15
Thanksgiving

Somehow nothing has happened I feel,

Nothing mine and nothing for real,

Till I seal it with outbursts of thanks.

The upshot of the story I have told in this book must be thanksgiving. In the period immediately after the partial recovery of my sight, when I saw that my fears of losing the ability to read were not going to be realized, my gratitude to God was intense. The whole experience had been intense. I lived through a crisis in my life. The intensity of such an experience is bound to wane. But intense experiences leave their mark on us. After them life may seem to return to normal, but we are not the same. Such experiences can be defining moments in our life stories, experiences to which we often look back and from which we get our bearings for living. Something about the experiences imparts a new quality or character to the life we continue to live. Not everything that seems important at the time remains so in hindsight, but defining moments do. I think the fact that I lived through this experience very consciously with God accounts for my sense that my thankfulness to God in this instance is not merely the conclusion to an episode of my life that is now past. It feels as though the experience has made gratitude to God a more pervasive feature of my life from now on. I do not mean that thanksgiving has not been important in my life with God before now. Of course it has. But it feels as though thanksgiving has, as it were, risen up higher in the scale of my attitudes to God and life.

Unsurprisingly, there have been times when I have caught myself thinking that actually life is now just the same as it was before this story began. This seems to me analogous to the way many of us experienced emerging from the pandemic. After those two very strange years of lockdowns, restrictions, and the deprivation of many aspects of our lives as they used to be, it was natural to feel relief that everything was returning to normal. We busied ourselves reverting to how we used to live. But we also knew very well that we were not the same. Those two years must have had permanent effects, for good or ill, on how we understand ourselves and the world. We may not be able to identify those effects at all accurately. They may become apparent only in more distant retrospect. But effects, different for different people, there undoubtedly have been.

It would, I imagine, be possible for me to pretend to myself that nothing has changed and to suppress the continuing gratitude to God that would otherwise color my life. But something about this experience, by the grace of God, makes that more difficult to do. My sight has been only partially restored. Most notably, the distortion that makes me see straight lines as wavy remains and is permanent. I have got used to it. In some situations, such as writing with a pen or typing onscreen, the distortion gets my conscious attention more than in others. This means I cannot forget that my eyesight is now different. And so, paradoxically, a respect in which my sight has not been restored to what used to seem normal is a permanent reminder that I did go through an experience of loss and partial recovery of sight. It reminds me that sight is very precious, that it should never be taken for granted, and that I can thank God for the eyesight I have, impaired though it is.

I am tempted to compare the distortion in my eyesight with Jacob’s limp. In the mysterious story of Jacob’s nocturnal struggle with an angel (or was it God himself?), Jacob prevails and obtains a blessing, but he is also wounded in the hip (Gen. 32:24–31). Paradoxically, Jacob’s limp becomes a sign and reminder of the blessing he received.

Psychological research has shown that gratitude is good for our mental health. (It boosts positive brain chemicals and inhibits those that cause stress.) Advice on healthy lifestyles now recommends we spend a few minutes each day focusing on the good things that have happened to us. (“Count your blessings,” we used to say.) No doubt this is beneficial, but it falls far short of real gratitude or thanksgiving. Gratitude is being grateful to someone. Thanksgiving means giving thanks to someone. Thanking “life” or “our lucky stars” or “the universe” makes little sense because these entities have no intentionality. They do not care whether we are happy or miserable, flourish or flounder. When we receive a gift from someone, we think of that person and feel happy that they felt for us whatever form of goodwill prompted the gift. That is gratitude. Then we may actually tell them that we are grateful. That is thanksgiving. A gift is especially meaningful if it is from someone who loves us. Then it conveys not just itself but also the other person’s love. We can treasure even small token gifts when we know that they come with love. Thanksgiving in this case is a way of completing the act of love. The gift and the thanks together create or enhance a bond of love between the giver and the recipient.

