A list of things to be thankful for usually turns out to be merely a list of things we like. It ought rather, I think, to be a list of what we have been given. A bride sitting down to write thank-you notes does not write only to the people who managed to choose gifts that suited her (the job would probably not take long if this were so). She says thank you to everybody—all the people who gave her electric knives, all those who chose the usual run-of-the-gift-shop candy dishes—and she tries to be both truthful and gracious to all. But some of the thanks is only “polite.”
Parents know the difficulty of teaching children to say thank you. If the child is given something he likes, he grabs it and in his pleasure forgets to say anything. If he gets something he doesn’t like he sees no reason to say thank you. He has to learn the meaning of a gift before he understands the meaning of thanks.
There must also be an understanding of a giver. It is interesting to note that many primitive languages have no words to express gratitude. The Quichua and Colorado languages of Ecuador, for example, have to borrow from Spanish, and the Indians rarely use the Spanish words among themselves. They use them only when speaking to outsiders. This says something, it seems to me, about their whole view of life. They take all of nature for granted (“The sunset, señora? Beautiful?” an Indian once said to me). They are sufficient in themselves. They depend consciously on nothing and nobody.
Most Christians acknowledge dependence on God in a vague and general way. Most of us thank him for certain things—for food, for example (and we’ve all heard facetious remarks about saying grace when the menu doesn’t look especially appetizing)—but if we are candid about it we find that usually our thanks is for things that please us, or for things we’ve asked for. What about thanking God for anything and everything he has given? We know we are meant to give thanks “in everything,” as Paul told us, and sermons have been preached on that word “in” as distinct from “for.” But few of us have got much further than the little girl who said she could think of things she’d rather have than eternal life. There is a sense in which the mature Christian offers not just polite thanks because he things he ought to, but heart-felt thanks that springs from a far deeper source than his own particular pleasure.
How can we reach that kind of maturity? You learn to swim by swimming. I am convinced that we can learn how best to thank God by thanking him. Thanksgiving is in itself a spiritual exercise, necessary to the building of a healthy soul. It takes us out of the stuffiness and confinement of ourselves, into the fresh breeze and sunlight of the will of God. The simple act of our own will—“I will thank him”—is for most of us an abrupt change of activity, a break from work and worry, a move toward re-creation.
I am not suggesting the mouthing of foolish platitudes as a spiritual exercise. “Things could be worse,” “Cheer up, the worst is yet to come!,” “Look for the silver lining!” and that sort of thing will hardly nourish the spirit of thanksgiving. I am not cheered, my faith is not fortified, my soul is not drawn out in gratitude by an attempt to ignore the truth. It is the truth of things I am trying to get at. It is what is given that I want to see clearly and be able honestly to thank God for. In mathematics you don’t find the solution to a problem until you know the givens.
A child has no idea of things as they are. He is ignorant, and therefore he is totally ungrateful. He gets his food without asking for it; he finds all his needs met, it seems, quite automatically. He has to grow up before he has much idea of what is involved in providing the necessities and comforts he has taken for granted. And the first spontaneous and sincere thank you for him is a sign that he is growing up. When the parent is thanked for doing a thing the child didn’t like at the time, he knows his child has come a long way.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is,” said Shakespeare, “to have a thankless child.”
Thankless children we all are, more or less, for we comprehend so dimly the truth of our relationship to God. We do not know him as the Giver, we do not understand his gifts. The depth of his love, the wisdom with which he has planned, the price he pays to bring his sons to glory—all these are far beyond us. The closer we come to spiritual maturity, the clearer is our understanding of where we are in relation to everything else. And this knowledge will enable us to give him what the Book of Common Prayer calls “humble and hearty” thanks, the kind that springs from true humility and a pure heart.
So let us get at the truth of things. Let us start with the basics. It is a help to me, when some petty private concern or perhaps some bad news in the daily paper depresses or confuses me, to “start over.” I am in no position to be thankful. Far from it. So I begin by deliberately putting my mind on a few of the Realities. What I am thankful for depends on what I believe, for what I believe determines what I most deeply desire. A concise statement of what I believe is found in the Apostle’s Creed, and I never get beyond needing to go over it and think about it.
BROAD-CAST
Strange
How bread
In breaking
Spreads
Shares
Itself divides
Distributes crumbs
All sundry
Take
Care your
Fair white linen
Not confine
The scattered seed
To virgin soil
Or all too narrow
Furrow
J. BARRIE SHEPHERD
“I believe in God the Father Almighty … and in Jesus Christ … I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”
It is not a long list. But it is all we need. Evelyn Underhill calls these “the necessary supplies issued to us, the standard equipment of the Christian.” They are not things we’ve asked for. (Imagine having nothing more than what we’ve asked for!) They are given.
We are flimsy, trembling creatures, blown about, shaken not only by great winds but by the faintest breezes of any sort of nonsense, steered by our own whims and by the fashions of this world, crushed by criticism and elated by flattery, fearful and proud and selfish in our hopes and prayers, offering the thanksgiving of the Pharisee in the temple, tickled to death to think (look at us!) that we are not like him. To go back and begin again with God instead of with how we feel about things will alter our perspective. We will lose sight of ourselves for a change. We may have been, a moment ago, deploring the state of things in general (war, taxes, drugs, elections, “youth”), or the state of our own finances or position or reputation (or even the oven that needs cleaning or our weight that needs reducing), and we have not been able to find in such thoughts any reason for thanksgiving. But measure them now against those mighty foundation stones. The truth of our situation can be known only in relation to those Realities. They tell us what is. We can test our attitudes by them.
“Jesus Christ … suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified.” God, in flesh, at the mercy of a Roman procurator whose name we all know—is this cause for thanksgiving? It is, and the heart that can give thanks for such a thing must be a heart that accepts mystery, for this touches on one of the profound mysteries of all life and of our own individual lives. Suffering is required. It behooved Christ to suffer. And because soldiers fastened him to a cross of wood with iron nails one Friday afternoon on a hilltop, the world with all its agonies and iniquities and griefs is redeemed. There was, after this hideous death, Resurrection. “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” But death had to come first.
On this Thanksgiving Day we do not give thanks only if we have not suffered. Some have suffered and are suffering greatly. Some of us know very little of suffering. But we know disappointments and betrayals and losses and bitterness we have never dreamed of thanking God for. These things were given. We could not possibly have chosen them, and we are not asked to like them, but our thanks is due because we are learning to know the Giver and to understand the meaning of his gifts.
The gift of food needs also the gift of hunger. Thirst itself is a gift when there is drink to satisfy it. Loneliness, which Katherine Mansfield said “opens the gates of my soul and lets the wild beasts stream howling through,” opens also our understanding of the communion of saints. Not until sin baffles us will grace ever amaze us. We learn then how precious is the forgiveness of sins.
This is the way things are. These things have been given to us. We may reject them, or we may receive them all with thanksgiving.
George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”
