I have been cheerfully enjoying my time off this past week. Thanksgiving is the official start of my favorite Holiday season. We start putting up lights...we will make the trek down the street to the Christmas tree farm a block from our house, to get a tree to put up, and I will climb up into the storage space to get our our decorations.
It is easy to simply enjoy the season, and not really reflect on what it means. Still, this is a season sparked with a celebration of thanks, marked by the waiting of advent, and culminating in the joy of the Christ-mas.
Giving thanks is a funny thing; it is rather like apologizing, in that it acknowledges a gift, perhaps even a debt, and grace from someone else on our behalf.
My wife tells me that I am quick to apologize...and I think that this is mostly true. My parents raised me to have a certain amount of humility about my choices and actions; something that is helpful when you make the kind of mistakes that I do. One of the pleasant results of that has been that I do frequently willingly embrace the burden of apologizing. I do sometimes wonder if I am too compliant...but I am convinced that it is safer to be compliant than stubborn, generally.
This is not to say that I am always humble or compliant...I do not always apologize first. One of the lessons of marriage I have had to learn is that, generally, fights last exactly as long as we refuse to make peace, and peace starts with someone being willing to admit fault. It is fair to say I don't like admitting I am wrong, even though if you know my wife, you can probably guess that I frequently am wrong. It's always easy to apologize when there's no skin on the line...when your pride is in the game (as it usually is in marital arguments), the words "I'm sorry" can seem almost impossible to conjure.
I mention all of this because, as I said earlier, I think giving thanks is very similar to apologizing. Sometimes it is simple and easy; who really cares about saying "thank you" when someone holds the door open for you, or when someone gives you the right of way on the road?
But life is rarely simple...how do we humble ourselves to acknowledge God's blessing, and credit not our own cunning as the source of our prosperity?
Or, as is increasing common in these times, many people feel less blessed and more stressed. In many instances, our skin is on the line; our credit, our investments, our livelihood...how do we give thanks to God for circumstances that don't seem to favor us? How do we acknowledge God's providence when it makes so very little sense from our perspective? In the midst of pain, fear, stress, how do we say, "Thanks be to God"?
If our thanks is based only on our personal experience, the answer is we don't say it very much at all. If our thanks is centered on our perspective, unless this year has been a year free of pain, filled with easy riches, and unfettered by the weight of the concerns of the wide world, we have little to be thankful for; after all, this is a hard time: people are dying and suffering, may of us are facing questionable financial futures, and it is all very stressful. Hope and change may be coming (it remains to be seen) but the reason so many people blindly leapt out into the void for the chance that Obama might be unlike every other politician is because we are exhausted and overwhelmed by all of our present circumstances. We need a tomorrow that is different from today, because today has been very disappointing...and yesterday wasn't much better.
How can the Lord call us to be at peace in the midst of this Winter of discontent?
I started writing this blog the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and became distracted by the holiday. Since then I have returned to class and have been teaching my 8th graders about the Greeks and their understanding of the world. I've mentioned a few times how much I am enjoying these classes, connecting them to the origins of their culture, the legacy of their heritage as citizens of the West. Yesterday the lesson concerned the way that the Greeks perceived history and the future; by and large, the Greeks were hopeless. For the Greeks, yesterday was better than today, and tomorrow will be worse still. The Hope that came out of Pandora's box wasn't a promise of a better tomorrow; it was the last cruel joke of the gods as they unleashed death, disease, suffering and pain on men. In almost every Greek myth, whenever circumstances have the chance of working out and people living happily ever after, you learn quickly that they almost never will.
This was a concept that my students didn't quite grasp (a fact that did my heart good). Of course, this is because they are Christians. We reflected on this reality in class, that unlike the fathers of the West, we had come to know a Hope that is not a cheat, that will not disappoint.
As we enter the Advent season, waiting for the promise of Christmas, and the coming of salvation from a God who did not create us to torment us, but to reveal His goodness to us, and many friends and relatives are sending notice that this year they will be foregoing the tradition of giving gifts, we have a unique opportunity to reflect on how the Christian life is bountiful regardless of the abundance of our bank accounts, or the presents under the tree. Let us give thanks, not based on our personal experiences, but as a result of our recognition of the hope that we have in tomorrow, and the ultimate hope that eternity's horizon promises to make known to us.
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