The story of Jesus’s healing of the ten lepers is instructive (Luke 17:11–19). The healing takes place as they are on their way to the priest, who can certify their freedom from the disease. Jesus tells them to do this. Nine of them, when they find they have been healed, simply continue on their way to the priest. But one of the ten returns, praising God, to express his thanks to Jesus. It is to this man that Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well” (17:19). All the lepers had been healed, but the one who gave thanks was made whole in a fuller sense. It is not just that he owed Jesus his thanks and did right to express it. More than that, his experience of the healing was enhanced by his praise of God and thanks to Jesus. He completed, as it were, the circle of love that began with his healing by Jesus and returned to its source when he gave thanks. The gift is experienced as love and creates a bond of love when thanks is given.

The importance not merely of feeling gratitude but of actually expressing thanks to the giver of a gift can be seen when people benefit from something generous done for them by a stranger, such as the donation of a bodily organ or help given by a passerby who then goes on their way. Often people want to find out who the donor or helper was so that they can thank them. In special cases, such as saving a life, a bond of friendship may be created.

When we look back over our lives or even over the events of a single day and take note of all the good things, we see there is much for which we can be grateful to specific people, but there is also much for which there is no one but God to thank. Appreciating all those blessings but having no intentional Source to thank for them is one of the impoverishments of unbelief. Gratitude cannot truly be itself when it has no recipient. But the impoverishment begins in the receipt of the blessings themselves. Without a Giver, blessings cannot be acknowledged as gifts of love, and so there is no circle of love to be completed by the glad expression of thanks. A desire to find the Giver of the blessings of life in order to give thanks may not be a common path to faith, but it is a possible one. It probably happens most often when God shows his hand in unexpected occurrences that surprise people into wondering how or why they happened. They need not be miraculous in any strict sense, but they may be sufficiently out of the ordinary to surprise and provoke wonder. They may be coincidences that look too good to be merely accidental. Wonder and thanksgiving are closely related.

One way of recognizing the difference that thanksgiving to God makes is to see it as a movement from ourselves and our concerns toward God. Lives that may have been narrowly focused on our own concerns, and necessarily so in situations of significant need, are opened up to a wider perspective. The change in our circumstances that gives rise to thanksgiving will have been liberating, but thanksgiving takes that liberation further. We are freed from the narrow perspectives that shut out God and, with God, so much else. But thanksgiving is not a movement from our own concerns to God that leaves them behind, as pure contemplation of God’s goodness may do. If it is more than momentary, it is a process that continually moves back and forth from our lives to God. It recognizes God in our lives and opens our lives to God. Frequent thanksgiving, for blessings large and small, is a way of living our lives with God. The more we thank God, the more we adopt a habit of thanksgiving, the more open we become to the continuing grace of God in our lives and the more sensitive we become to discerning God’s presence and activity in other lives and the world.

In petition and intercession we desire God’s presence and activity in situations of need, our own or those of others. In thanksgiving we recognize God’s presence and activity in our own lives and the world. A life of prayer entails both. Thanksgiving emboldens us to ask for more. Intercession grows wearisome without thanksgiving. Beyond both, there is a third form of address to God: praise. Thanksgiving may lead to praise and perhaps should lead to praise, but praise is a further step in the orientation of our lives to God. We shall return to it.

In his poem “Gratefulness,” George Herbert reflects on the idea that, in addition to all the gifts of God for which we are grateful, gratitude itself is a gift:

Thou that hast given so much to me,

Give one thing more, a grateful heart.2

The poem is a witty prayer in which he claims that, unless God adds to all his gifts this additional one, “All thou hast given him heretofore / is lost.”3 Without gratitude, the other gifts will not be received and enjoyed as gifts. Of course, Herbert could not be praying in this way if he did not already have some degree of gratitude, but he wants something more:

Not thankful, when it pleaseth me;

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be

Thy praise.4

The book of Psalms contains a variety of types of prayer or hymn. Among them, scholars commonly identify hymns of praise and songs of thanksgiving. The distinction between these two types is not absolute. They overlap. Praise and thanksgiving are closely related (e.g., Pss. 92:1; 100:4), and thanksgiving can be considered a type of praise. But the distinction is useful. Hymns of praise offer to God what is sometimes called “descriptive praise.” God is praised for what he is and what he regularly and characteristically does—as Creator and ruler of the whole creation and as the covenant God who acts on behalf of his people. The songs of thanksgiving, on the other hand, focus on a specific and recent intervention of God to deliver either the community or an individual.

