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No one is quite sure when the first official Thanksgiving was held. Some partisans hold out for the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, others point to the Catholics in St. Augustine. Somehow, Virginia is in the mix claiming the first feast was in their great state. I don’t really know. I’m just happy to eat the turkey.
Maybe it’s best to not waste energy arguing about which group was more thankful and who was thankful first. From the beginning of time, people have had much to be thankful for as God showers countless blessings upon us. The psalmist gives thanks, as did the prophets, as did any countless number of men and women whose names are lost to history. Gratitude, particularly gratitude directed towards God, is good and just.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t days during which I am fundamentally ungrateful.
The path to gratitude
It seems to me that our disordered relationship with time, the way we rush around thoughtlessly from entertainment to work to chores, the way we put off thinking about death in any shape or form, is a major cause of ingratitude. There are entire days I tumble through aimlessly, taking food and friendships and fresh air and children for granted. I cannot spare a thought for them. I only have so much time and I use it up in busyness.
I know that if I consider the nature of time and how I use it, I will inevitably think about the end of time and my impending death. I will be forced to reckon with the fact that time is limited. I will be pushed to consider what it looks like to live a good life full of gratitude, a manner of living that is something like a lifelong pilgrimage undertaken with the knowledge that every good thing is passing into eternity. I hold my days as precious only because they slip away from me. I know beauty and goodness only as a traveler searching for a spiritual home.
It’s a difficult meditation to make but, ultimately, pondering time and death is the path to thankfulness. These thoughts assist us to live with no regrets and appreciate each moment as it passes. I think about this often, as I’m sure all parents do, as I watch my children grow up. It’s bittersweet, knowing that soon they will leave our house to make homes of their own as adults, but I am so much happier for having them under my roof temporarily than I ever would have been without them.
Thankfulness and loss
The knowledge that everything we love is slipping over the horizon helps us cherish our limited time with gratitude. But we cannot get to this point if we’re constantly rushing to the end of the story. If we skip the death part, we also lose the thankfulness for life part. The way Christians might phrase it is that, if we skip the Crucifixion part, we lose the Resurrection part.
I know this connection between thanksgiving and our limited time sounds tenuous, but I can’t help noticing that Thanksgiving providentially arrives at the end of November, a season of harvesting and bringing summer to a close, a month beginning with All Souls day and dedicated to the memento mori.
This very month ends begins with death and ends with a feast of gratitude.
The man who was thankful for everything
G.K. Chesterton was a huge fan of gratitude. He once declared that, for him, thanksgiving before meals was not enough. He offered prayers of thanks for everything — writing, before the opera, for a nice afternoon walk, and so on. In his autobiography, written as he knew he was closer to the end of his story than the beginning, he writes that gratitude had been, “the chief idea of my life.”
Not only is gratitude a virtue etched into us from time immemorial, but Chesterton explains that it enables us to move past to unrealistic attitudes and achieve greatness. The two attitudes to be avoided, he says, are extreme optimism and pessimism.
An optimist is convinced that he’s never sinned, that faith is easy and forgiveness hardly necessary. An optimist has little to be grateful for because he can hardly comprehend how deep the pit is from which God is offering to save him.
A pessimist, on the other hand, despairs of having even a single sin forgiven. He looks inside himself and only perceives that which is deserving of eternal death. He considers the world and thinks it irredeemable.
Why thankfulness is reasonable
Gratitude, says Chesterton, helps us to avoid these errors. Gratitude places us firmly in the grip of reality. A grateful person sits down to a Thanksgiving feast and knows he’s not worthy of it while also knowing that God wants him to eat. And so he offers thanks and feasts. A grateful person knows that death is his deserved fate and yet accepts that God desires to save him from such a fate. He accepts forgiveness and worships God ever thereafter with a thankful heart. It is the grateful person who both knows he is undeserving but still accepts the startling and unexpected gift.
So no, we humble sinners are not worthy of all the delicious turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing spread out before us. We deserve dust and ashes. But we will eat, even if this feast is consumed as those who are pilgrims on a journey. If Thanksgiving is a great feast, there’s an even better one waiting for us in eternity. It is the grateful person who will be dining at the Heavenly banquet.
There’s no rush to get there, though. God has placed us right where we are to be thankful and happy. Even passing through, by God’s grace we’re already over the threshold and entering into Heaven. I cannot think of a better reason to be deeply grateful.
And today we celebrate...