Dear reader,
I blinked and Thanksgiving is upon us. Despite being outside of the U.S., we’ve been able to celebrate this holiday—one of my favourites!—each year with turkey and our traditional side dishes. As we prepare for a feast with friends next week, I realised that I’m late in creating our family’s “Thanksgiving tree” this year. I’ve made this tree since my oldest was little. It’s taken different forms, but most recently is simply a tree I cut out of paper and stick to the wall, decorating it with paper leaves that name particular things we are thankful for. It has helped keep me focused when the shops and catalogs are already stirring up the Christmas frenzy.
My tardiness in creating our Thanksgiving tree represents a failure in my own heart this year. I know I have been slow to offer thanks for what we have received. In part, it’s a deep sense of lack—of feeling that, especially through lockdowns and border closures, our days have not turned out as we had desired. The door closed on things we had hoped to do. We have a long list of people who we long to see. And so, I find myself surprised that Thanksgiving is almost here, and wondering how to begin putting my heart in order—how to begin what I should have been doing all along.
In Norman Wirzba’s book From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Loving and Understanding Our World, he writes that giving thanks is a sign that we have perceived God’s love. We cannot perceive God’s love, nor give thanks as a result, unless we pay attention. Perhaps I could add here that sometimes the failure is not a lack of attention, but what we have chosen to give our attention to. This year, I can identify an attentiveness directed at what I lack, what is missing. I’ve been attentive, but I’ve narrowed the scope of my attentiveness. In this narrowing, I have missed many opportunities to perceive God’s love and so give thanks.
Wirzba opens the act of gratitude even further. He argues that “Insofar as we lack the appropriate attention and humility, and thereby do injury to the integrity of others, confession and asking for forgiveness will be abiding elements in any expression of gratitude we offer...there is no giving of thanks that is not at the same time a request for forgiveness and a petition to be instructed in the ways of love.” I’m challenged, here, both in my general lack of gratitude and also the depth of the expressions of gratitude that I do offer. In my giving thanks, do I recognise my neediness?
This kind of gratitude is more, of course, than the “pious, verbal gesture” of thanks that we make easily, learned as it is from childhood. Instead, Wirzba says, thanksgiving leads us “into a transformed understanding of the world as a place of encounter with God’s love.” This world, alive as it is through the sustaining love of God, makes God’s love known to us. And while it has also become a place groaning under the curse, a curse that results in dashed hopes, broken relationships, disease, and death, the curse does not overwhelm God’s love. It is there, even though it may be hiding from our inattentive and ungrateful eyes. When we offer thanks, we train ourselves to perceive God’s love in the world.
Henry Ossawa Tanner / The Thankful Poor / 1894 /Oil on canvas
I love Henry Ossawa Tanner’s depiction here of these two giving thanks. I’ve only got a few gray hairs right now, but it’s not too difficult to put myself into the old man’s shoes—to see how giving thanks is not only about my own heart and relationship to God and others, but also a way of modeling a posture for my children and other younger generations. If giving thanks is something we learn to do, we need as many faithful guides as possible.
This month I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Bilbro’s new book Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News. In a world that considers being well-informed a virtue, putting limits on how much news we consume feels irresponsible. But Bilbro plots a different course: advocating for a “holy apathy” that cares deeply about the issues to which God has called us, and focuses our love on those who are particularly close to us, whether in place, time, or other circumstances. I’m trying to figure out what this might look like for me, especially as I often feel my attention stretched between the U.S. and Australia.
My C.S. Lewis classes are winding down, and one of my sections has just finished That Hideous Strength. One of the themes I’ve noticed throughout Lewis as I’ve spent the last few months with his writing is his insistence that our bodily life is good. Christian theology has often been ambivalent about the body, but Lewis’ depiction of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) shows so clearly the danger of rejecting the goodness of the body. N.I.C.E. enacts the view of Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters: that our bodies are “degrading” to the spiritual world. God’s judgement of very good declares otherwise.
Giver of all,
...I thank thee for the temporal blessings of this world—
the refreshing air,
the light of the sun,
The food that renews strength,
the raiment that clothes,
the dwelling that shelters,
the sleep that gives rest,
the starry canopy of night,
the summer breeze,
the flowers’ sweetness,
the music of flowing streams,
the happy endearments of family, kindred, friends.
Things animate, things inanimate, minister to my comfort.
My cup runs over.
Suffer me not to be insensible to these daily mercies.
Thy hand bestows blessings: thy power averts evil.
I bring my tribute of thanks for spiritual graces,
the full warmth of faith,
the cheering presence of thy Spirit,
the strength of thy restraining will,
thy spiking of hell’s artillery.
Blessed be my Sovereign Lord!
- from The Valley of Vision, “Evening Praise”
On the road with you,
Laura