Thoughts On Giving Thanks
On this day of thanksgiving, it seems worth our time to reflect on the virtue of gratitude. It typically doesn’t occupy a high place on our taxonomy of virtues, but it is in many ways one of the most essential virtues, for it disposes us to the whole world and its inhabitants around us. We intuit its importance when we consider how much effort parents expend in trying to teach it to their children.
If a generation succeeds at anything it ought to be the communication and development of virtue among the next. As parents we will use example and rhetoric as means of communicating gratitude, but at a certain point – oh, let’s say the teenage years – parental rhetoric loses a lot of its force. We can use the more coercive tools at our disposal, especially the denial of privileges such as use of the car, but such denials can give rise to resentment, which may be thought of as the opposite of gratitude. So the problem remains: how do we break through the shell of entitlement and narcissism that seems typical of our age and help young people realize they live in a world which owes them nothing, but to which they owe their diligent concern?
Our children have been raised in a world where our voices easily get lost in the cacophony of competing claims to their attentions. Childhood TV characters repeatedly tell our children how special they are; schools seem singularly directed toward building their self-esteem; culture leaders such as Disney tell them they can be whatever they want to be; our entertainment-industrial complex reinforces the belief that any impulse of passion young people have is self-justifying. A young person who wants to spend a summer doing nothing but indulging him- or herself no longer looks remarkable. And all these inhibit the cultivation of gratitude.
I suspect part of the problem is a surfeit of misdirected love, one directed inward and not outward, and thus one not capable of gratitude. I am reminded here of the complaint of Nietzsche’s madman upon proclaiming the death of God in the public square: they do not recognize the death of God, and yet they have done it themselves. Could it be that we elders find ourselves in the situation where we don’t recognize the death of gratitude in our children, and yet we have done it ourselves? How are we complicit in this killing? How have we either explicitly or implicitly subsidized the aspects of character that result in entitlement and not gratitude?
I think part of the problem is that a technological society such as ours not only lessens our sense of dependence upon one another but also is so filled with sound that it doesn’t create spaces for reflection. Death as well as life is swallowed up in noise. We don’t know, or what’s worse seek to know, the measure of our days, and thus miss out on the fundamental wisdom of our existence: that we are passing through, and the awareness of this fills us not with despair but with gratitude. Even though we will someday not be, we never had to have been. Without a realization of this mystery of being, we cannot begin to cultivate the virtues of gratitude and service. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great rabbinical scholar, gets at this in the following passage:
To pray is to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time? Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers – wiser than all alphabets – clouds that die constantly for the sake of God’s glory. We are hating, haunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how presumptuous our doings! Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift or our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great!But where are our moments of silence, of meditation, of prayer? Where do we contemplate our haunted and hurting nature as creatures incomplete and lost without a love and grace underserved?
Meditation and prayer create space in our lives for thankfulness, such as when we pray before a meal — a reminder of our dependence on others and that we shouldn’t take for granted the bounty we enjoy. These spaces are essential to developing a disposition of gratitude. I think this is where we have failed the next generation. We have always “filled” the space in our children’s lives with endless activities, technological distractions, and self-fulfillment directed around what they want to be. Heaven forfend our children should ever have moments of quiet: we sign them up to highly organized ball teams or other athletic events. I’ve long thought we’ve had a price to pay for how structured our children’s lives have become – what David Brooks called the advent of the organizational kid. The spontaneity of play in a close community – my brothers and I gathering the neighborhood kids to go to the park to hit the ball around – has been replaced by a highly organized game under constant adult supervision. What sorts of citizens will these young people become? How servile, how lacking in wonder and spontaneous creativity? For it is wonder that helps one grasp the mystery of life, and thus cultivate a type of self-sustaining virtue of gratitude that expects little, that doesn’t have the sense of entitlement that discourages the responsible use of freedom.
Cultivating gratitude is a difficult task for us as parents, who direct our energies to the satisfaction of our child’s needs and often their wants as well. We are wired to protect them from the very hardships and deprivations that might properly form their characters. We eschew the economic uncertainty that makes wondering where our daily bread comes from an anxiety-producing condition. We fear the tenuousness of a hand-to-mouth economic existence. We want to make sure our children are taken care of not only now, but in the future as well – to the point where we take out wagers against our own mortality in the form of life insurance. The cultivation of gratitude under conditions of affluence is no longer natural to human beings; it becomes artificial, contrived. I suspect kids see through such contrivances.
