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If we are surrounded by goodness and take goodness in so as to praise it where we find it, then we are urged to give thanks for life, for existence, for the goodness tasted therein. When Dorothy Day, an atheist and communist at the time, became pregnant she was so overcome by the beauty of bearing a new living being inside her that she converted to Christianity. Why? “Because I had to give thanks to someone,” she said. God is the One to whom we render our Thanks.

We need to make a simple return, Hart says, “to that original apprehension of the gratuity of all things” a deep response that is not neutral but that is grateful to “the limitless beauty of being, which is to say, upon the beauty of being seen as a gift that comes from beyond all possible beings.” Thomas Aquinas considers gratitude to be the very essence of healthy religion: to be religious is to be thankful. One is never half-full of thanks—one is thank-full.