Thanksgiving
In this month we as a country celebrate a national holiday, a holiday with decidedly religious overtones. We have developed a tradition, perhaps patterned after the celebration of the Native Americans and the early Pilgrim settlers, of bringing together persons of different ethnic, cultural and faith backgrounds to celebrate what all profess to be a shared religious attitude, an attitude of Thanksgiving. While the tradition for us as citizens of the United States of America began around an historical event, it was an event, which turned a tragedy into new life, in a sense. Through the discovery of new friends, the original Americans, the Pilgrims received they believed, by God’s grace, gifts from these new friends which helped them to establish their new colony.
What the Pilgrims have given us in a larger sense is an awareness and an experience, historically recorded, of how gratitude, in Thanksgiving for God’s gifts of life and new life, forms the basis of relationships, the basis of community, and is a mark of health. One writer makes the point that gratitude is the appropriate response to “gracious actions”, especially those actions unexpected or undeserved. Elie Wiesel said, “when a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or he attitude toward gratitude.” How does a person find gratitude, how does one develop thankfulness?
Gratitude, it is known psychologically, is just hard to hold on to over time. It can get mixed up with many motives. The patient thanks the doctor after the successful surgery and then the thankfulness fades over time. In counseling the offer of one more chance to correct patterns of relationship which are insincere or destructive may begin genuinely and then the destructive behaviors return. Perhaps this may be because the one who receives gratitude for a second chance forms a kind of dependency on the giver of the gratitude. If one does not feel worthy of the gift of gratitude that one will find ways to sabotage the gift. There is also a kind of false gratitude that can be manipulative. It can divert responsibility for one’s own behavior in the form of thanks for a favor, for bailing me out. Sadly these forms of unrequited gratitude or manipulative gratitude miss not only an opportunity to see the gift given but also may begin to weigh down one’s health.
A study not too long ago revealed that building up or cultivating gratitude could reduce the painful effects of anger or anxiety. This is not gratitude which is taught by saying, as one writer has put it, to tell someone in an angry tone that they have to be grateful for what they have. There is also a reverse envy approach to gratitude where one is thankful for not being as bad off as the other one. In another study where these two approaches to gratitude were compared with an approach to list something one is thankful for each day the group that was thankful had more energy, fewer health problems, and felt better about themselves than the other two groups.
An attitude of Thanksgiving may, in the final analysis, have to be learned and practiced. While it starts, often, in a genuine fashion, there are many demons that will tear away at it. Another pastoral psychotherapist offers these suggestions about developing an approach to life that is full of gratitude and thanksgiving. Keep a journal of what you are grateful for. Say thank you to those you love. In your prayer and meditation offer prayers of thankfulness. Have a place to go to for moments of gratitude, whether it be to your house of worship or to a home bulletin board on which are pictures of things for which you are thankful. The attitude of Thanksgiving is caught up in these words from Ralph Marston. “What if you gave someone a gift and they neglected to thank you for it –would you be likely to give them another? Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessing that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have.” Happily the believer knows that God does not look at life in the way of waiting for people to say thanks. That can also be the magic, or the gift of grace in relationships where efforts to live out gratitude become long term and not short lived. Thanksgiving is about life; your spiritual and emotional health depends on it.
This article originally appeared in the Farmington Observer.
Dr. Paul Melrose