We shall focus here on the individual songs of thanksgiving because of their relevance to the personal story I have told in this book. They may also be called testimony psalms, because they presuppose a communal context (such as the temple) in which the psalmist gives thanks publicly and so bears witness to the community to the way God’s power and love have been shown in the psalmist’s deliverance from trouble. Good examples are Psalms 18, 30, 32, 34, 41, 92, 116, 118, 138. Each of these has distinctive features, but there are also major common elements that suggest that these psalmists were guided by a pattern. It is worth remembering, when we read or study the Psalms, that the collection we have was formed as the hymnbook of the Jerusalem temple. Each psalm must have had a specific author or origin, but it proved suitable for regular use by the community or by individuals who could apply it to their own needs and circumstances. Some were doubtless written with the intention that they be hymns for regular use, but the songs of thanksgiving reflect an author’s particular experience. In such cases, the particularity matched the similar experiences of other and later worshipers who expressed their own thanks in these words. People who pray the Psalms still read them in this way.

Each of the psalms of individual thanksgiving tells a concrete story of distress and deliverance by God. In that sense they are very personal. In them God is “my God” (Pss. 18:2; 30:12; 118:28). We cannot usually be sure what form of trouble the psalmist was in or what form the deliverance took. These things are expressed in more metaphorical than literal terms, which is what makes these psalms transferable from the experience of the psalmist to the experiences of those who later pray them.

There are some indications of serious illness (Pss. 32:3; 41:8), and rather characteristically these psalmists speak of being on the verge of death, plucked by God from the very jaws of the underworld (18:4–5; 30:3; 116:3, 8). There is also deliverance from enemies (18:17–18). Modern readers who want to pray these psalms for themselves may find these descriptions too extreme for application to their own less extreme circumstances, but it may be that some of these depictions were always hyperbolic and that ancient Jews praying these psalms were not by any means always close to death or surrounded by threatening enemies. Sudden diminishments of life, such as illness or depri vation, could be felt as falling into the power of death and being dragged down toward total loss of life. Like the “mighty waters” from which the Lord rescued one psalmist (Ps. 18:16) or “the desolate pit” and “the miry bog” from which he pulled another to safety (40:2), all these images can be treated as expressions of serious threats to well-being.

If the nature of the psalmists’ distress is only vaguely depicted, the way in which they have been delivered by God is given hardly any literal depiction. God, we hear, “delivered me from all my fears” (Ps. 34:4). He “delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling” (116:8). He has protected the psalmist from enemies by means of his powerful right hand (138:7). Most notably, perhaps, the psalmist experienced a transformation of his condition, like the transformation of night into morning (30:5):

You have turned my mourning into dancing;

you have taken off my sackcloth

and clothed me with joy. (Ps. 30:11)

God is recognized in this kind of life-changing intervention, and it’s this that funds the psalmist’s heartfelt and unstinting thanksgiving (30:12).

It is very important that, in addition to God’s great acts of deliverance in the origins of the nation, focused on the exodus, the Psalms give a place to acts of deliverance in these little stories of individuals. The provision of these psalms for others to use shows that such experiences are not expected to be unusual. In such experiences God is found to be the same God who is proclaimed in the recitals of Israel’s history. He is characterized by steadfast love and faithfulness (Pss. 32:10; 40:10; 92:2; 138:2). He is gracious, righteous, and merciful (116:5). In testifying to what they have experienced, the psalmists testify to others that this is indeed what the God of Israel is like and this is how he acts. Whereas in the hymns of praise God is praised for being who he is and for displaying these characteristics generally, in the songs of thanksgiving this is, so to speak, verified in the lives of individuals.

