals a lesson I had not mastered myself?

In the end I decided to study the people who had learned to be grateful in the midst of suffering and to see what lessons could be gleaned from their lives. Specifically, I decided to look at those who experienced the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi and communist regimes, yet somehow remained positive and thankful throughout.

What was their secret? And could their example help us to remain positive in the midst of the mild inconveniences that confront us every day?

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gratitude in life’s trenches

It turns out their secret wasn’t complicated at all. It really comes down to one thing: attitude.

I know, I know. You’ve already heard a hundred times that you need to maintain a positive attitude toward life. The self-help sections of the bookstores are filled with books essentially saying the same thing: Be positive! If you read enough self-help literature, you can sometimes come away with the impression that maintaining a positive attitude is easy, as if there were a switch we could suddenly turn on to have the right attitude. The catch is that when we try to practice a positive attitude and can’t, then we feel worse than we did in the first place.

Part of the problem is that the self-help gurus who promote the “just be positive” approach usually live comfortable lives, having achieved a measure of worldly success. By studying those who lived on the other end of the spectrum, in conditions of extreme misery, we can look past the tired clichés to strategies of real substance. When we do, we find that living the good life does indeed come down to attitude, but not in the way that is often supposed.

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

Two Secrets for Living the Good Life Part of the problem is that we have come to think about attitude in the wrong way. While reviewing the twentieth-century prison literature, I began to see that those who managed to keep a healthy attitude in the midst of Nazi and Stalinist death camps understood two secrets that those of us living in comfort and ease are often prone to overlook. These secrets are 1. The things we can control in our internal environment (the inside) are more fundamental to living the good life than the things we cannot control in our external environment (the outside).

2. Meaning, not happiness, is what enables us to live the good life.

Let’s spend some time unpacking these two points.

Inside versus Outside Our internal environment includes such things as our mindset, values, and core spiritual convictions. These are all things we have control over and which largely determine our attitude toward life. By contrast, our external environment consists of factors outside ourselves that we cannot always control: how other people treat us, what opportunities we have, what is happening in the world or in our immediate environment. To be sure, we can sometimes influence these external conditions by making wise choices, but more often than not, we cannot change what is happening around us.

It’s easy for us to assume that a positive attitude results from things working out for us in this realm of factors outside our control—our external environment. Often the changes we desire in the external realm are genuinely unselfish and good. For example, we may want our son or daughter to come to know the Lord, or we may wish that a relative would stop treating us unkindly, or that God would heal a

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gratitude in life’s trenches family member’s illness. Yet regardless of whether our desires are spiritual or selfish, the common assumption tends to be that the good life arises from things going well for us. The problem is that when we assume the good life is contingent on external factors, we set ourselves up for perpetual frustration and constant misery, since we are surrendering our well-being into the hands of other people and events beyond our control.

In days gone by, people never needed much reminding that most of what happened in the external world was outside their control.

The survival of our ancestors often depended on factors like the right weather, access to sufficient food sources, and so forth. The irony is that as we have come to exercise more control over the external world, we have surrendered control of our internal realm, supposing that our emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being also depends on what is happening around us. In the midst of our rapidly expanding ability to manipulate the world with technology, it is sometimes easy to forget that the things that matter most in life—the ingredients that go into the good life—are still completely independent of anything that can be manipulated in the external realm. Rather, peace and well-being are the results of our internal disposition.

In my research I found that some—not all, but some—of those who suffered under the communist and Nazi regimes understood the crucial importance of inner attitude. They understood that the things that matter most in life arise from the attitudes we carry in our hearts and minds, no matter what is happening around us. These attitudes include things like gratitude, peace, love, hope, and acceptance. Acceptance may be the most important attitude we can bring to challenging situations, so let’s dig deeper into it.

We often misunderstand acceptance, because we confuse it with the Stoic idea of passive resignation to fate (see chapter 8 for a critique of Stoicism). But the Christian virtue of acceptance involves actively

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

embracing God’s good plan for our lives and trusting His sovereignty no matter what. One of the best ways to understand acceptance is to consider its opposite. When we respond to physical or emotional pain with nonacceptance, the results are often the following: » » » »

suffering plus feeling stuck; suffering plus hitting out; suffering plus judgment against our pain; suffering plus being drawn into various pain narratives (e.g., “this will destroy me,” “in order to be fully me, I need this problem to go away,” “I can’t continue one more day like this,” “my life is worthless if I can’t ___.”)

By contrast, when we respond to pain with acceptance, the result is simply ordinary pain. The pain may be acute, but it is not amplified by the added suffering of unhealthy reactions to it.

Years ago my spiritual mentor, Fr. Tikhon, went on a hike with me and used an analogy to explain the difference between acceptance and nonacceptance. As we walked, Fr. Tikhon asked me to imagine someone in a dark prison. After some time in the prison, the horror of confinement and light deprivation causes the victim to begin experiencing extreme suffering.

