SOMETHING TO REFLECT on as you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner:
If you had been a Pilgrim, would you have given thanks?
Consider what they had been through, the men and women who broke
bread together on that first Thanksgiving in 1621.
They had uprooted themselves and sailed for America, an endeavor
so hazardous that published guides advised travelers to the New World,
''First, make thy will.'' The crossing was very rough and the Mayflower
was blown off course. Instead of reaching Virginia, where Englishmen
had settled 13 years earlier, the Pilgrims ended up in the wilds
of Massachusetts. By the time they found a place to make their new
home - Plymouth, they called it - winter had set in.
The storms were frightful. Shelter was rudimentary. There was little
food. Within weeks, nearly all the settlers were sick.
''That which was most sad and lamentable,'' Governor William Bradford
later recalled, ''was that in two or three months' time, half of
their company died, especially in January and February, being the
depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected
with the scurvy and other diseases.... There died sometimes two or
three of a day.''
When spring came, Indians showed them how to plant corn, but their
first crops were dismal. Supplies ran out, but their sponsors in
London refused to send more. The first time the Pilgrims sent a shipment
of goods to England, it was stolen by pirates.
If you had been there in 1621 - if you had seen half your friends
die, if you had suffered through famine, malnutrition, and sickness,
if you had endured a year of heartbreak and tragedy - would you have
felt grateful?
Gratitude isn't an emotion most of us cultivate. Even on Thanksgiving,
we are more likely to concentrate on the turkey or the television
than on giving thanks. But perhaps we would think differently about
thankfulness if we realized its extraordinary power to improve our
lives.
I mean something more than simply the civilizing benefits of good
manners. Of course it is admirable to show gratitude. Nothing rankles
more than showing kindness or generosity to someone who doesn't appreciate
it. But the value in giving thanks goes far beyond mere politeness.
Gratitude is nothing less than the key to happiness.
For this penetrating insight into gratefulness, I am grateful to
Dennis Prager, author of the shrewd and perceptive ''Happiness is
a Serious Problem.''
''There is a `secret to happiness,''' Prager writes, ''and it is
gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be
happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people
to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads
to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a
much happier person.''
This is a keen observation, and it helps explain why the Judeo-Christian
tradition places such emphasis on thanking God. The liturgy is filled
with expressions of gratitude. ''It is good to give thanks to the
Lord,'' begins the 92nd Psalm. Why? Because God needs our gratitude?
No: because we need it.
Learning to be thankful, whether to God or to other people, is the
best vaccination against taking good fortune for granted. And the
less you take for granted, the more pleasure and joy life will bring
you.
If you never give a moment's thought to the fact that your health
is good, that your children are well-fed, that your home is comfortable,
that your nation is at peace, if you assume that the good things
in your life are ''normal'' and to be expected, you diminish the
happiness they can bring you. By contrast, if you train yourself
to reflect on how much worse off you could be, if you develop the
custom of counting your blessings and being grateful for them, you
will fill your life with cheer.
It can be hard to do. Like most useful skills, it takes years of
practice before it becomes second nature. This is one reason, Prager
writes, that religion, sincerely practiced, leads to happiness -
it ingrains the habits of thankfulness. People who thank God before
each meal, for example, inculate gratitude in themselves. In so doing,
they open the door to gladness.
In a sense, gratitude is an expression of modesty. In Hebrew, the
word for gratitude - hoda'ah - is the same as the word
for confession. To offer thanks is to confess dependence, to acknowledgment
that others have the power to benefit you, to admit that your life
is better because of their efforts. That frame of mind is indispensable
to civilized society.
Be thankful. Don't take the gifts in your life for granted. Remember
- as the Pilgrims remembered - that we are impoverished without each
other, and without God. Whoever and wherever you are this Thanksgiving,
the good in your life outweighs the bad. If that doesn't deserve
our gratitude, what does?