According to one of the origin myths that bind us together as a unique American people, the day of gratitude we celebrate today traces its origins to a 1621 harvest festival shared between the English Pilgrims in the Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag natives with whom they had established a tentative alliance. According to the annals of American history, George Washington later proclaimed November 26, 1789, as a day of public Thanksgiving and prayer. Even “in the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity,” Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the final Thursday of November, 1863, to be a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise” for God’s providence. Finally, in 1941, Congress officially declared a national day of annual Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.
Full stop.
Four days ago, I read in the stolid Wall Street Journal a fluffy piece of pop-psych that attempted to set the practice of gratitude on its head: “The Case for Being Ungrateful” by Elizabeth Bernstein. “Performative gratitude,” the article unashamedly asserts, “—compelling ourselves to be grateful when we’re not—is a form of toxic positivity.” The author continues her whining: “Pushing ourselves to feel grateful . . . can also make us appear like a Pollyanna—someone out of touch with reality.”
No, I say. Rather, I counterargue that that much-maligned “glad girl” is precisely the model we ought to follow. The Psalmist tells us, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let is rejoice and be glad in it” (118:24). In a similar vein, Paul writes, “In every thing give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18). The essence of these biblical injunctions also plays a central role in the philosophy of the Stoics, whose principle of amor fati counsels us to love our fate—to embrace all the circumstances in our lives as necessary and thus good.
This philosophy of acceptance and gratitude brings us directly to its near kin, the advice spoken by the wise man who often reminds me, “Choose to be happy.” And yes, it is a choice.
This most important of life lessons is one that I came to very late—on the cusp of my eighth decade on this Earth. It was at first a chilling lesson I came to appreciate only slowly after I first heard the prayer that I now use to begin each day: “Thank you, Lord, for everything I have and everything I don’t have.”
Like the pop psychologists I derided above, I initially chafed at that bit of gratitude that suggested that I should thank God even for pain and loss. But I have slowly come to realize that the mantra of gratitude for all things is simply a primer for what Jesus was trying to impart when he taught us to pray: “Thy will be done.”
Embracing this lesson has been the most comforting and even joyful circumstance of the last two years. I could enumerate several awakenings enabled by this new understanding, but I’ll share only the most powerful one:
Over the last several years, I have spent an inordinate amount of time beating myself up for a very bad decision I made as a young woman that resulted in my now being a childless older woman pondering the fact that I will die alone. Almost 30 years ago, I asked for and received God’s forgiveness for that decision, but I was never able to forgive myself. However, over the last several months, living in the shadow of a recent crisis in my professional life, I have used the lesson of gratitude to reshape my self-awareness. Specifically, gratitude has enabled me to accept God’s promised and obvious forgiveness, to forgive myself in the process, and to express an even more profound gratitude for the gifts he has given me in recompense for what I lost when I gave up my chance to be a mother.
- Specifically, I am grateful for the gift of teaching–expressed as the longing to impart that I first recognized in the third grade and have now been practicing for the last 32 years. I am even grateful that I temporarily lost my teaching job because that circumstance humbled me, increased my gratitude, and forced me to “recognize anew that the soul of a teacher must first be a soul full of love.” And something new has occurred: I pray for my students every day, a process that enables me to perceive them as God’s beloved children whose tutelage has been vouchsafed to me. What a gift, and what a responsibility!
- I am also newly grateful for the gift of music. For fifteen years, I had recurrent nightmares with the theme of being prevented from playing music. Now, I can be grateful for that long fallow time as a means of increasing my present joy when I sit down to play at church every Sunday morning. And that gift is magnified tenfold now that I have begun to experience the added richness of learning the organ. Playing a hauntingly beautiful piece in my first organ recital earlier this month humbled me as it enriched my life.
- Finally, I am grateful for the gift of writing–expressed mostly here in these long-neglected pages. I have received encouraging news from the publisher about a manuscript of Advent writings I submitted earlier this year. More significantly, though, I am reminded every day of how fortunate I am to have been granted a love of language and the facility for expressing my thoughts clearly and precisely.
On this day set aside on our calendar for giving thanks, I encourage you to practice gratitude for all things–the bad and the good, the gain and the pain, the laughter and the tears. Each of these disparate circumstances has brought us to the precise point where we are this very day–accepting and living into God’s will for our lives. As the sign on my office wall has been reminding me for the last year, practicing this king of gratitude makes us realize every moment how blessed we are–that we we have is exactly what we need: enough.
This year I have a new sign next to the old one, a new reminder from cultures all over the world: Enough is a feast.
Your reflections are profoundly beautiful and moving.
Thank you, my dear friend. Our recent communications about children and fulfillment helped these thoughts come to fruition.