A good argument could be made that a consistent practice of gratitude should be at the top of every person’s list of spiritual practices. A genuine and faithful spirit of thankfulness can serve to keep us humble. Thanksgiving reminds us that we are the recipients of far more gifts that are beyond our merit and our designs than the “rewards” for our industry. In fact, true thankfulness reminds us that even the rewards we earn from our work are only possible because of the unmerited gift of God in creation. As we say in Eucharistic Prayer C: “[God] brought forth the human race and blessed us [with the gifts] of memory, reason, and skill.”
Everything we do, everything we achieve, earn, accomplish, or experience is a gift. Thanks be to God.
If you are like I am, it is much easier to give thanks for what I experience as blessings in my life. Food on the table, health, happiness, family, and friends, these are the foundations of most people’s Thanksgiving Day Feast. We celebrate that God’s blessings are bountiful. But what about those challenges, hardships, sorrows, and losses we experience?
There is a petition in the prayers section of the Book of Common Prayer titled “A General Thanksgiving” (it would make a great prayer for your Thanksgiving Table). One of the petitions reads: “We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.” There are challenges, hardships, sorrows, and losses in life. The most difficult of these are more often than not beyond our control. The practice of gratitude invites us not to wash over the pain, sorrow, or loss with a Pollyanna gloss of denial, but a genuine acknowledgment of the gift of tears, the gift of life and love in its fullest experience comes from a loving and merciful God who knows our suffering as well as our joy.
A healthy practice of gratitude should never blind us to the realities of life nor should expressing gratitude become a form of spiritual bargaining or a ransom payment to God. Many of us grew-up with the understanding that if we didn’t write our thank-you notes, we wouldn’t get gifts. Thank you notes are a good thing. They are an expression of gratitude, but, perhaps steeped in the ways of the quid pro quo world, we also learned that blessings depend on our gratitude–gifts are earned or denied by what we do. The shadow to this way of thinking is the belief that bad things happen to us because we aren’t grateful.
Gratitude should never be expressed under threat. God who gave the world the gift of life also gave life again in the gift of Jesus. God does not operate by threat or fear, but by mercy, by love, by gift.