So perhaps what we are left with is simply the example we can provide: a life filled with prayer and meditation; a life of voluntary giving. But too often we give on our terms, in our time, in our way, with the recipient of our charity beholden to us. We may learn how to give in such instances, but we don’t learn the humility of accepting. Without such grace, without the humbleness of the spirit broken and rebuilt under the weight of accepting the gift of another’s charity, we have difficulty imagining our dependence on others and how fragile our well-being is. Such humility is the key to gratitude.
I find myself a wanderer between two worlds, to steal from Arnold. One world, that of my parents – both of them post-war immigrants – is one of tremendous hardship and uncertainty. They spent their teenaged years under Nazi occupation, and previous and subsequent years under great economic uncertainty and distress. When my parents moved to North America, first Winnipeg and then Michigan, they had days they couldn’t put food on the table, and they worked tirelessly to provide for their children. The other world is that of my children, a world of private schools, of climate-controlled environments, of balanced well-prepared meals, of organized activities to develop their gifts. My son had golf lessons at an early age. My daughters engaged in all sorts of organized activities, often accompanied by parental supervision. My children came to expect opportunity, and those expectations diminish the disposition toward gratitude. I find it difficult to negotiate these two worlds: one of privation and the other of abundance. But I’m not coldhearted enough to want for my children the world my parents inhabited.
We sent our children to catholic schools, and whatever they may have gained catechismically (which turned out to be far less than I would have hoped) seems to have been undone by the feelings generated by being lower on the socio-economic totem pole. Comparatively speaking, we were not well off. Our children’s friends lived in big beautiful houses and drove nice cars and had parents who paid for their gas and insurance. We lived in a very modest house and drove old cars with high mileage, and we insisted the kids pay for their own gas and insurance. They drew from this some interesting conclusions: namely, that talent and ability do not fully relate to status and wealth. This, for my son at least, was an unnerving discovery.
I understand better now that placing our children in social settings of tremendous affluence produced some negative effects. They became more enamored by those above them than mindful of those beneath. In this crucible they easily developed a sense that the cosmos is unfair. So, what I saw as a sense of entitlement, my children often claimed was a reaction against this fundamental unfairness. It was not that they expected what we provided, but that what they received seemed a pittance compared to what their friends got, making it hard to generate requisite levels of gratitude.
As a college professor, I had a lot of autonomy and flexibility in my schedule. My dad got up at 5 every morning to go work in the factory. There was no mystery to me about what my dad did, and I never doubted for a minute about how hard he worked. My parents performed the daily grind of their jobs without complaint or shirking of responsibility, even though my dad once confessed to me that he hated his job. At the same time, I know he took tremendous pride in what he did. This for me was a powerful lesson: life isn’t about doing what you like, it’s about liking what you do. In other words, take pride in the most menial and distasteful of tasks, and fulfillment in your vocation comes from knowing that what you have done you have done well.
Then, too, there was how we discussed things inside the home. I adopted my parent’s way of thinking of the household in terms of “property relations” as a way of reinforcing relations of authority. My dad had “his chair” and no one dared to sit there. When my children wanted to play their lousy music in the house, I told them to turn it off. When they protested that they had to be subjected to my Mahler, I pointed out that it was my stereo and my house, and when they have their own places, they can play whatever they want. I often pointed out that as long as they lived under my roof they would play by my rules. In other words, I frequently use the language of property ownership as a justification for allowing or disallowing certain practices. While I believe in parental authority, I worry about how such rationales ultimately played out. Did this reference to what’s yours and what’s mine undermine our shared life and sense of gratitude? I’m far from opposed to property rights, but I also recognize there is a time and a place to invoke them. Is the household such a place? Can there be requisite levels of gratitude without free and unencumbered sharing?
And yet they have done it themselves. I worry this may be true. I worry that in worrying we may be giving the next generation a waiver, that I am misplacing the onus of blame. Mostly, I worry that a culture that caters to young people and their impulses, one that treats authority as a joke, one that hides the tenuous nature of existence behind the mask of wealth, has so thoroughly infected us that we can hardly hold it back. We had terrible storms some years ago in Michigan, and I was helping my sister get the water out of her basement, but it was pouring in faster than we could move it out. In some ways, I thought to myself, this is the world in which I find myself: the waters are moving in faster than I can bail them out. But we are lucky we are able to bail, and have no other choice than to keep bailing. In that, too, there is a grace disguised.
Discussion Questions:
What are the best ways we might cultivate gratitude in younger generations?
What is the relationship between affluence and gratitude? Between poverty and gratitude? What’s the right balance?
Why it is so important for mature human beings to demonstrate gratitude?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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