An Attitude of Perpetual Thanksgiving

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In 2020 I will celebrate my second Thanksgiving in Italy. The previous year I was fortunate to be invited to two Thanksgiving dinners in Rome, both with American expats. As I shuffled between dinners, I noticed the obvious: for Italians, Thanksgiving was simply a regular Thursday. This is not to say that Italians are an unthankful lot, but rather that, as Americans, we are fortunate to have a national holiday dedicated to gratitude.

This idea of giving thanks is so ingrained in our culture that it endures by that name as a fixed holiday. Whereas in many academic and business circles “Christmas and Easter breaks” have been replaced by “winter and spring recesses,” Thanksgiving remains. This leads to the question: to whom do we give thanks, and for what?

While some give thanks to family, friends, or Mother Earth for all their blessings, as Christians, we give thanks to God for everything. What is often lacking, however, is a real awareness of what those blessings are.

Case in Point

Often, we give thanks to God for the things that we like and appreciate, but we give no more than that. I stumbled upon the incarnation of this superficial approach in a book of prayers of the faithful, tucked in a corner of our parish sacristy. Published by an important liturgical press, this saccharine attitude stands out in the book’s suggested intercessions for Thanksgiving Day. God’s most notable “gifts” include:

  • “The smell of new rain . . . and Snoopy . . . funny looking animals like giraffes and koalas and human beings”;
  • “Pay checks, and smoked ribs”;
  • “Perma-press, and stereo-headphones . . . seat belts . . . and red balloons”;
  • “The smell of leather . . . long hair and french [sic] fries and recycling centers.” (Prayers of the Faithful, Liturgical Press, 1990, 63.)

In honor of the book’s years of dutiful service as a place-holder and dust-gatherer, I recently retired it and rewarded it with a new life as a newspaper, coffee cup, or however else waste management will seek fit to reincarnate it. If books could give thanks, I am certain this tome would give thanks for recycling centers, as it is certainly receiving more use in its rejuvenated state.

In all seriousness, these intercessions reveal a common mentality that renders real thanksgiving impossible. Thomas Aquinas notes that to be grateful requires three things:

  • First, recognition of the favor received;
  • Second, an expression of appreciation and thanks, and then;
  • Third, repayment of the favor “at a suitable place and time according to one’s means” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 107, a. 2).

If we do not recognize the gifts we have received from God, then it is impossible to thank Him properly, and this is a serious matter.

The Certainty of Providence

 What is it that God gives us? A simple answer would be “everything”, but the more concrete approach is to consider God’s Providence, meaning, how He provides and cares for us.

 The word providence comes from the Latin pro – ahead, and videre – to see. God sees ahead of us, or, rather, in His eternity He sees all things as present. Aquinas says that God is “stationed as it were at the mountaintop of eternity” (Peri. Herm., 14, 20). We can think of mountain climbers who have reached the summit. As they look down from the heights, they see everything at once: the cars moving along the road, long stretches of trees blowing in the breeze, clouds over distant ranges.

What those in the valley experience as an isolated experience of reality, the climbers experience all together and at once. In this image, we catch a glimpse of how God sees the universe, although God’s vision extends even back to the past and beyond into the future.

Since God is not only all-knowing but also all-powerful, all-loving, and desirous of our salvation, He “orders all things sweetly” (as some translations of Wisdom 8:1 read; see also Romans 8:28) so that everything can help us get to heaven. This sweet ordering of all things, God’s Providence, is how He loves us and blesses us in everything. His is a constant watchfulness, an endless guidance and protection that provides for even the smallest of our concerns.

The Incomprehensibility of God’s Plans: Edith Stein

 In a world fraught with difficulties, Divine Providence and its governance of the universe is a tough sell. Yet, the prophet Isaiah reminds us that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8); we do not need to understand that something is good in order to be convinced that God has done it. Rather, we must trust that, because it is God who is at work, whatever happens is good in that it can direct me to God. God does not cause evil or approve of sin; He only permits these, and this because He will get a greater good from them than if He had used some other method.

This is not to deny human freedom; on the contrary, God gives us freedom as a gift and counts on us to use it. Rather, a belief in Divine Providence declares that God’s designs are not frustrated by human actions.

St. Edith Stein explains this in her masterpiece Finite and Eternal Being. As her thought wanders from the philosophical discourse, she notes that what makes sense to us is sometimes secondary in God’s designs, and what we see as meaningless is perhaps what God intends.

