Americans are grateful people. More so than in any other country
I can think of, the giving and saying of thanks is a vital
ingredient in the history, heritage, culture, and day-to-day life
of the United States. Why?
Visiting various cities in the fourth week of November last
fall, I was again struck by the warmth and universality of the
preparations for Thanksgiving. Almost everyone seemed to be making
travel plans, cooking plans, and family plans for this uniquely
American celebration. As a visitor I have always found Thanksgiving
a particularly attractive symbol of the national character. The
event rises above the commercialism of Christmas. It avoids the
parades and parochialism of nationalistic or ethnic festivals such
as St. Patrick’s Day in New York. Nobody feels excluded from it on
grounds of race or religion. It is a loving, simple, and
warm-hearted occasion, happily fo-cused on family life.
Yet although Thanksgiving is secular in its designation as a
public holiday, its origins are rooted in the spiritual practices
of the Pilgrim Fathers. When the founders of the Plymouth colony
held their first thanksgiving supper in December 1621, they were
expressing gratitude for a suc-cessful harvest and the ending of a
difficult year. Gratitude to whom? The original thanksgivers would
have been surprised by the question and unhesitating in their
answer, for they were resolutely God-fearing and God-grateful
people.
Contemporary Americans are more varied in their expressions of
gratitude. They are profuse in their politeness of thanking
everyone for everything. Go to a greetings card shop to ask for a
thank-you card and you discover that every imaginable relationship
is catered to. To my boss, my boyfriend, my dog walker, my doctor,
my manicurist, our sales department, our paper boy, and even our
editor (!) are just a few of the occupations that can be thanked
via Hallmark and other personalized card manufacturers. However,
there seems to be a presumption that all this grati-tude follows
some good result-perhaps a bonus from the boss, neatly trimmed
cuticles from the manicurist, and so on. But what happens when
things go wrong-as they do in real life? This is where God
re-enters the picture, although not always easily.
William Law, the author of the 17th-century spiritual classic
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, offered this
advice to his readers:
If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all
happiness they would tell you to make it a rule to thank and praise
God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that
whatever seeming calamity befalls you, if you can thank and praise
God for it you turn it into a blessing.
Now this is a tough call. When we are knocked sideways by one of
life’s mega-misfortunes, ranging from a malignant tumor to a
financial meltdown, most of us mortals are more likely to be angry
with God than grateful to Him. That was my initial reaction during
my personal career catas-trophe, when I fell from rising cabinet
minister to jailed convict.
At one point in these self-inflicted disasters a friend
recommended that I should seek guidance from an abbot who was
renowned as a spiritual counselor. When I met this venerable figure
in his monastery he was hard of hearing so I had to raise my voice
to summarize my problems, which consisted of defeat, disgrace,
divorce, bankruptcy, and jail. When I had finished reciting this
litany of woes the old sage leaned forward and asked in his quavery
voice: “Have you tried thanking God for them?” Giving him a punch
on the nose was the instant temptation from which I had to restrain
myself!
In retrospect I have come to see that the monk was right. Today
I am grateful because the pain was eventually followed by the gain
of a far more fulfilled life. Signposts to such a result can be
found in spiritual writings down the millennia. “Give thanks in all
circumstances,” advised St. Paul (I Thessalonians 5:24). The author
of the world’s best-selling Christian book after the Bible, Thomas
à Kempis, wrote in The Imitation of Christ, “If thou wilt
that I should be in the light blessed be thou. And if thou wilt
that I should be in the darkness blessed be thou. Light and
darkness, life and death praise ye the Lord.”
Maybe one has to be as holy as Thomas à Kempis, William Law, and
St. Paul to follow this path of godly gratitude to the full. Yet at
some point on life’s spiritual journey the light dawns for many of
us that even in the worst of times the old saying “count your
blessings” is a truth well honored.
JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING I was in Washington, D.C., so I
exercised my country membership in a Georgetown prayer group that
has been meeting each week for more than 30 years. Its members,
whose friendship has meant much to me, are now men of mature years.
Our combined dramas have encompassed more than a fair share of
life’s peaks and valleys. Bereavements, breakdowns, divorces,
suicides, Watergate, prison, serious illness, family estrangements,
and financial disasters have been part of our combined tapestry of
experiences, although well tempered by joys and successes. On this
particular eve-of-Thanksgiving morning we talked and prayed about
gratitude. The overwhelming consensus was that each and every one
of us had a multitude of reasons for being grateful to God.
Our group’s combined wisdom of hindsight should be far more
widely accepted as spiritual foresight. Gratitude is a seriously
underestimated virtue, pivotal to both prayer and Bible study. For
it is important to thank God for blessings received before we put
our requests to Him. Those supplications, although right as an
expression of dependence on God, often have a touch of
self-centeredness about them. But the backward-looking prayer of
thanksgiving is quite selfless, a disinterested act of godly
love.
God appreciates disinterested thanks. We know this from a story
in Luke’s Gospel (17: 11-19). It relates how 10 men were
miraculously healed of leprosy, but only one of them came back to
thank their healer.
“Were not all 10 cleansed, where are the other nine?” asked
Jesus, saying to the grateful one, “Go thy way; thy faith hath made
thee whole.”
This valedictory blessing draws an intriguing distinction
between health and wholth. We go to the gym for the former. True
wholeness, which includes that vital ingredient of gratitude, comes
from God. The Pilgrim Fathers understood this when they celebrated
the first Thanksgiving. They would have agreed with their
contemporary, George Herbert (1593-1633):
Lord thou hast given so much to me;
Give one
thing more — a grateful heart.
