A giving of thanks

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The past year has wrought a global pandemic, a heated election, scores of wildfires and the worst hurricane season ever recorded — and the hits keep coming. The third wave of the coronavirus looms over winter. A much-needed economic stimulus remains in jeopardy. Intractable leaders dig in their heels.

Still, as in years past, we have set aside the fourth Thursday in November to give thanks.

Thanksgiving began in 1863. Not exactly a peaceful and prosperous year. To quote the president of the time, our nation was “in the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity.” Yet, the same Abraham Lincoln issued the Thanksgiving proclamation, declaring a national holiday so that “gracious gifts ... should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.”

I appreciate the call to gratitude as well as the appeal for unity. But gratitude is not another thing I “should” do. “Should” is a strict taskmaster, a joyless disciplinarian. We command our small children to say thank you, forgetting that a true giving of thanks is neither compelled nor coerced.

Gratitude comes unbidden like a sudden breeze, the family dog, a child’s laughter.

When my younger brother turned 3, maybe 4 years old, our grandmother presented him with a gift bag. White tissue paper billowed from the top. The little boy grinned, “You gave me tissue paper to blow my nose! Thank you!” He was happy with the present he eventually unwrapped, but while the toy has been forgotten, our family has remembered his gratitude for the wrapping paper.

If the year 2020 were to present a gift, I would expect the bag to be empty and 2020 to cackle, “Gotcha again!”

But genuine gratitude is never empty of grace.

I sit by the window most mornings and watch for the first fingers of dawn. Gradually, the pine trees come into view as dark exclamation points against the fiery sky. Those rascal squirrels begin their usual mischief. Chickadees run their mad errands. A mourning dove coos and hoots like the tuning of a lonely woodwind instrument.

Soon enough, I will get to work on all the things I “should” do.

First, I give thanks for the trees, the birds, the squirrels. The slanting morning light through the rising steam of my coffee. Oatmeal bubbling on the stove. My wife and children upstairs, tucked under their warm covers.

Great leaders, like Lincoln, may tell us what we should do. But a child squeals at the tissue paper — the simple detail we might have ignored or tossed aside. And that would be our loss.

A giving of thanks is itself a gift.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and author of Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. He is currently working from home with his wife and three children.