When a thanksgiving psalm was recited or sung in the temple, it would accompany a sacrifice, a thank offering (an animal along with cakes of bread; see Lev. 7:11–18). The sacrifice enhanced the giving of thanks. Both took place in public, among family and friends who would share in eating the sacrifice, and also in view of the crowd of worshipers in the temple (Ps. 116:17–19). As John Goldingay explains, “As usual sacrament and word accompany one another. . . . A verbal declaration of gratefulness without an expression of it that costs something would not be very impressive, but a concrete expression of gratefulness unaccompanied by interpretation would not give clear enough glory to [the LORD].”5

It is notable that, in Israel, there was a ritual for an individual to use in order to give thanks to God for their deliverance and as an act of witness to other members of the worshiping community (Ps. 66:13–16). There is no such provision in most Christian churches. At least in contemporary churches in the West, to my knowledge, people are not encouraged to declare to others what God has done for them in particular acts of blessing and restoration to well-being. In our worship we pray for the sick, but we do not give thanks for their recovery. The same goes for other forms of distress and suffering that people go through. In the Eucharist (which means “thanksgiving” in Greek), we regularly give thanks for what God has done for our salvation through Jesus’s death and resurrection, just as Israel celebrated the exodus and the other great acts of God in their history. In the baptism of adults there can be scope for those being baptized to testify to the way God has brought them to faith and salvation. Perhaps the Eucharist could also be a context for individuals to make their declarations of thanks for God’s other remarkable interventions in their lives.

On the theme of the thank offering, there is a striking variation in Psalm 40:6. The psalmist declares that God desires not sacrifice but rather an ear receptive to God’s commands (if that is the meaning of the obscure reference to the ear). Probably this is not as absolute a rejection of sacrifice as it sounds. As in the words of the prophet, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6), the meaning is that God is less concerned with sacrifice than with doing good. (First Samuel 15:22 puts the same contrast in an explicitly relative rather than absolute form.) Accordingly, the psalmist goes on to declare, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart” (Ps. 40:8). The suggestion is that gratitude and witness should be enacted by more than verbal and ritual acts. They should be lived out in a life all the more aligned with God’s intentions.

In some of the psalms of thanksgiving, the psalmist declares the intention of continuing to thank God forever. Psalm 30 ends on such a note: “O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever” (30:12). The kind of life-saving deliverance this psalmist had experienced leads to a life characterized by thanksgiving. Although it is not spelled out, we can imagine that the psalmist will not only continue to thank God for this experience itself but will also, as a result of the experience, become more aware of God’s goodness in all the blessings of life so that thankfulness becomes something like an attitude of mind, a way of relating to God all the time.

Psalm 34 begins with such a declaration, even before the psalmist goes on to tell the story of his deliverance:

I will bless the LORD at all times;

his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

My soul makes its boast in the LORD;

let the humble hear and be glad.

O magnify the LORD with me,

and let us exalt his name together. (34:1–3)

Here the psalmist does not want his thanksgiving to stop with him. He wants others to join him in praising God, because the testimony he goes on to give will be good news for all who know their need of God. In fact, the psalm quickly moves from recounting the psalmist’s own experience (34:4–6) to generalizing from it. Most of the psalm describes how God similarly looks after and rescues from danger all the righteous who fear him (34:7–10, 15–22). In this way, his own thanksgiving moves into praise and the invitation to others to praise God with him. Thanksgiving for his own deliverance on a specific occasion moves into praise to God for what he regularly does.

When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears,

and rescues them from all their troubles. (34:17)

His own experience has given him the confidence to invite others to “taste and see that the LORD is good” (34:8).

While these psalms offer us a vision of life lived in perpetual thanksgiving and praise, we know, of course, that thanksgiving is likely to be interrupted by further troubles. Goldingay provides a diagram of a circle on which he plots the sequence of moments of life with God that the various types of psalm express: Protest (or Lament)→Plea (Petition)→Trust→Thanksgiving→Obedience→Praise→Protest (or Lament)→(and so on). He says that this is really a spiral that one can enter at any point: “Understanding the movement as a spiral also recognizes that the next time a person sings a praise psalm, the words mean something different. Each time people go around the spiral, each element has more depth. The praise can be more nuanced. The protest can be more urgent. The trust can be deeper. The testimony can be more fervent.”6 This is helpful, but it is, of course, a scheme and so relates to real life only in an approximate way. For example, praise of God does not, even in the Psalms, arise only from such a sequence. As the psalms that feature creation and Israel’s history show, we praise God also for the wonders of his creation and for his great acts of salvation for all of us in the biblical story.