Once I had firmly fixed that image in my mind, Fr. Tikhon asked me to imagine two scenarios. In one scenario, the suffering prisoner rages against his painful situation, banging his head against the door while screaming, “Let me out!” and “I can’t go on with this a minute longer!”

In Fr. Tikhon’s second scenario, the prisoner feels just as much pain but quietly sits on the floor, embracing the situation in which he finds himself.

In both cases, the quantity of pain is the same, but what is different is the quality it takes on. The person who is able to accept pain as

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gratitude in life’s trenches part of his experience can inwardly rise above it. It is unmixed by the suffering of feeling stuck, hitting out, judgment against the pain, or mental scripts about it.

At some point, acceptance may even transform itself into peace and gratitude. Many people bridge the gap from acceptance to gratitude by recognizing that everything within our earthly life, including the pain we endure, will be transformed and glorified as part of the new creation we will enjoy after resurrection. Indeed, when we get to heaven and look back on our pain, we may find that we actually would not have wished it any other way.

I was reminded of this eschatological perspective in March 2017 when I got an email from my friend in England David Van den Broek. David is the husband of Ruth, the woman I mentioned in the introduction who has been suffering all her life with cystic fibrosis.

David shared how his wife’s health had been declining, culminating in a nighttime drive to the hospital. As Ruth was getting into the car, overwhelmed with pain and suffering, she turned to David and paraphrased the words of Charles Spurgeon, the nineteenth-century English preacher: “Remember, if any circumstance would be better for us, then Divine Love would have put us there.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer also exemplified the move from acceptance into gratitude. While in Tegel prison in April 1943, he wrote to his brother-in-law, “we have been able to enjoy so many good things together that it would be almost presumptuous were we not also ready to accept hardship quietly, bravely—and also really gratefully.”2 During Christmas 1944, four months before his execution, Bonhoeffer maintained this same perspective when writing to his fiancée, Maria. Despite the suffering around him and the uncertainty about his own safety, he kept focused on the spiritual realm, noting, “I live in a great, unseen realm of whose real existence I’m in no doubt.” Then, assuring Maria that he was not unhappy, Bonhoeffer added, “Anyway,

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

what do happiness and unhappiness mean? They depend so little on circumstances and so much more on what goes on inside us.”3 Just think for a moment about those powerful words: Happiness depends so little on circumstances and so much more on what goes on inside us. Bonhoeffer understood that the Nazis could take away his job, his freedom, and his friends, family, and loved ones, and they could even take away his life. However, the one thing they could never take away was the attitude inside his heart. Bonhoeffer seemed to downplay his own happiness or unhappiness. This leads to the second point I gleaned from the prison literature: the pursuit of happiness (at least, in the modern sense of the term) is not what enables us to achieve the good life; far more important is pursuing a life of meaning.

The Will to Meaning Viktor Frankl (1905–97), an Austrian psychiatrist, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp in 1942 because of his Jewish pedigree. Later Frankl wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, describing his time in the death camps (including Auschwitz, where he was transferred in 1944). One of Frankl’s central insights was that a sense of meaning is more fundamental to mental and physical well-being than is happiness. Whereas unfavorable circumstances cut the prisoners off from happiness, an inner sense of meaning could never be taken away from one determined to cling to it. In many cases, external suffering helped increase the meaning in a person’s life.

But what did Frankl mean by meaning? Frankl showed that meaning always involves attitude and decision. In the death camps, some people realized a higher meaning in the choice to accept their suffering instead of escaping into a condition of numbness and passivity.

For others, spiritual freedom came in their refusal to give up hope, even when the likelihood of surviving the war seemed very slim. Some

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gratitude in life’s trenches attained meaning by choosing to practice gratitude, including thankfulness for little things we usually take for granted. Still others realized meaning in the decision to pour their last ounce of life into service to others.

Frankl saw that the ability to accept suffering with dignity and spiritual integrity, and to find a higher meaning in and through the confusion and agony, could determine whether a prisoner shriveled up and died or continued to live. Being able to tap into inner resources of meaning was even more predictive of whether a prisoner would survive than was his or her physical condition upon entering the camp.

Sensitive people of “a less hardy make-up” who possessed “a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom” often “seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.” 4 Frankl often quoted Nietzsche’s insight that “he who has a why to live can endure almost any how.”

The suffering in the death camps presented the prisoners with the same choice each of us faces when confronted with suffering. Will we revolt against our circumstances, or find ways to grow in and through the hardships to become richer, deeper, and more meaningful people?

Frankl saw that revolting against hardships could take the form of bitterness, or it could take the form of passivity, hopelessness, and emotional numbing. In all such cases, we miss the opportunity to grow deeper into a life of intense meaning. Only through meaning are we able to rise above what would otherwise be a hopeless situation.

