Why Feeling Thankful Is Not The Same Thing As Giving Thanks
Thanksgiving differs from gratitude in this respect: it requires an object. – Jayme Metzgar
This morning, my husband and I spent hours in a botanical garden, appreciating the living world on a level we rarely stop to do. We admired the texture of redwood tree bark, the fall of begonia blooms, the sheer beauty and intricacy and brilliance they add to our world. How often do we walk by all manner of things we fail to properly notice and appreciate?
That level of feeling is what I would describe as thankfulness: being grateful for and appreciating the value of something in your possession or experience. We so often miss this: we are too busy or distracted to stop and notice what we have, or we become attenuated to its value through constant exposure or the craving for more. Practicing gratitude has been a universally popular topic in recent decades, for good reason: it carries all kinds of physical, psychological, relational and societal benefits, and it is something we can learn to do more.
But thankfulness only goes so far. In fact, the Bible talks more about thanksgiving than thankfulness, and the two are not synonymous. Thankfulness is a general feeling of appreciation. Thanksgiving directs that feeling towards someone; it sets that feeling in the context of a relationship with someone. Thankfulness is appreciating the beauty of a flower; thanksgiving is knowing that my experience of that beauty is possible because my husband paid tickets for entrance into that garden, and a gardener planted and cared for that flower. It is appreciating not only the flower, but the fact that both the attributes of that flower and my experience of it are gifts to me, generally but also personally. Thus I don’t merely feel thanks; I give thanks to someone.
And the Christian idea of thanksgiving extends far broader than our culture’s idea of what we should be grateful for. John the Baptist said that “a person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27). James tells us not to be deceived: “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Every single good thing in our lives, every single thing that could cross our mind to appreciate, is a gift given to us from God. It is not something we earn, or deserve, or can take full (or sometimes any) credit for. That is the mind-boggling truth. In fact, part of the purpose of living with gratitude is to realize the extent to which our thanksgiving should extend. “Acts of gratitude,” writes Nouwen, “make one grateful because, step by step, they reveal that all is grace.”
The ramifications of this are many. Gifts tell you something about their giver. The gifts God gives tell us something about His character and purpose. They are bits of his glory shining through to our world; they are promises of what more is to come. Thus there is a sense in which thanksgiving can move us both to adoration and to hope—to adoration and worship of God himself, and hope in that God and his promise for our future.
C.S. Lewis tells a story about an experience he had once in a shed:
I was standing in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are two very different experiences.
“Gratitude,” Lewis writes, “exclaims, very properly: ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”
In the end, the point is not the sunbeam, but the sun. Thankfulness, while good, is a limited experience. It is limited by our moods and emotions; it does not address or always balance out our sufferings. But thankfulness was never meant to be the point in and of itself. Thankfulness was meant to be thanksgiving, and thanksgiving to be adoration and hope: connection with a Person who is the source of all pleasure. Glimpses of that far country we long for. To quote more Lewis: “This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.”
Tiny theophanies. The flower in the garden is a tiny theophany: its cultivated, yet not entirely controlled, beauty and intricacy a visible manifestation of the nature of God’s own beauty and the eternal home where life will bloom evermore. All of life is a gift. And all the gifts are theophanies, if we have eyes to see them.
