Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. ~ 1 Thess. 5: 16-18*

Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” ~ A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

United by the One Common Work
In 1985 there was an award-winning American movie called Witness. It was a crime thriller that brings a city detective to Pennsylvania Amish country to investigate a murder. One of the memorable scenes in the film was of a barn raising. Amish men and women and their children are seen coming from all directions, over the hills and through the fields and up the roads to a family’s farm. The men wear their straw hats, overalls, and tool belts and the women donned in their bonnets and long dresses carry baskets, as the children run and scatter to meet their friends. The instrumental music plays as movie-goers watch a time sequence from morning to evening of a barn being built by an entire community of neighbors who have come together for this one endeavor.

A barn raising is a good image for liturgy. Liturgy is a word used mainly by Catholics, Episcopalians, some Lutherans, and a spattering of other Christians to refer to communal worship. The word liturgy comes from the Greek word leitourgia which in its original usage had no religious connotation. Rather, it referred to a common endeavor entered into by a collection of people. What drew the people together was the one common purpose, the one unifying work to be done. Later, the term was appropriated by Christians who understood their communal prayer at Sunday Mass as the gathering of people united by one common work. And the work that people joined together to do as they came over the hills and through the fields and up the roads to the Sunday liturgy was to give thanks and praise to God. In and through the Eucharistic action, then and now, the people participate in a shared thanks-giving in response to the extravagance of God’s love as incarnated in the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

Being Grateful
There is another Greek word that the early Christians used for this Sunday gathering and the shared meal and the action of grace that was at the center of it: eucharistia, that is, “thanks giving.” The overlooked obvious is the profound mystery of our being created at all, of being given life. It’s all gift. We did nothing. The self-made man, the self-made woman is a blasphemous illusion. And the one and only fitting response when someone gives you a gift is to say thank you. In his book Thoughts in Solitude, Trappist monk Thomas Merton said that all sin comes back to the primal sin of ingratitude – of taking life, others, and God for granted. Later in the same chapter, Merton says this:

To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us—and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is grace, for it brings with us immense graces from Him. Gratitude, therefore, takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder, and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.1

Our primary vocation is to be a “first responder.” And our first real response, our defining and guiding act of human dignity from which all other good deeds flow is the conscious, wholehearted act of giving thanks. Julian of Norwich, the 13th to 14th century English mystic, wrote, “Thanking is a true understanding of who we really are.” Let’s say it even more emphatically: To be human is to give thanks. It is to be so grateful that we can’t bear to keep this grace to ourselves. We have to give it away. Thanks that is not given is a contradiction. Gratefulness that is not deeply felt is an indictment and a sign that we do not understand what it means to be human. In an interview with the writer, teacher, activist, and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp Elie Wiesel was asked, “Do you still have a place inside you for gratefulness?” Wiesel replied, “Absolutely. . . And to this day, the words that come most frequently from my lips are thank you. When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.”2 Not to be a giver of thanks is to violate and misuse one’s humanity.

Since the supreme and most extravagant gift we have been given is our very life, the first bud and the full bloom of our humanitas is to give thanks and praise to the One in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17: 28). The wise woman and the wise man learn that on the sacred journey that is the human adventure, what goes around comes around. We come to see that to grow and mature in wisdom includes returning to and integrating into our lives that which came naturally to us when we were young: walking in wonder, oohing and aahing, sitting with a friend who scraped her knee, sharing our sandwich, getting mad at unfairness, cartwheeling and jumping for joy (okay, thinking about cartwheeling), laughing hysterically and crying easily, whistling in the dark, being perfectly still and listening for the night cry of the peacock or God, and yes, being grateful for all the above. Only now as the miles before us become fewer than the miles behind us we realize, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” The blossom holds anew the “whenceness” of the bud.

To give thanks is not to give a bit of ourselves but the most of ourselves from the poverty of ourselves. It is a full response to a gratuitous act of generosity, hospitality, or kindness that is given with no expectation of recompense or compensation. This is true whether the giver is human or Divine. In fact, to try to pay someone back for a gift is to insult the giver by reducing that which was freely given to a transaction involving remuneration. It is no better than failing or refusing to give thanks. Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes,

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. . . It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.3

We give thanks because that is all we can give, meaning — that is ALL we can give to truly honor the giver and to be most truly ourselves and most fully human. When the giver is the gratuitous Source and Giver of life, we are indebted to One whom we can never repay. We can only give thanks, only be grateful, only make of our life a prayer, an ongoing response to the inconceivable surprise of living. Or not. But to be ungrateful is to betray our humanity which was conceived in God’s infinite love.

Offering Praise
The one who is grateful gives praise as well as thanks. Grounded in the soil of existential humility, a sense of indebtedness, and grateful awareness, praise buds and blossoms in the absence of presumption and pretension. When the response of wonder to mystery gives way to the experience of awe evoked by the sense of the presence of God beyond the mystery, when awakened to the sheer gratuitousness of life we sense that the gift showers forth from a kind and generous Giver, then indebtedness becomes gratefulness and gratefulness blooms into worship, into praise.

As an act of worship, praise is joy aimed at God. It is forged in the inner movement from indebtedness as a felt requirement of being human to praise as the indigenous and spiritual response to being a human person fully alive. In receiving a gift, Rabbi Heschel explains, the recipient obtains, not just the gift, but the love of the giver as well. For this reason, offering thanks and praise are the most extravagant and felicitous responses we can make since they contain our love of the Giver who is God.

* Note that it says to give thanks “in” all circumstances not “for” all circumstances.

1 Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 33. Also note: Merton was writing before sensitivity to gender-inclusive language for humans and exclusively male pronouns for God.

2 Interview in O: The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

3 Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, 5.