There are spiritual dimensions to every person’s life that are not well understood. Perhaps most men and women do not believe in applied spirituality as a general and pervasive reality, but there is abundant evidence that it is practical, functional and beneficial. There is a spirituality principle, even in a generally humanistic context that adds benefit to human life. Some persons invoke a belief in thanksgiving who do not believe in any divine power achieved by it. Some psychologists contend that if one cannot believe in God, he or she should fake an active belief in thanksgiving for personal life, and useful in general society. Pretending is not always destructive even if devious.
Thanksgiving, we learn, is a spiritual principle applied to practical life. Studies show that thankful persons are better off than unthankful ones – to both believers and unbelievers in God. There is some mystery to it, as there is for much that comes from God. On a lengthy auto trip I surfed the radio, and happened upon a secular talk show on which the host was trying to use the thanksgiving season to discover how persons responded to the matter of life appreciation. The program did not relate to religion. I was intrigued about the idea – human thanksgiving as a meaningful issue in secular life. The host recited some of the research provided to him, about thanksgiving. He said that thankful persons were healthier, lived longer, were happier than unthankful, and, that fullness of happiness would not likely be present in unthankful persons. He added that he had not known of any happy friend or family member who was not thankful, and he found them to be less arrogant or self-preoccupied. In lengthy narrative, he embellished these and other positives he found in thankful people. I stayed with his program through long miles.
After numerous tries he gave up on his effort to get affirmative responses from callers to his point. Persons called asking, somewhat angrily, what they had to be thankful for with the ill treatment their forefathers experienced in slavery and general disrespect of personhood. Callers whose forefathers were treated badly in the Indian tragedies of the 1800s openly wondered if the host of the program was kidding. For what did they have to give thanks? There was a strong emphasis on a Seattle school executive who had issued a letter to teachers that Thanksgiving was a day of sadness and mourning. She would communicate some of that forcefully to the students.
The callers missed the point of thanksgiving, as did the Seattle executive. Thanksgiving is a personal attitude not to be interpreted by the tragedies of history, but to what makes life worth living, worth that high opinion of life and orientation that accrues to an individual who is thankful. Thankfulness is addressed often in Scriptures. King David apparently wrote many of the Psalms during the dark hours of the night. The nighttime brought emotional lows for him. He wrote of wakefulness, of tears, of revenge for enemies, but in all the distress he felt driven to thanksgiving. Apparently that virtue helped him through some ugliness and periods of revenge. The Apostle Paul wrote in the same pattern, giving thanks after reciting dismal personal circumstances. In all he survived. He was thankful to God for whatever impositions if only he might be serving for good to others. He found meaning for good in it all. Without a thankful spirit one shrinks in this life, and goes somewhat self-wounded into the next. If I were asked for my evidences of God, one of them would be the giving of thanks. Why does the attitude, the orientation, the prayer make so much difference for good in persons, and the absence indicate reduction of some of that good? Here is evidence of something. I suspect it is evidence of God’s blessing. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020