This post is also an article from The View, the weekly newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church in Decatur, Alabama. To read the rest of the article and learn about St. John's, click here.
At a hospital bedside, I watch the fear that family members
hold melt away when the person whom they love responds to their expressions of
anxiety with words of gratitude. In my office, I hear someone struggling with
grief make a small but significant breakthrough when they discover again what
it means to be thankful for each day that God has given them. In my own heart,
I see deeply held resentment and the intractable relationships that it has
infected soften when my prayers shift from petitions for a change to
thanksgiving for a reality.
Gratitude has the power to change us and our circumstances. Even
though it is at its core an acceptance of a situation, a spirit of thanksgiving
may be the most effective way to transform an otherwise hopeless condition into
an opportunity for new life. In fact, as the first of the twelve steps of
recovery reminds us, it is acceptance that is the first step toward change.
Before an addict can turn his or her will and life over to God (step three),
ask God to remove his or her shortcomings (step seven), or make amends (step
nine), that person must first admit a fundamental powerlessness over a
situation. Such an admission is not the same thing as gratitude, of course, but
the same acceptance underpins both of them.
As the word implies, thanksgiving is a transaction of sorts.
In return for the thing of value that I have received (a meal, a hug, a
compliment), I respond by giving gratitude. The word gratitude comes from the
Latin word gratus, which means
pleasing. In other words, when you give me something nice, I acknowledge the
pleasure I have gained from your gift and return some of it to you. I might say
thank you with words, or I might return your casserole dish with a few homemade
cookies in it, or I could make a donation to a local charity in your name, but,
whatever the medium, giving thanks is about acknowledging the receipt of
something that did not originate with me and offering a sign of appreciation in
return.
In grade school, we made hand-print turkeys and decorated
the finger-traced tail feathers with objects of gratitude. Family, food,
freedom, and friendship were likely choices for the feathers. This
Thanksgiving, what if, instead of four feathers of thanksgiving, we filled a
whole turkey with markers of gratitude. A Google search suggests that a mature
turkey may have as many as 3,500 feathers.[1]
Can you name even a hundred things for which you are grateful? What happens
when that list grows from the dozen or so easy answers to more subtle
statements of gratitude? What happens when we run out of things we like and
have to start listing the things we usually take for granted? What happens when
we exhaust that list as well? Might we even mention the objects, names, or
circumstances that we would rather forget?
Near the back of the Book
of Common Prayer, there is A General Thanksgiving, which begins to embrace
this wider concept of gratitude: “We thank you for the blessing of family and
friends…We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts…We
thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge
our dependence on you alone” (p. 836). What happens when we begin to approach
God with gratitude for the disappointments and failures that we would just as
soon forget? What happens when, instead of slapping away the hand that has
dealt us those frustrating moments, we search for ways to respond to them with appreciation?
Thursday is
Thanksgiving Day. Many of us will celebrate with family and friends and too
much food. Some of us, however, will not. Whatever our situation, how might
true thankfulness open up new pathways for blessing? How might we use the power
of gratitude as a vehicle for the transformation that God is enacting in our
lives, in our community, and in the world?
Thank you for this post, and especially for your regular, faithful ministry here.
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