Gratitude can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, without permission and without restraint… It is, perhaps, the most immediate and most primal of all spiritual affections – one that makes every human being a priest.
–Diana Butler Bass
I would like to make an appeal to remove one practice from our thanks-giving this weekend and, ideally, from here on in. That is, to stop arriving at gratitude by comparing our circumstances to those less fortunate. It’s something so commonly done, but it is not good for our souls and is not the heart of gratefulness.
I’ve heard it as recently as this week – a teacher telling kids that others don’t have it as good as they do and they should be thankful. At face value, it seems reasonable enough, to do some perspective finding about our privileges. I’ve done it myself in the early years of parenting. I’d try to get a complaining child to eat their vegetables by telling them of others who are starving and would do anything to have what they have.
But here’s what happens when we reference the misfortune of others in order to prompt thanks.
The first is that we are putting a value proposition on our gratitude that it is only for the materially wealthy, the physically healthy, and the culturally privileged. In my experience, it is quite often the “less fortunate” who better see, receive, and express unadulterated thanks. In this way, we might follow their lead. I get a certain pleasure out of imagining those we’ve thought poor and miserable praying that we might know the true joy found in God’s grace.
The other aspect is that, in using the less fortunate as a stepping stone to giving thanks, we’ve not induced gratitude but guilt. And this gets so entangled in our minds that we have a hard time extracting one from the other. Rather than appreciating our gifts with joy, we associate them with feeling bad. And feeling bad is something we try to avoid, thus damming up our own joy with a guilty conscience. We are now on the defensive. This causes us to be protective of what we have and why we have it, furthering a sense of entitlement and ingratitude.
Our own approach to giving thanks is working against us. May I suggest a different one?
This Thanksgiving, let’s look to whom we can credit instead of whom we should pity.
For Christians our source of gratitude is God. Simply put, we believe in a good God who desires our well-being and gives good gifts to us. We also believe he carries out his work through others. The practice of giving thanks invites us to consider those who have loved us, helped us, challenged us, strengthened us… and our gratitude grows.
This Thanksgiving, let’s look to whom we can credit
instead of whom we should pity.
If we were to return to the classroom, I might suggest to the children that we peer closely at something we might have taken for granted. Let’s consider the bread from our sandwich – where it came from, the many hands that worked to make it yummy and bring it to us. Let us give thanks for the farmers, the distributors, the grocers, the parents, and the many besides who aided in the nutrition and enjoyment of this bread we get to eat. Now we’ve induced wonder! Which is something we want to think about more and more and allows joy and gratitude to flow.
True thanks-giving is inclusive, not exclusive. It comes with an invitation to God’s goodness. It sees value in every human and recognizes the ways in which we contribute to each other’s betterment. It activates joy, not guilt; generosity, not entitlement. Let’s help each other practice it well.
Happy Thanksgiving!
In Everything 