Thanksgiving
is here.
The concept of Thanksgiving is
pregnant with ideas that remain undetected by the vast majority of people who
annually celebrate this holiday. Unlike Christmas and Easter, say, which,
despite the secularization to which they’ve been subjected, are still regarded
by atheists and agnostics as specific to Christianity and, thus, (too)
“religious,” Thanksgiving is typically thought to be inherently secular, a day
that everyone can and should celebrate.
This, however, is a fundamental
misconception of Thanksgiving.
The concept of giving thanks
presupposes a relationship between a giver and a receiver. And when the
thanks expressed are given for the totality of good
things in one’s life, the giver thanked is the Giver, God.
So, first of all, the notion of Thanksgiving implies the existence of
God: In giving thanks for our families, health, jobs, friends,
quality of life, and so forth, it must and can only be a being capable of and
willing to give us these things that we intend to thank.
And this brings us to the next implication
of Thanksgiving:
The God to whose existence Thanksgiving
inescapably points is not the God of the Philosophers, the pantheistic
Substance of Spinoza, say, or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Nor is it anything
like Plato’s Form of the Good.
No, the God implied by
Thanksgiving is deeply, profoundly, unabashedly personal. Only
persons give thanks and only persons deserve thanks.
It’s true, of course, that we not infrequently imbue impersonal entities with
anthropomorphic qualities and speak as if we owe
them thanks: We may “thank” “the universe” for that job promotion, or those who
have survived being lost at sea may “thank” the ocean for having “let them go.”
But it takes just a little bit of clear thinking for us to see that these are
just figurative ways of speaking.
Literally speaking,
it is persons alone who deserve to be shown gratitude.
Hence, in
thanking God, we thank a God who created us in His own image, a God who is
personal.
More specifically, the God
who we thank, this Being who is at once capable of and willing to bestow upon
us innumerable blessings, is a Being whose power and love must be limitless, for only an omnipotent and
omnibenevolent actor could supply us with all for which we give thanks.
Third, the conception of God endorsed,
whether consciously or not, by Americans and Canadians—and these are, if I’m
not mistaken, the only two peoples on the planet who observe a holiday which
they call “Thanksgiving”—is peculiar to the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet there are at least two reasons, one
historical, the other theological, for seeing behind the concept, history, and
practice of Thanksgiving a distinctively Christian vision of God:
(1)Historically,
America and Canada have been Christian countries. Those who founded them
were overwhelmingly Christian and, to this day, Christians continue to compose
the majority of the population in both places. Undeniably, it is the
Christian notion of God that they had in mind when they decided to reserve a
day for the giving of thanks.
(2)The celebration of
Thanksgiving is, ultimately, the celebration of a Giver who, from boundless
love, bestows endless blessings upon everyone. All
people, irrespectively of nation or tribe, owe their Benefactor an eternal debt
of gratitude for the countless ways in which He has favored them. While
Christianity grew out of Judaism, and while Judaism is, of course,
monotheistic, Christianity parts ways with its predecessor or, at the very
least, advances beyond it in two, and two mutually related, respects:
(a)Christianity repeatedly
and explicitly equates God with Love. Judaism too recognizes God’s loving
nature, but it is Christianity that pursued the reasoning of divine love to its
logical and theological climax, with God
giving all of Himself through His Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection from
the dead.
(b)Unlike Judaism, with its
focus on a specific people, Christianity
affirms the unique individuality of
each person by way of its offer of Salvation. Christ’s
Death and glorious Resurrection were meant to reconcile humanity with God. It is the individual,
from the Christian vantage point, that must accept Jesus.
It is
through the Self-Giving of God in Christ that everyone learns as fully as
anyone can learn what it means to both give and receive. The acts of
giving and receiving are inseparable, the giver and receiver united
inextricably by an indissoluble bond.
This bond the Roman Catholic
cleric David Steindl-Rast identifies as…gratitude.
On
Thanksgiving, we are reminded of the metaphysical fact that the cosmos is not a
self-sufficient mess of matter and we are not random combinations of physical
particles.
As we gather around the dinner table
with family and friends, we are reminded that ultimate reality is spiritual,
that there exists an all-powerful, all-loving God who did indeed make us in His
image and Who continually blesses us with all manner of good things.
Thanksgiving is an occasion to remind
us that human beings are mutually-dependent upon one another as givers and
receivers.
It reminds us that the world is one, a
gift of which we all partake and that we continue to renew.
Thanksgiving, importantly, reminds us
of a neglected virtue, the virtue of gratitude, and how it unites us with the
Ground of our existence and supplies the key to a flourishing human life.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
