“Why should I give thanks on Thanksgiving?” wonders Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally in the 1973 animated classic, “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.” “I haven’t even finished eating all of my Halloween candy!”
I love that line. I chuckle every year. I appreciate the impulse to give each holiday it’s due time; I don’t disagree with Sally. But I also know that if my family waited until the last of the Halloween candy had been fully digested before turning our attention to turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes, we’d never give thanks at all.
To be honest, whether or not you’ve finished your ghost-themed KitKats and pumpkin-shaped Reese’s is actually quite beside the point. We’re all like Sally at times: looking for any excuse we can find to procrastinate, to put off a word of thanks, a disposition of gratitude.
I’ll be grateful just as soon as… Go ahead. Fill in the blank.
There are the mundane examples: putting off writing thank you notes after a birthday or sending that grateful text after a dinner party. We forget; we’ve got other things on our minds; we swear we’ll get around to it. There’s still a bucket of Halloween candy on our kitchen table, after all.
But there are more pernicious examples. I’ve not amounted to anything worthy of gratitude; I’ll wait until my big break. Why should I give thanks — or expect any thanks given — when I’m such dour company? It’s no longer a matter of forgetting or running out of time; we’re now judging ourselves — and others! — as unworthy of gratitude, unequal to the very task of being grateful.
That’s nonsense, of course: We are — all of us — worthy, good and the delight of our God Who Delights. The enemy of our human nature wants us to forget that essential truth and the God to whom that truth necessarily propels us. The enemy of our human nature does not want us to cultivate a disposition through which we look beyond ourselves. Gratitude, after all, necessitates another. Gratitude demands we recognize that we are not reliant solely on ourselves, that we are in community, and that we follow a God who showers us with graces.
The enemy of our human nature would prefer we believe we’re on our own and that we ourselves are all that matter. We have no one to thank and no need to be grateful if we have made of ourselves little gods.
Here’s the thing: We live in a very challenging moment. And there’s another — quite understandable — hurdle to our giving thanks. “There are too many terrible things unfolding all around us,” we may say. “What business have we being grateful at a time like this?”
Fair enough. And yet, gratitude is foundational to our spiritual lives — St. Ignatius himself believed as much. And so I wonder, is this timely impulse another trick of the enemy of our human nature, an effort to overwhelm and demoralize us, to poison our relationship with God and one another?
If gratitude is needed to enter more deeply into God’s own self, then anything that causes gratitude to whither in our souls is not of God.
Ignatian spirituality, of course, challenges us to find God in all things; that means all things are worth of our gratitude. God dwells in the common and small as much as in the extraordinary and immense.
These are difficult times. And yet, God remains. God’s Spirit continues to urge us on into community, toward a world that is more just, compassionate and inclusive. Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving this week or not, don’t let anything stop you from being grateful. Do all you can to cultivate a spirit of thanksgiving in your heart and in those of others.
That proverbial Halloween candy can wait.