There is also this question: What do we do when a plea for deliverance is not answered, at least not as we expect, and there seems not to be anything to give thanks for? Only the author of Psalm 88 seems to speak out of such a situation, and it is remarkable that this psalm of nearly despairing entreaty was included in the hymnbook of the temple. The only hope it offers is that the psalmist does continue to cry out to God. It was recognized in Israel that there would be people who would need this psalm, an anguished and so far unanswered cry from the depths.

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It needs to be stressed that thanksgiving does not obliterate the memory of sadness, pain, and loss. It does not evince what Martin Luther called a “theology of glory” or what modern theologians sometimes call “triumphalism.” In other words, however blessed and uplifted we may feel, we have not been exalted out of this world of tears and troubles. We are still weak and vulnerable humans, subject to the common lot of this fallen world, sharing it with millions who live in grinding poverty or suffer all manner of diminishments of life. In a comfortable life, it is easy to forget such people, partly because of a failure of empathy, an inability to imagine the sufferings of others. Even if our own sufferings have been comparatively slight, remembering them is a step toward empathy and solidarity with others. As always, Jesus must be our example. The Letter to the Hebrews regards him as qualified to be our heavenly high priest because on earth he fully shared our human weakness and “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death” (Heb. 5:7). Even in his exalted glory, Jesus has not forgotten the plight from which he was delivered by resurrection. He understands and cares about all who are afflicted.

Not long ago I met someone I have known for years, though I have been in contact with him only occasionally. I have always known that he had a rare kind of sight impairment that was bound to get worse. I have admired the way he has pursued a demanding career. But on this occasion, because of my own struggles with sight impairment, I had no hesitation in asking him much more about his condition. I felt for him more strongly, and I will try to go on praying for him.

On one occasion (probably one of many), the apostle Paul had a narrow escape from death (2 Cor. 1:9). We do not know any details, but it was shortly before he wrote his Second Letter to the Corinthians and seems to have strongly affected what he wrote in that letter. He begins the letter, following the opening greeting, with something like a psalm of thanksgiving, in which he refers to his deliverance as God “comforting” or “consoling” him, perhaps with reference to Isaiah 51:3, 12. Like the psalmists, he hopes that others will be able to share in his thanksgiving (2 Cor. 1:11), but there is also a distinctive feature of his thanksgiving. He says that just as Jesus suffered so that he would be able to “comfort” others, so did Paul himself. (In this passage, “we” is an epistolary plural, functioning as “I.”)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. If we are being afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation; if we are being consoled, it is for your consolation, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we are also suffering. (2 Cor. 1:3–6)

Paul’s special consciousness of an apostolic ministry that gave him a very close and responsible relationship with the churches he founded is operative here, but the passage can still be instructive for us all. Affliction and “consolation” from God prepare us to empathize with and console others who are afflicted in similar or even very different ways. From Christ’s solidarity with us in suffering on the cross, loving consolation flows to us and then overflows from us to others. Our thanksgiving, like Paul’s, should encompass all this, and we should act on it. (I hope this book may help others experience God’s consolation in their lives, as I have.)

