by Kathleen J. Greider
Professor of Pastoral Care & Counseling
School of Theology at Claremont, Claremont, CA

     More than other months, November’s arrival usually feels sudden.  It sneaks up on me during the cleanup from the childsplay of Halloween and amid the fall-out of my All Saints’ ambivalence.  In October lies the hope of one last ripening during unexpectedly warm days and then, ready or not, November is a movement into chilliness, harvest, preserving, and storing up.  If, at the end of the month our cupboards are full of sustenance for winter, literally and/or metaphorically, the ritual of Thanksgiving follows quite logically, quite easily.

     That I have lived into my forties is undeniable evidence that I always have had access to enough nourishment to survive not only the calendrical but also the spiritual winters I have had to face.  My thanksgiving—and that of other people of relative privilege and power—has often been quite logical, quite easy.  Indeed, the logic and ease results in large measure from the power and privilege.

     Still, privilege and power does not guarantee thankfulness. I and other people and societies of privilege and power, even where social responsibility has honed consciousness of their material wealth in comparison to the material poverty of most global citizens, still hunger for the sustainable activism that thankfulness cultivates.  Our hunger is an abiding reminder that there is not a simple equation between abundance and thanksgiving, between the social circumstances of advantage or security and the spiritual condition of thankfulness.  People with full cupboards may still find thanksgiving elusive.

     This aberration in the logic and ease of thanksgiving draws me deeper into the workings of human nature and experience where gratefulness, if it is to be born, is conceived.  Just as the deeper regions of the soul point through Answers toward Mystery, so also they point through thanksgiving toward the deeper mystery of gratitude.  Though thanksgiving can have—ought to have, it seems—a reasonable, even rote, quality to it, gratefulness regularly is nonsensical, defies logic.  Though there are many ways that gratefulness defies logic, I’ll reflect here on just three.

     Gratitude Companions Suffering.  While we rarely are inclined to give thanks for suffering, humans regularly find that gratitude emerges in the company of suffering.

     It is logical to be thankful for shelter or food to eat, but some people have a grateful spirit even when they are hungry and unsheltered.  It is reasonable to feel and express thanks for a kindness extended, but some people can still live gratefully though they have known terrible cruelty.  It is reasonable to experience thankfulness for health, but some people experience an increase of their gratitude at the same time that their bodies and minds are wracked with illness.  Gratitude springs up even in the heart of our most tragic suffering in response to the sacrificial kindnesses, enhanced relationships, and enriched spirit that are not infrequently occasioned by suffering.  The United States experienced this gratitude as a nation in the midst of the suffering set in motion September 11, 2001.  That suffering not infrequently seems to increase abundance of life, and human gratefulness for life, is an intractable spiritual mystery, befuddling all theologians.  It reminds us that the psychospiritual atmosphere of gratefulness defies logic by not being necessarily or simply a feel-good experience about feel-good circumstances.  The suffering we dread may bring us the gratefulness we covet.  Gratefulness and suffering can be companions.

     Lucky to Be Grateful.  While thanksgiving can be taught or pretended, gratefulness cannot.  There are many situations in which, logically, we ought to feel grateful, and we do not.  We can be surrounded by love, or experiencing the realization of a long-dreamed dream, or have recently won the lottery, and not experience gratefulness.  Indeed, the prevalence of melancholy, mourning, depression and suicide ought to keep us mindful—though somehow we remain collectively if not personally in denial—that the experience of gratefulness is occasionally a choice but is often chance.  We can desire gratefulness with all our hearts and minds and souls, and desire it for others as for ourselves, and still gratefulness may elude us because it is our bad fortune to live amid relational toxicity.  We can try and try and try to choose gratefulness, but the transformation of despair to gratitude regularly refuses to bend to human will and is instead overrun by the unlucky body chemistry of depression.  It is in response to the elusiveness of gratitude that some people say that gratitude is a gift.  But in the presence of those who do not receive this gift, those who, despite their best efforts, live their lives in despair, such a characterization suggests that there is a gift-giver who refuses not only their efforts but answers their despair with indifference, or maybe even parsimoniousness.  Given that logic, I choose the mystery that gratefulness has as much to do with luck as with determination or spiritual discipline.

     Grateful to Be Spared.  A third dimension of the nonsensical quality of gratefulness is nearly unspeakable: we feel gratitude that we do not suffer as others do.  This dimension is rarely voiced.  Not only illogical, it is almost taboo.  In its most dramatic form, we may feel grateful for surviving when others have died.  For example, a man who barely escaped from his office building as the Twin Towers fell wrote about fleeing the city and then said: "Friends and strangers spoke in disbelieving tones about the number of people who must have died.  We felt a terrible gratitude for being alive."  Any of us who have been spared catastrophic loss when a person nearby has been devastated are at risk of an inescapable and shame-threatening flash of "terrible" gratitude and, even worse, our involuntary exclamation may attribute our good fortune to divine power: "thank God it wasn’t me."  This example of terrible gratitude defies every facile assertion about altruism and human relationality and keeps our feet firmly planted in the force of our instinct to survive.  It is evidence, not of our indifference to the suffering of others, but of our passion for life. This gratitude is a cause, not for shame, but for stewardship.

     At Thanksgiving, or whenever we seek socially responsible responses, the mystery of gratefulness offers countercultural practices that might freshen our spirits.  We can express thanks that gratitude is not cowed by suffering.  We can express compassion for those not lucky enough to be grateful.  We can express passion for life, through grateful stewardship of our privileges and powers.

 

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