Attitude Adjustment
And are we yet alive? What a strange thing to ask, especially during Thanksgiving week. It’s actually a song title that has been on my mind while preparing this essay. Usually set to the tune of Blest Be the Tie That Binds, it is but one of Charles Wesley’s vast outpouring of spiritual verse. Charles and brother John were tireless in their efforts to enliven the Anglican Church of the 18th century. Disparagingly called “methodists”, their organizational acumen and reforming energy helped ignite the awakening fires that swept our country in the 1700 and 1800s, putting a distinctively Protestant stamp on our culture.
One stanza in particular may be key in understanding this sacred holiday:
What troubles have we seen, what mighty conflicts past,
fightings without, and fears within, since we assembled last!
At first glance this may seem like a crying-in-our-beer, stein-raising toast from the lips of battle-hardened soldiers. Hardly what I’d expect to be on our minds, or prayerfully chanted around sumptuously-filled Thanksgiving tables. For us, this is the moment of our most anticipated and enjoyable family reunion of the year. By the time the china and silverware are set, the turkey is sliced, and our olfactory overload has us salivating—we will have no room for such troubling thoughts or discouraging words. And if we do shed a few tears this week, they will rise up from our joy in being reunited once again with those people to whom we feel most connected in spirit and name.
Unlike few other holidays, Thanksgiving holds place as the warmest and most treasured of all for so many of us. It draws us into a reverential ethos about our families, our faith, and our country that no other holidays can quite match. And it has worked its magic on us from our very beginnings as a nation.
We hear it in the pilgrim witness of one Edward Winslow, whose 1621 recollections give us our oldest impression of the first Thanksgiving:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors…At which time…many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted…And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
This account has inspired many romanticized depictions of an Eden-like gathering of native and immigrant peoples. Yet it didn’t mention the 47 deaths that reduced the Plymouth colony to 55 survivors that first winter, nor the underlying enmity felt by those who broke bread together. How thankful could they have been when so many of their company were sick or dying, and their future so uncertain? Yet Winslow talks of rejoicing in the face of God’s goodness. How? What kind of people were they? And are we yet ALIVE?
We read it in George Washington’s proclamation from October, 1789:
I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being…That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks…for the…favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly …for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed…
Why our first president would make such a declaration after eight years of war, in the midst of militant divisiveness between patriots and loyalists, during a time when partisan strife between Federalists and Republicans was as ugly and vicious as anything we are now witnessing—defies my ability to fathom. And are WE yet alive?
Whatever the Father of our Country was thinking must have resonated with Abraham Lincoln, who, 74 years later, in October 1863, issued this proclamation:
The year that is drawing towards its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added…In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,…No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things…It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens… to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
How could our 16th president—who suffered through a year where unnumbered American lives hallowed the ground on which they fell at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Jackson, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg—how could he speak of blessings and bounty in this bloodiest year in our entire history? And are we YET alive?
America has endured, against all odds, sustained by determination, grit, and gratitude. And at every turn, we have found a way to be thankful. While observed at different times since Washington’s 1789 decree, Thanksgiving was finally solemnized as a national holiday when Congress, with signatory endorsement from President Franklin Roosevelt, issued H. J. Res 41 on October 6, 1941. Designating the last Thursday of November, our lawmakers soon realized that calendric necessity favored the fourth Thursday of November, as it has remained ever since. Fittingly, they amended the date just two days after Pearl Harbor and our entrance into World War II. Perhaps that says it all, about us, and being thankful. We ARE yet alive!
This week we will once again enjoy the bounty of an American Thanksgiving. We will speak our minds, think Thanksgiving thoughts, and pursue our happiness as benefactors of a dream first imagined in a forested clearing in New England four centuries ago. Many of us will bow our heads in prayer. But will we be thankful? We are certainly the recipients of our civilization’s prosperity that has provided us with creature comforts and luxuries known only to the wealthiest and most privileged in earth’s long history. That should make us overjoyed with gratitude, if not to a benevolent Creator then at least for the good fortune of our birth as Americans. But I’m not sensing that a thankful spirit accurately describes our current mood or national temperament. So many of us seem angry, irritated, and cynical. So many are more ready to grab a rock, holster a firearm, or toss a Molotov than we are to extend a hand in friendship or clasp both hands in prayer.
There is something rather ironic and profoundly counterintuitive about how and when we have been most moved to express thanksgiving in our history. As the documents I’ve cited so clearly confirm, this sentiment has arisen, not in times of abundance and prosperity, but when we were most overwhelmed by hardships and privations. And that underscores for me what I believe is an axiom of human gratitude: the essence of being thankful is attitudinal, not circumstantial.
If beauty really does reside in the eye of the beholder, than it is just as certain that being thankful depends, not in the good fortune or even luck we may enjoy in good times, but in the perspective of gratitude we bring to each and every circumstance, whether favorable or unfortunate. When someone compliments us or even bestows on us a welcomed kindness or unexpected gift, we usually say “thanks” in reflexive response. This is both polite and expected. We feel good being noticed, included. Yet, in that very moment of attention, who among us doesn’t start calculating what we’ll need to do in return to square the ledger with this benefactor. And if we are bean counters at heart, we may even wander down green avenues of envy in comparing what others received that were rightfully ours. It is upon such reckoning of favors and slights that so many of our judgments of fairness, justice and equity are constructed.
Being thankful comes for somewhere else, some other part of our being. I say this because it seems to depend, not on what happens to us, but on a particular attitude we bring to reading and interpreting the changing circumstances of life. Thankful people try to take things as they come, weighing both the highs and lows of existence on a scale that accepts both as part of life’s changing landscape. Thankful people are inclined to look for kindness, to recognize benevolence and to expect fairness in people and situations before any of those qualities are confirmed in words and deeds. When thanksgiving is attitudinal it has staying power that keeps the best of times and worst of times in perspective. I’d go so far to say that a thankful attitude is more likely to be found among those who have known hardship, struggle and sacrifice than it will be evident among those accustomed to privilege, indulgence and ease. American history certainly bears this out, helping explain why our leaders were moved to proclaim Thanksgiving, not in eras of prosperity and bounty, but in times when things were most agonizing and uncertain.
This Thursday, November 25, 2021, should be a day of thanks in your life and mine. It just may be if we bring to it that perspective, that attitude of gratitude that emerges when we accept life for what it is and what it isn’t. It most certainly can be if we are willing to accept each other, and ourselves, for who we are and who we are not. And it surely will be if we accept the fact that life holds no guarantees of fairness or success, and that nothing and no one of value and meaning to us should ever be taken for granted. With that kind of attitude, perhaps we will be able to add AND WE ARE YET ALIVE, to our Thanksgiving song list, and even sing it from time to time with both feeling and meaning.
Happy thanksgiving!
