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Everyone likes to hear the words, “Thank you.” It is uplifting when someone directs gratitude your way. When you say these two short words, you are really saying, “You could have made a different choice, and yet the choice you made was in my best interest.”
You would never say “Thank you” to a brick. The brick didn’t make any such choice. A brick doesn’t make choices at all. The brick is a thing, or a what. You only say “Thank you” to a who. Never do you say “Thank it.”
There are a lot of secular people who are not atheists but who think of God in terms of being a what, a power such as electricity or the Force in the film Star Wars. Secular just means “worldly,” which means that one is concerned with what is fashionable. Like a coat or a dress or a pair of shoes, a secular theist might wear God like a thing, mostly when it is useful or fashionable, but not really thinking of God as a who.
Many of these same people have an inclination to want to be grateful for their lives. You see well-intentioned bumper stickers or slogans such as “Have an Attitude of Gratitude” or “Be Thankful.” But the truth is: if you think of God as a what, in other words “a thing,” and you know that things don’t make choices, then in what general sense could you be considered “Grateful?”
On the other hand, if a person thinks of God (the Divine, the Spirit, or whatever name he or she might use) to have the qualities of a who, then gratitude can have a proper object onto which to cling. And it opens up a whole new realm of the heart those times when you are all by yourself and say “Thank you” out loud.
Perhaps these many thoughtful people do, in fact, have an “attitude of gratitude,” but they could benefit from thinking the whole thing through a little more, and that deep down they may unconsciously be thanking our Personal God without even being aware of it.
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