About 4 am on Thanksgiving Eve, I sent a text message to my husband at work that said, “I changed my mind…I think we should drag our butts out of bed and go give thanks as a family…”
Well, if that statement is any sort of transparent, it was a long haul to get to Thanksgiving. The long and short of it is that my ungrateful spirit was a manifestation of failed expectations yet again. If I had it my way, my husband would work days, my son would sleep nights; I would have a master’s degree and a best-selling novel; I would be Jane Fonda in the gym and Martha Stewart in the kitchen. I would have the perfect body and my biggest struggles would be bad hair days and morning breath.
I just heard a radio broadcast lamenting holiday commercialization and the fact that Thanksgiving has become more about gluttony and football than actually giving thanks. Well, to be perfectly honest, I can see why…giving thanks, being grateful is HARD. When my perfect life vision streams through my head like a shiny Black Friday commercial, looking around at my actual life can sometimes feel like the Land of Misfit toys…
My husband is tired, my son is fussy, my kitchen smells like rotten eggs, my house and my yard look like ground zero, and despite the hundreds of dollars of I dumped into fixing it, something is still wrong with my car. And, around me, strained relationships abound, the government is feuding, the economy crashing.
Why should I give thanks again?
Why can’t life be like internet shopping where I can just return everything I didn’t order? Then I would be happy; then I could be grateful.
And yet, when I think about the iconic first Thanksgiving (however fictionalized my mental portrait may be), it was probably no rosy-eyed picnic of shiny belt-buckle hats and fluffy feathers, either. Those attending were probably either freezing their British buns off or sweating from syphilis, trying to ignore who was having affairs with whom and trying to cut tension tougher than the turkey. And yet, as the story goes, they gave thanks anyway.
The lesson? If I’m waiting for life to be perfect to be grateful, I’ll never be grateful a day in my life.
I recently listened to a podcast by Fr. Thomas Hopko where he quoted the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann,
Everyone capable of gratitude is capable of salvation and everlasting joy.
Fr. Hopko went on to say,
Hell is the absence of gratitude. Heaven is nothing but gratitude.
Fr. Hopko described gratitude as the mark of the Christian life. We need to be grateful for EVERYTHING…not only what we perceive as good, but even those things which do not seem overtly good…because God makes ALL things in this wacky world work for the good…even though I don’t—or can’t— understand how He does it.
So, on Thanksgiving Day, my husband and I rolled out of bed after very little sleep and packed our son into the car to go to my mother-and-law’s to give thanks for everything from our sleepy spouses right down to the burnt roast beast in our smelly kitchen.
I recently read a quote by St. Teresa of Avila,
Thank God for the things I do not own.
The truth of the matter is, despite my American sense of entitlement, I do not own ANYTHING. All is a gift, a grace, and therefore, all should be counted in gratitude.
So, as many times as I can pull my head out of my butt, I will be thankful for the daily muck and “imperfections” of life that give me a reason to strive, to carry on, to live. I will be thankful for the Land of Misfit Toys that makes me hungry for heaven…instead of attaining a Black Friday Fantasy Land that would bind me to this weary world.
I will be thankful for the difficulty of gratitude…because it makes me appreciate the compassionate God who mercifully judges thankless wretches like me.
