I have a confession to make, and I might not be alone. As a kid, I hated gathering around the thanksgiving dinner table because it meant we had to say out-loud something we were grateful for. To be honest, as an adult, I don’t like it all that much better. I know criticizing being thankful on thanksgiving is not a very popular thing to do…I’m not actually a grump. There are plenty of things I’m grateful for. I’m grateful for people that have been influential, who have taught me, counseled me, loved me, and given me innumerable gifts. If someone does something for me, I appreciate it, and I’m quick to thank them. But forcing gratitude, like forcing any feeling…isn’t honest…isn’t real.
It’s been at least 25 years that I’ve been hearing about the practice of journaling your gratitude. It’s said that consciously cultivating gratitude can confer emotional and physiological advantages – more content, more optimistic, less selfish, better able to defer gratification, and even a sounder sleeper. Maybe. But “count your blessings in order that you’ll have more of them” is a bit iffy as justifications go,
Alfie Kohn, in his article on gratitude, says, “Look at it this way: If there’s something wrong with being perpetually sour and discontent, (I think we’d say there might be) why wouldn’t we also object to erring in the opposite direction? If we think those who are constantly complaining should take stock of what they have and quit their whining, why not push the habitually happy to contemplate what isn’t satisfactory, to express displeasure when doing so is the apt response to a given turn of events? And if their own lives really are a nonstop delight, couldn’t they summon some indignation on behalf of all those humans whose lives are exponentially more dismal?”
Is there not a shadow side of every gratitude?
- For every opulent feast with far too much food we give thanks for, there are those who won’t have even a simple meal.
- For the gratitude of our many comforts and priveleges: our homes, our easy transport, our settler attitudes, there are those who can never go home, and find themselves walking for their lives to a foreign land they’re unsure to find welcome.
- For every gratitude we share for work, for health, for economic growth, for retirement funds, there are systems that have worked in our favour to ensure those blessings, and there are those for whom the system equally excludes.
On the last Thursday of November 1931, about 200 people gathered near Union Square in New York City for what was billed as the First Annual Blamesgiving Service. “While others are expressing their gratefulness for the good things of the past year,” their leaflet said, “there can be no harm in making a similar list of things that were not so good.”
Is it not better to see things as they really are — and respond accordingly — than it is to adopt one prescriptive reaction on a particular day, or any day? Neither an Eeyore nor a Tigger be.
And so it’s with this lens that we can approach the old, old parable of the workers.
With thanks to John Dominic Crossan (First Light Reader LtQ):
It is harvest time in the vineyards and a landowner goes to the marketplace to hire day laborers. But instead of hiring all he needed at once, he went out five times—at 6am, 9am, 12 noon, 3pm, and 5pm. (I think you can already sense a comment coming on his character in just that.)
At the end of the day, all alike are given a full day’s wage – whether they worked all day or just an hour. They grumble immediately about the landowner’s injustice. And we’ve tended to focus on that problem of personal and individual justice or injustice. Was it fair? Was the owner equitably generous or provocatively condescending? And in focusing there, we do not focus elsewhere.
But think about this interchange: “About five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here doing nothing all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard’” How would Jesus’ listeners—especially poor day-laborers—have responded to that interaction? Would nobody from the audience have objected to such a blatant blaming the victim? Would nobody have protested that looking for work all day was not laziness?
In hearing this story, should we not have the same questions? Questions about the difference between personal and individual injustice as compared to systemic or structural injustice? Why did it happen mysteriously that, even at high harvest in the vineyards when labor should have cost top dollar (or top denarius), day-laborers were still looking for work at the end of the day? And, of course, the owner knew that situation full well since he had tried all day to have just the amount of labor needed and no more. He knew he could go out as late as 5pm and still find workers. How did things happen just as the landowners wanted?
This is not a story with the theme of “Just shut up and be grateful for what you have.” This is a story that pushes back on a first century farming culture, and on our 21st century consumer culture by asking, or maybe demanding, that our gratitude ask deep and important things of us:
Listen again to how Alice major depicts that kind of systemic sickness:
In the city of the poor, irrationals drop from the number line. Eyes swivel to avoid the man debating with a devil- a delirium of air that blocks his private trapezoid of pavement. The roots of negative numbers are called imaginary by politicians. In the city of the poor, no one demonstrates. There is no proof.
When we come face to face with the comforts in life, like on a day devoted to the awareness of what is good in life…the questions of what isn’t so good elbow themselves in.
One of the best questions along the spiritual path is “so what?” but a very close second is WHO BENEFITS? Who benefits when we’re persuaded to live life according to the economic drivers that push to define us? Who benefits when we give our personal data away? Who benefits when we acquiesce to our identity as consumers? Who benefits when we simply live with and deal with injustices as “just the way it is”?
Jon Hanson, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes, “The norm of Thanksgiving seems to be to encourage a particular kind of gratitude — a generic thankfulness for the status quo. Indeed,” he adds, “when one looks at what many describe as the true meaning of the holiday, the message is generally an announcement that current arrangements — good and bad — [are what they are, and we must find the good and be happy with what we have]”.
It’s worth asking about the uses to which gratitude is put, the questions it quiets, the interests it serves. We can appreciate a welcome development and thank those who make our lives more satisfying — and still offer a realistic appraisal of what isn’t worth celebrating.
It’s thanksgiving. Let’s not ruin it, Chris. Indeed, let’s be grateful for all that is. This planet, this world, this life is a wonder. Let’s be aware of that, not take it for granted, list them, even. But I wonder if this the year we add to that list… we add what it is that needs to change, what costs our decisions have on others; we add to our list what we’re mad about and what is deeply unjust. Maybe we can let our gratitude move us to an awareness that someone else is in pain? And that we can help. That this day and the meal we celebrate it with will be just the energy we need to get up from the table to speak and to act.
Won’t that be a day… when everyone can really and truly give thanks?
-Chris New
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