Positing the case of a student heading to a university to study a particular field seems reasonable enough to us, writes the saint. But that the student should meet someone “incidentally” enrolled at the same university, and “accidentally” have a conversation about the important things in life do not, on the surface, seem to be very intentional. She adds:

And yet when, many years later, I reflect upon my life, it becomes clear to me that this particular conversation turned out to be of decisive significance for my life, that it was perhaps more “essential” than all my studies so that now I am inclined to think that this encounter may have been “precisely the reason” why I “had to go” to that town. In other words, what did not lie in my plan lay in God’s plans. And the more often such things happen to me the more lively becomes in me the conviction of my faith that — from God’s point of view — nothing is accidental, that my entire life, even in the most minute details, was pre-designed in the plans of divine providence and is thus for the all-seeing eye of God a perfect coherence of meaning. Once I begin to realize this, my heart rejoices in anticipation of the light of glory in whose sheen this coherence of meaning will be fully unveiled to me. (Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, ICS Publications, 2002, 113.)

This might seem true enough for the great and small blessings of life, and perhaps even for the normal annoyances of daily life, the little struggles we face. But what about really bad things? What about things that, when we look at them, have no other explanation than human weakness and sinfulness?

Yes, even these things fall under God’s providence. Again, God does not cause these bad things to happen, but, if He permits them, it’s only because He will get a greater good from them than if He had used some other method.

The Difficult Cases: Clare Boothe Luce

Clare Boothe Luce was one of Fulton Sheen’s most celebrated converts. Coming from a very difficult family situation, she was constantly sad and melancholic. While serving as a congresswoman, her daughter was killed in a car accident. A few weeks afterwards, Fulton Sheen called her, asking to have dinner. Luce accepted, and after the enjoyable meal, as they got into the subject of religion, he said: “Give me five minutes to talk to you about God, and then I will give you an hour to state your own views.”

She agreed, but about the third minute, when he mentioned the goodness of God, she immediately bounded out of her chair, stuck her finger under his nose and said: “If God is good, why did He take my daughter?” He simply answered: “In order that through that sorrow, you might be here now starting instructions to know Christ and His Church.”

The response is honest with a sort of “pastorally insensitive” bluntness. Yet this is the harsh reality: God writes straight with crooked lines. It’s not that car accidents, cancer, or any number of painful experiences are good in themselves. What is good in them is that God reaches out to us through them, and draws good even out of the harshest realities. Oftentimes, in the moment we can’t see that; it’s only by trusting in God and His providence in the present, and then, later, looking back and seeing how God’s providence was at work, that this is possible.

Once we begin to see everything in light of God’s providence, we see how His love surrounds us at every moment and in all situations. Blessed Joseph Kentenich expressed this well by saying “[You must] swim practically day and night in the ocean of God’s benefits! This is important, for we are children to the extent that we know we are loved.” (Childlikeness before God, Schoenstatt, 2001, 112.) To really be childlike requires we see God’s hand in everything.

The Grateful Leper

Consider the Gospel for Thanksgiving Day, which recounts the healing of the ten lepers, and the return of only one to give thanks. Luke makes the point of telling us the one who returned “was a Samaritan,” a foreigner. The enmity between the Jews and Samaritans is well-documented, and it is unlikely that this Samaritan would have run into Jesus had it not been for his leprosy which pushed him out into the fringes of society.

In other words, his leprosy, which was clearly a cause of great suffering, was also the cause of his encounter with Jesus and his own salvation: “Your faith has saved you” (Luke 17:19). Luke tells us that the man returned to give thanks. He probably gave thanks for his healing, but he could also have given thanks to God who, in His Providence, sent him an illness that would lead to his salvation. In God’s eyes, everything has “a perfect coherence of meaning.”

A Real Thanksgiving

Only then, when we really come to see God’s hand at work in everything and everywhere, can we put into practice the truth St. Ignatius of Loyola presents at the end his Spiritual Exercises in his “Contemplation to Attain the Love of God.” After considering all of God’s goodness, all His many blessings, Ignatius writes “I will reflect upon myself, and consider, according to all reason and justice, what I ought to offer the Divine Majesty, that is, all I possess and myself with it” (234).

A proper thanksgiving to God means seeing all of His benefits and blessings, even in their disguises as annoyances, sorrows, and sufferings. Then, we can offer ourselves entirely to Him. This is truly gratitude towards God, an attitude of perpetual Thanksgiving.

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1 thought on “An Attitude of Perpetual Thanksgiving”

  1. Pingback: 2020: THE YEAR OF SEEING EVERYTHING CLEARLY | ROMAN CATHOLIC TODAY

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