Thanksgiving: Gratitude is Underrated

Thanksgiving, we turn off the media and internet and enjoy a wonderful meal with our loved ones. It is possibly the very best and most instinctive holiday. It is more humane than most of the others and if done right and the overeating is limited, people can feel more restored than frazzled.

Do people have a place in their being that is nurtured by the Thanksgiving holiday and what is that need the holiday meets?  The origin of the holiday is given to be from the Pilgrims who upon surviving their first year in the New World, had a worship service and feast to give thanks to the providence that had delivered them. That was nearly 4 centuries ago so how does this resonate for us today?

I ask, isn't gratitude underrated? I am not sure we hear a great deal about it anymore. It has snuck up on us that gratitude is now a bit an uncertitude. Why? Instinctively the Pilgrim gave thanks for their survival. Thanks to whom? Well gratitude is loaded my friends. Gratitude is all about something bigger than ME.

An elderly friend of mine, a mentor, once told me he started everyday on his knees praying to God, giving thanks for the day he has received and all the other gifts in his life and asking for help to do God's will today. The image of him doing this was striking to me. The humility and the spiritual practice it implied made a strong impression.

Thus instructed, I resolved to practice gratitude and this is what I gained from it. First, I learned that gratitude is an extremely effective antidote for discouragement. If I make a list of the positives and gifts in my life, it is hard to focus on the disappointments. The positives are always numerous and abundant starting with the love you have in your life and it is uplifting to remember them. I learned more than that, however.

I learned that gratitude lifts my focus and spirits from a state of self centeredness. Today, on Thanksgiving I remember my ancestors whose struggles against adversities I may never fathom and their faith and fidelity made it possible for me and my family to thrive today. Wow, that is a big thought and puts things in their proper perspective. But gratitude lead me to another truth that is elemental to the human condition.

I can not take credit for much of the good in my life. I did my bit ok but nonetheless on both a spiritual level and an intellectually honest level, many outcomes in life are largely dependent on events outside of ourselves.

When I am spiritually right, I feel a sense of grace. Grace is something is given to us without us having earned it. There is a wonderful sense of humility that accompanies the awareness of grace. Awareness of grace, the humilty that accompanies it and the gratitude for it is a human spiritual state that is and can only be a personal experience of God. 

So gratitude is a path to a personal experience of God and it can be done at any time, but today on Thanksgiving it can be shared together and as a nation. That was what I learned from the practice.