The good life consists of such heroic attempts to embrace a life of meaning rather than the pursuit of personal happiness. In fact, a life of meaning often involves turning away from pursuing our own well-being for the sake of serving others. In one moving passage, Frankl told of those who, though starving to death, chose to give their last bits of precious bread to help others and thus made the ultimate sacrifice of voluntarily taking up their cross for the sake of another.

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

Through these acts of painful sacrifice, prisoners were able to add a deeper meaning to what would otherwise be a hopeless and purposeless situation.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. . . . In the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. . . .

The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. . . .

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. 5

Frankl was later able to use these insights in his work as a psychotherapist. He taught his patients that each of us has the power to bring meaning and purpose to our lives by the way we interpret the circumstances confronting us. The quality of our life depends, not on everything working out well for us, but on our “will to meaning”—the determination to find meaning, purpose, and significance through situations that might otherwise lead to hopelessness and depression.

Saint John Chrysostom expressed this insight when he observed that “it is certainly not in the nature of things, but in the will of man,

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gratitude in life’s trenches that our happiness naturally resides.”6 I think the Apostle Paul must have had something like this in mind when he encouraged the Corinthians to find positive meaning (which, for Paul, is always rooted in Jesus Christ) in and through the tribulations they encountered:

The quality of our life depends, not on everything working out well for us, but on our “will to meaning”— the determination to find meaning, purpose, and significance through situations that might otherwise lead to hopelessness and depression.

We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. (2 Cor. 4:8–11)

Meaning versus Happiness This “will to meaning” does not involve blind optimism, nor does it involve laying a sentimental gloss over the difficulties we face. On the contrary, Viktor Frankl followed in the footsteps of St. Paul in being very realistic about the sufferings he endured.

The will to meaning also does not involve pretending to be happy when we are not. Bonhoeffer was correct when he told Maria that we should not even concern ourselves with something as mercurial and transitory as our own personal happiness. In fact, when a person’s life is filled with meaning, he will sometimes turn away from pursuing happiness in order to aim at something higher. We see this

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The Power of Attitude and the Will to Meaning

in Bonhoeffer’s decision not to escape from prison when he had the opportunity, lest he inadvertently endanger members of his own family.7 The will to meaning is simply the pursuit of meaningful goals beyond a person’s own subjective happiness. Paradoxically, however, by living a life of meaning, especially when that meanIt is the very pursuit of ing is directed toward servhappiness that thwarts ing others, we increase our happiness. The more one opportunities for happiness makes happiness an aim, the more than if happiness had been our direct goal. Frankl more he misses the aim.* showed this in a manuscript —Viktor Frankl he wrote prior to his imprisonment and which he took with him into the first prison camp. In this work, titled The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Frankl argued that joy should never be an end in itself since joy arises as a by-product of a life directed to outward ends. Just before his transfer to Auschwitz, the manuscript was discovered and discarded by the authorities. After his release, Frankl reconstructed the book from memory. Listen to these powerful words from the book: Joy can never be an end in itself; in itself, as joy, cannot be purposed as a goal. How well Kierkegaard expressed this in his maxim that the door to happiness opens outward. Anyone who tries to push this door open thereby causes it to close still more. The man who is desperately anxious to be happy thereby cuts off his own path to happiness. Thus in the end all striving for happiness—for the supposed “ultimate” in human life—proves to be in itself impossible.8 *Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2000), 90.

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gratitude in life’s trenches During Frankl’s later career, he watched humanist psychology become the reigning orthodoxy in America, with its emphasis on concepts like self-actualization, personal fulfillment, and “finding yourself.” Frankl continually challenged the humanist movement by pointing out that only when we pursue meaning outside the self (and, in the process, forget about the self) can we actually find ourselves.

In a sequel to Man’s Search for Meaning titled Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Frankl articulated his basic point as follows: Just as self-actualization can be obtained only through a detour, through the fulfillment of meaning, so identity is available only through responsibility, through being responsible for the fulfillment of meaning. . . . Therefore man is originally characterized by his “search for meaning” rather than his “search for himself.” The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself. . . . Pleasure and happiness are by-products. Happiness must ensue. It cannot be pursued. It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness. The more one makes happiness an aim, the more he misses the aim.9

L ab Researchers Discover Lit tle-Known Secret about Happiness Recent laboratory research supports Frankl’s basic thesis that happiness is a by-product of meaningful ends other than the pursuit of happiness itself. The research even suggests that a life of ease—a life in which everything goes well for us in the external world—often blocks a person from achieving an inner sense of well-being.

Much of this research comes from the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who has directed a happiness laboratory at Harvard and has conducted numerous clinical experiments on the ingredients that

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