When I think now of the loving consolation I received from God during the story I have told in this book, I think especially of the blurred cross. I recall when I sat in the chapel at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, on the very worst day of this experience, and ahead of me was the black cross, “blurred” because that was how I saw it. It expressed the loving solidarity of the crucified Jesus with me. It had never occurred to me before that Jesus’s own eyesight must have been blurred, cloudy with tears and blood, when he hung on the cross. As his cross was blurred to me, so his loving sight of me was blurred. It now strikes me as part of the meaning of that experience that the place was a chapel in a large and busy hospital. I had come from and would soon return to the eye clinic, where I would sit in the overflowing waiting room among the socially distanced chairs of other patients, silent, no doubt anxious about what degree of sight they could expect to have from then on. Some were waiting for treatment that would remedy or ameliorate their impairments. Others would learn there was nothing much that could be done. Their sight would go on degenerating. As I sat before the blurred cross, I was not isolated from them, and neither was the Christ who was symbolized by the cross. In medieval hospitals there were crucifixes or paintings of the passion in wards so that patients lying on their beds could be reminded of Christ’s suffering for them and receive the consolation of his love. Nowadays nurses are not even permitted to ask patients if they would like them to pray for them.

Among Christians, it is the event and the symbol of the cross at the heart of our faith that makes it impossible to forget the afflicted. When Luther opposed a “theology of glory,” he preferred in its stead a “theology of the cross.” We meet God most profoundly in affliction, his and ours.

In a sequence of 150 poems he calls “Psalter,” the poet Micheal O’Siadhail writes poems addressed to God, inspired to some extent by the biblical psalms. They are personal and moving, embodying O’Siadhail’s intense and day-by-day experience of God. A striking characteristic of them is how frequently they sound a note of thanksgiving and praise. O’Siadhail is a man who delights in life, and he cannot stop thanking God for everything that delights him. Indeed, thanksgiving is integral to the delight. He experiences life in a way that cannot but give rise to praise.

One poem, all about thanksgiving, is somewhat comparable with George Herbert’s “Gratefulness.” Like Herbert, O’Siadhail surprises readers with a poetic conceit: the notion that he has to apologize to God for the tedious way he is constantly repeating his thanks:

Forgive me how I must repeat myself—

Every day I live

I say my prayer of thanks.

He cannot help his overflowing gratitude for the “way you’ve lavished love on me.” He is a lover, so in love he must as “any lover does repeat myself.”7

In another poem he reflects on the prospects and perils of old age. Since he is about the same age as I am, I feel some affinity with this poem. He prays,

Though I will take what extent you assign,

Please let me keep praising line after line,

Please let me love more before I must leave.

In the last stanza he asks that he may be able, even in a frail and dependent condition,

Still to rejoice, never just to resign;

Grateful for what all this time has been mine,

Let me then go, giving thanks to the end.8

In chapter 1, I quoted T. S. Eliot’s famous line: “Old men ought to be explorers.” I should like to add another proposal: “The old should be thanksgivers.” One of the tasks and joys of old age should be to look back over the whole course of one’s life and remember it with thanksgiving to God. As O’Siadhail suggests in the lines quoted at the beginning of this chapter, no experience is really owned until we give thanks for it. Similarly, I suggest, no life is complete, insofar as it can ever be completed, without gratitude and thanksgiving to God.

To say that an old person is someone with a long life behind them is mere tautology. But in the quest to stay young and feel young, some of my contemporaries try not to think about that. Yet it is the wonder of being old. At least until memory fails, it is the advantage the old have over younger people, an advantage that counterbalances the obvious disadvantages of being old. It is the source of the distinctive contributions the old can make to the common life and even pass on to later generations. Some old people claim not to recognize the “I” of their early memories as the same self they feel themselves to be now. It is certainly a feature of childhood memories that we do not seem able to “get inside” them as we can the memories of later years. It is also the case that our younger selves, in memories we can still experience as subjects, can seem embarrassingly or shamefully different from the selves we have become. All the same, we need to own them, just as we have to agree that it is we who are portrayed in early photographs, even though we might not be able to identify ourselves without help from others. It is a matter of personal integrity and responsibility to own the whole extent of our lives. Even if I have changed quite radically, through conversion or reform, through a radical change of heart or direction, or through some tragically life-changing experience, all that I have been still contributes in some way to who I have become. We need to own it all.

