On Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving is an ever-perplexing holiday. When I was younger, I was confused about why we even bothered having Thanksgiving. After all, we had dinner every night; it's not as though Thanksgiving dinner was all that different, except that it was the one day a year we had turkey and stuffing. As I got older, I was confused as to why we got a holiday to eat and drink to the point of gluttony; don't get me wrong, I was happy to have the opportunity. Now that I am at a point in my life where I think I recognize the importance of giving thanks, as an organized and annual ritual, in a way that I did not previously, I would like to share my thoughts as to why I think Thanksgiving is important and why proper observance of the holiday is difficult. Please pardon the untimely nature of the post.

I know two things for certain about humanity: we are fallen and we are ambitious.

There can be no doubt but that mankind is a fallen creature. We were given the entire garden of paradise, only to be cast out for disobedience and insubordination. Any skeptics as to man's fallen status need look no further than modern warfare and weaponry to conclude that his copious conscious creative and intellectual prowess, unmatched in the natural world, has been in appreciable part squandered on counterproductive measures, wasted. Any argument that mankind is not fallen crashes on the shoals of a history that includes the holocaust, centuries of "holy" wars (a paradox if ever there was one), organized genocide, and all sort of human atrocities.

Mankind's ambition is likewise undeniable. It is man who looked at the moon and decided to go; who approached great expanses of ocean and instead of steering to the safe harbor ventured to the great unknown. Mankind has explored the depths of the oceans and the peaks of the mountains; the equatorial jungles and the polar ice. Man's insubordination that cost him Eden was his ambition; he ate from the tree of knowledge because he wanted to be more.

So far as we know, it is only man that has a conscious understanding of his own being and a belief that his future is based on his own determinations. Perhaps mankind's belief in his own self-determination is an expression of his own hubris; nonetheless, the belief in self-determination is (rightly, in this writer's opinion) a basic foundation of all principles of freedom we espouse.

Two of mankind's most defining traits are precisely why it is so difficult for us to humbly and sincerely give our thanks. We are hardwired to believe that we are in charge of our own destiny. We refuse to believe that we can't do something. It is both a compliment to mankind and a criticism of him to point this out.

Thanksgiving is the occasion to genuflect to the fact that we are mortal and we are merely mortal; we show a piece of our own grace by owning up to, at the very least, the possibility that we are human precisely because we remain subordinate to a higher power. This subordination is an essential element of humanity.

Accepting this principle requires accepting the coordinate principle that, because there is a higher power than man, certain things are out of man's hands. This is a difficult premise, I believe, for many of us to accept, but accept it we must if we continue to believe, as I do, in a monotheistic ordering of the universe.

In light of the above, Thanksgiving is the time when we humbly accept our lot as a species and pay heed to the Great Chain of Being; recognize our limitations and give thanks for the undeserved blessings we have received. We give thanks, not for the success we have achieved on our merit, but for the divine providence that has intervened on our behalf.