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Being Thankful When You Don't Feel Like It
November 24, 2002
"To Everything that has been--thanks.The late Peter Fleck, who came to the Unitarian Universalist ministry late in life, but who became one of our most insightful thinkers and writers, once wrote that most people assume the Pilgrims, after their first winter in the New World, were thankful for having survived. “It seems to me,” Fleck wrote, “that they were able to survive because they were thankful.”
For Everything that will be--yes."--Dag Hammarskjold
Let's think about that possibility. After all, what did they have to be thankful about? They were cast up on a foreign shore which to their orderly English eyes was “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” The native inhabitants were not very happy to see them, having already had run-ins with greedy and self-righteous Europeans. As William Bradford wrote, they were “readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise.” Half of the Pilgrims died in that first awful winter, the rest nearly starved, and would have, without the help of those selfsame natives. And yet, they were thankful. How could this be so?
Part of the explanation lies in their self-understanding. The Pilgrims were people of the Bible, and they believed that they were reliving the biblical story. They knew it wouldn't be easy. After all, Moses had led the Israelites in search of the Promised Land for forty years. It had not been easy. The people had backslid and hardened their hearts against Moses. They had suffered and nearly starved, saved only by a miracle of “manna from heaven.” And when they had finally reached the “land flowing with milk and honey,” Moses was not even allowed to enter in. After all he had done for his (thankless) people! He was allowed to see the Promised Land from the top of Mt. Pisquah, but he died before he was able to get there.
So the Pilgrims' expectations were--realistic. They knew there would be hardship and suffering and death. They expected it. But nevertheless they were grateful: grateful as they imagined themselves to be the people of God. Grateful to be on the shores of a new and mysterious Promised Land. Grateful to be free to worship as they desired and chose. Grateful even to die in a cause that mattered deeply to them.
Thanksgiving is an easy holiday, right? Good food and good company, family and friends, football and late afternoon naps. But what if you don't feel like it? What if you just aren't feeling very thankful this year? What then? What if you are dogged by illness, confronted by failure? Perhaps you have lost your job, or are caught up in a failing relationship. Your life has lost its direction. You are depressed, or someone close to you has died. You don't know where to turn for help. (Help, by the way, is out there--but you need to ask.)
How do we give thanks when we just don't feel like it?
Beyond the superficial objects of our thanksgiving, there is something deeper. My colleague Frank Hall once wrote that “There is a kind of thankfulness that is different from our appreciation for all we have. I'm not at all sure that I can describe it. It is thankfulness for being itself. For existence.” Frank continues,
But “being” is a mixed blessing, isn't it. Life is often a struggle, and it is sometimes filled with pain--and there is always the possibility of pain. We live with it--with that uncertainty. . . .The first thing that is needful is that we acknowledge the difficulty. It is not always easy to be thankful. There are manifold reasons which stand in the way. But what if our very survival depends upon it? What if Fleck is right, and the Pilgrims survived only because they were thankful?
Thanksgiving is an easy holiday to celebrate, on the surface. But it points to that which is not so easy. To be thankful for the gift of “being” is the acknowledgment of what theologians call “grace.” Our life is a gift from God. We may fail to catch the spirit of thanks. . . .
In his book Lifelines: Holding On (and Letting Go), which we have been reading in our adult education groups, Forrest Church writes that our most common response to the miracle of our being is, “What did I do to deserve this?” To which he responds, “Nothing.” We did nothing to deserve the life we have been so miraculously given! He writes,
Against unimaginable odds, we have been given something that we didn't deserve at all, the gift of life.Despite St. Paul's plea, “In everything, give thanks,” no one is grateful all the time. For most of us, this is an impossibility. Sadness and loneliness and loss, illness and death and grief, will come to all of us in time. All of us will experience failure, and moments of despair. But life is more than these. Somewhere the sun is always out and the stars are always shining. Unitarian Universalist minister Laurel Hallman writes,
What does this mean? Astoundingly, unbelievably, it means that we have been in utero from the beginning of creation. We can trace ourselves back, genetically, to the very beginning of time. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.
What a luxury we enjoy, wondering what will happen after we die, even what will happen before we die. Having spent billions of years in gestation, present in all that preceded us--fully admitting the pain and difficulty involved in actually being alive, able to feel and suffer, grieve and die--we can only respond in one way: with awe and gratitude.
When the burdens of life seem overwhelming, when we cannot clearly see our way and hope seems frivolous, it is time to “give an accounting of gratitude.”This, like so much in life, is a paradox. But what if it is true? Laurel continues,
Be grateful for the path that has brought you this far. There have been some close calls along the way, some scrapes with disaster--but you have survived them. And so many of your fears and worries have been about things that never came to pass.There is a line from a prayer I often use at memorial services which asks us “to accept even the hard and bitter things which we have known and suffered, the mysteries of pain, of sickness, and of death.” I think it means that we are to be thankful even for these, because without them we could not really have known their opposite. Without sickness, we could never appreciate health, without pain, it's absence, without death, life; without grief, love. “Love means grief in time,” reads another line which I often use in memorial services. To love is to risk grief in time; we cannot have the one without at least the risk of the other. Death is the price for having lived. Is it worth it? Is pain worth it? To live, to experience the beauty of the universe, to know love? Can we live at all without a sense of gratitude? Perhaps, but I would suggest: not for long, and certainly not well.
Be grateful for friends, for common tasks undertaken and successfully completed. For the encouragement of others who were healthy when you were sick, happy when you were sad, hopeful when you had lost hope. They reminded you that life was much more than your experience of it at the moment.
Be grateful for life's celebrations and life's joys. Be grateful, too, for that which you would have avoided if you could, but which taught you the harder lessons of life. For it is in those moments that you can find the workings of a mysterious wisdom and know a more than human love.
“Thou hast given me so much . . . Give me one thing more, a grateful heart,” says a little prayer. Obtaining a heart that is truly grateful is the ultimate challenge of thanksgiving, for it means accepting the bad as well as the good, the sorrow as well as the joy, which life has to offer us. Gratitude, as Dag Hammarskjold recognized, gives us the power to say “yes” to life.
Sometimes, it is in our darkest hours, what the Christian mystics call “the dark night of the soul,” that we learn the most. Life is not easy; it is filled with sorrow, and often with suffering, too. It ends in death. But life contains all that we love, and have loved, and will love. For that, if for nothing else, let us be grateful on this day, and in all the days still to come. Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