Of course, we do not remember everything, not even everything important. But we should do our best not to edit our stories to our advantage, tempting though that is. Before God at least it is a futile exercise. Better to face up to what God knows anyway. But can we be thankful for everything? For God’s part in it all, we can, for God has intended nothing but our good. The advantage of the vantage point that old age gives us is that we can see that we were often wrong about what we thought was good for us. We can see how what turned out was really better for us than what we wanted. We can also see how God brought good out of things that went wrong, whether through our own foolishness or fault or otherwise. Undoubtedly things did go wrong, often seriously wrong, but by God’s grace the outcomes were better than they might have been. If that is not always the case, it is probably true more often than we recognize. God redeems our sins by making less of them than they had the potential to be, just as he enhances the good things we do by making more of them than we could do ourselves. All this is involved in tracing the hand of God in our lives and adding the seal of thankfulness and thanksgiving to all these experiences. Just as distance may put them in a new perspective, so thanksgiving can enhance them, as in memory, reflection, and thanksgiving we experience a further dimension of them.

There are things in our past, perhaps even whole tracts, for which we cannot be thankful. We cannot thank God for our own willful evil. We may be grateful for the ways in which he brought some good out of these events, but not for our evil intentions and actions. I am not as sure as many Christian counselors that all memories can be healed in this life. We can be assured of God’s forgiveness, but it may be good for us for a process of repentance and regret to continue. We have to live with the seriousness of what we have done. To say, as one often hears now, that God has forgiven us and so we must forgive ourselves is simplistic. As Christians in earlier times knew, there may be works of repentance to be done, not because God’s forgiveness is conditional but because the perfecting of our moral character is not a matter of instant transformation. We need to avoid the moral shallowness and carelessness of our culture. Forgiving others is a clear duty, but forgiving ourselves is more complex. It may involve those we have hurt or destroyed, and it may become fully possible only after death. There is also all the harm we have done without, in our moral insensitivity and carelessness, realizing it.

So we cannot be thankful for everything we have done. But our lives are woven out of God’s providence and our free will. Our thankfulness to God for his role, an overriding part that allows us our freedom within limits, should mature as we age and look back with greater wisdom and a fuller attunement to God’s purposes. What of our achievements, the things of which we can be proud? Modern people may instinctively feel that being grateful for them undermines our own self-worth and justified pride. But anyone who reflects on their achievements knows that they were not possible without circumstances and people who helped to make them possible. When someone appears on a stage to receive a medal for a major achievement and they thank all the people who contributed to their ability to achieve, they usually do so gladly and gratefully. The pleasure of achieving is enhanced, not diminished, by sharing credit with others. Some people labor alone against the odds in unfavorable circumstances, but even they are not “self-made” people. Something, perhaps genetics, perhaps early experiences, perhaps some influential figure in their past, or perhaps a personal hero who inspires them (and there are other possibilities), made them people who could do that, whereas others could not have done. In short, we do not minimize real achievements by recognizing dependence. Thanking God for making our achievements possible enhances their value, just as gratitude always does. We are glad to have done them, recognizing them as the gifts of God’s love to us and through us to others.

“The old should be thanksgivers.” Surely thanksgiving is part of our calling, a reason why we have been spared to live as long as we have. It may lead us to other good things, such as generosity. It may lead us deeper into God’s love, which is what Eliot intended with the image of exploration. It could be the last we can do, as we echo O’Siadhail’s prayer:

Grateful for what all this time has been mine,

Let me then go, giving thanks to the end.9

1. Micheal O’Siadhail, Testament (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2022), 26. These lines are from “psalm” 23 in O’Siadhail’s “Psalter.”

2. George Herbert, The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 245.

3. Herbert, The Country Parson, 245.

4. Herbert, The Country Parson, 246.

5. John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 3, Psalms 90–150, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 345.

6. John Goldingay, Psalms, vol. 1, Psalms 1–41, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 68–69.

7. O’Siadhail, Testament, 63. This is “psalm” 60 of his “Psalter.”

8. O’Siadhail, Testament, 98. This is “psalm” 94 of his “Psalter.”

9. O’Siadhail, Testament, 98. This is “psalm” 94 of his “Psalter.”

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Thanksgiving