Gratitude

Bedtime Theology with the 3 yo...     

Me: Let’s say thank you in our prayers tonight. God likes to hear what we are thankful for and it makes us feel happy, too.

3 yo: Thank you for this day.

Me: Thank you for our friends and family. Amen.

3 yo: Wait, I didn’t tell God everything that is in the room.

Me: What?

3 yo: Thank you God for this wall, thank you God for the bed, thank you God for my stuffies, thank you God for this blanket, thank you God for this pillow….

It's Thanksgiving weekend and gratitude is on my mind, even as I'm scrambling to figure out what to get my kids for Christmas. How is it December already? 

Gratitude can be complicated even for adults; is it easier or harder for kids? On the one hand, it is perhaps easier for young children to list things for which they are thankful and they are often satisfied with a simple or small toy. On the other hand, most kids I know have a long Christmas list. How could they not? We live in a culture and economic system that depends on conspicuous consumption. What happens if we all decide tomorrow that we are simply grateful with the toys, electronics, cars and clothes that we already have and stop buying new things? 

Gratitude may not mean that we stop shopping entirely, but it's still a way of being in the world that I want to keep cultivating, and that I want my children to have, too. 

While I often think that gratitude is a response to the "good things" in my life, author Diana Butler Bass in her book "Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks" gives me another lens. She writes: "Gratitude is not about stuff. Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence, to sensing that inner light and realizing the astonishing sacred, social, and scientific events that brought each one of us into being." 

My being here at this time and place and with these people is a miracle, and that's the lens I need somedays when it's 10 degrees out and my kids are whining and I am sick of making casseroles that they complain about. Gratitude is realizing, as the poet Jane Kenyon writes, "It could have been otherwise." Also, if gratitude is an emotional response, then I'm in charge of it. 

Bass also writes about the role of gratitude in human relationships. She writes: "Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence -- and interdependence -- can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us."

I think about the interdependence that defines this phase of my life: my husband and I are raising three children with no extended family in the area. Friends have become family and we take turns hauling each others' kids to sports, helping when someone has a surgery, sharing holidays and looking out for each other in general. I'm profoundly grateful for the aunties, and uncles and cousins we've made by choice here in our city, and I recognize that this gratitude is because of the mutuality of these relationships. We need each other, and that's a special kind of gratitude. 

These would probably be good things to say to my kids out loud and not just in an online blog :) 

This weekend is the liminal space between a day of giving thanks and a commercial frenzy of days that get their own names for types of shopping. Yet perhaps we can shop and we can be grateful. We an also be on the lookout for ways to name our gratitude this season in ways that go beyond stuff. We are miraculously here, today, on a day that has never been before. We have relationships to tend and to keep. We have many things in the room to tell God about (maybe too many!) For all of this, I am grateful.