I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. [Chesterton, A Short History o England (London: New Phoenix Library, 1951): p. 59.] 

If G. K. Chesterton is right about that, then we ought to do some high thinking this Thanksgiving season.  If we want to do more than go through the motions of carving up the turkey and wolfing down the pumpkin pie (with a dollop of whipped cream, yum), then we need to open our eyes to wonder so we can double our joy.

Some people think setting aside a date on the calendar for thanksgiving is like setting aside a date for good weather or for falling in love—you can’t force these things, you just have to go with them when they come to you.  And while there is some truth to that, I would say that’s a rather pessimistic view of life, the kind of worldview someone like Sigmund Freud tried to foist upon us.

The thoughts of the father of psychoanalysis were too low for any sustained joy or chronic gratitude.  He looked at life as a series of human events that could be explained in human terms with reference to nothing outside one’s own head, let alone to God.  He believed in the pleasure principle—the idea that human happiness is all derived from fleeting moments of sexual pleasure.  And since these may occur for the most eager of us only occasionally, happiness cannot be a regular thing.  So, we have to adjust to unhappiness being the normal human condition.  We try to avoid sustained unhappiness

that leads to depression, which would make our little lives unbearably miserable.  Freud himself resorted to all sorts of self-medicating therapies, including the ongoing use of cocaine, to relieve the general sadness of his life.  [Armand Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (Free Press, 2002).]

Now, from time to time throughout the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth—the teacher, the narrator of the book—sounds about as melancholy as Dr. Freud.  Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and striving after the wind, he would say.  He portrays himself as a man who has everything anyone could possibly want in life, but he has found all of them lacking in their power to bring happiness. 

And he is entirely right about that.  Think what anyone might think might bring happiness.  Money?  How many people do you know with money who are truly happy because of it?  They may be happy because having it allows them not to think about it so much, but in that case it isn’t really the money that makes them happy, is it?  It’s something else, like the fact that they don’t have to worry about it.  Or what about love?  Never-married people sometimes fancy this as the answer.  Asked many married people if that’s the secret of happiness?  I know lots of happily married people, but if you expect another person to be the key to your happiness, good luck to you, Dr. Freud.  Children?  Wonderful.  Love them, cherish them, but understand they have this nasty little habit of growing up and forgetting that their main purpose in life is to make their parents happy.  Parents can disappoint their children equally well.  Work?  That works sometimes, for some time.  And then the economy goes bad or you make a mistake or you have to retire, and then what?  No, none of these sustains happiness, let alone that quality of life that is richer still, that joy that swims only in the deep end of the pool.

So how do we arrive at something that gives rise to thanks because it rises up as joy from the depths of the soul?  Well, before I launch into this, I need to make some disclaimers.  First, understand that I understand and God understands that all’s not right with the world.  Bad things happen, and sad things, too.  The point of all this wisdom from Koheleth and the Apostle Paul is not to discount whatever madness over evil or sadness over loss you feel.  If all were right with the world, we wouldn’t be wrestling with this tension: we’d already be in heaven.  But that said, another thing is this: all’s not wrong with the world, either.  Sometimes I think we suffer from watching the news or reading the papers and thinking we are all under siege at every moment by powers of darkness unrelenting.  And if you go to church under some steeples, you get fed a heavy diet of grave words designed to make you believe the only good to be known is in the next life.  We get only fleeting moments in this life by our relationship to Christ in the invisible places of the soul.  But that view of things is hardly better than Freud’s, or Christ more preferred than cocaine. 

Gladly, there is a view of things that is truer to the way of things, and in it Christ is no narcotic-offering fleeting relief for our despair.  Christ is the solid ground under our feet that allows us to keep our balance when the world tilts off its moral plumb.  Christ is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, the dearest freshness deep down things.  Like the morning dew, he supplies daily refreshment beneath our normal notice.

Next, I do not want you to leave here thinking that all depression is a state of sin that you can climb out of by higher thinking.  Clinical depression is real, as real as any other kind of illness.  Chemical imbalance is not spiritual imperfection.  Medical treatment and counseling for such things can be God’s good gifts of life to you.  You are more fool than saint to refuse treatment under these conditions.  Pride like that can get in the way of a life of gratitude and joy.

Finally, genuine grief over loss is not the enemy of joy; it is the proper avenue to returning to it.  You have to go through the rightful stages of grieving before you can regain a sense of joy that will wake you up each day eager to meet it.  God has made us this way, and trying to pretend that all’s well since we know God is good or that since our beloved deceased is with God that we therefore just march happily along without so much as a catch in the throat, let alone a pall over our heart – well, that’s just crazy, and it certainly isn’t Christian!

Alrighty then, now that I’ve answered my mail ahead of time, onward.  They shall scarcely brood over the days of their lives, because God keeps tm occupied with the joy of their hearts.  Outside of John 3:16, I can’t think of a verse I would rather have you memorize in the Bible.

Isn’t this the cause of our unthankfulness and ingratitude—that we brood over the days of our lives too much?  The Hebrew phrase is less eloquent but more graphic: They do not make count of the stones.  The image is a pile of stones built up as a memorial over a grave.  They do not try to value or measure their own lives, Koheleth is saying.  But isn’t that what we do?  We are all so concerned with whether we count, with keeping score, with measuring our worth, with comparing ourselves to others, with worrying over whether what we have or what we have done is enough for us to be remembered when we pass from here.  Koheleth says that truly happy people, people whose breasts pound with gratitude, scarcely brood over such things.  They leave it to God to sort out, and they instead occupy themselves with the joy that God puts in their hearts, a joy they had nothing to do with, a joy they could never manufacture like bees that make their own honey.

We don’t conjure up salvation from within ourselves.  As Chesterton would say, a baby doesn’t get his best food by sucking his thumb.  Likewise, we do not get our own best moral food by sucking our own souls and denying our dependence on God or other good things.  We feed on the gifts of God, on the good things of creation, and they nourish us until they make us strong and healthy.

This is why Koheleth can talk about how fitting it is for us to eat and drink and enjoy our work all the days of our lives.  Not because it is our food or our drink or our work, but because it is our lot, our portion, what’s been put on our plates.  All these are God’s gifts to us.  Life is to be received, not taken.  We are to focus upon them with wide-eyed wonder and allow gratitude to well up in us to the praise of God.

So Paul says, Whatever is true or honorable or just or pure or pleasing or commendable or excellent or worthy of praise—think about these things.  Take account of these things instead of taking account of things that only cause worry or a feeling of lack.  Pay attention to the good things all round you.  Thank God for them in prayer, stand before them with your mouth open at the wonder of them.  They are windows through which we see God.  But we must be careful not to make of them mirrors in which we can see only ourselves.

I was on a plane coming back from Atlanta Friday.  Delta was late leaving that airport that they ought to rename Purgatory, since you never hope to stay there but you are always hoping to go upward out of there.  Anyway, I was on one of those huge air whales, packed to the gills.  The man sitting next to me in the middle seat must have just missed having to buy two seats for himself.  I was trying to work on this sermon on my laptop in the cramped quarters—a sermon about being thankful don’t you know?!  We were late and I was supposed to pick up my daughter, Cameron, who was arriving from Greenville at the American terminal, because we had timed it to come in at the same time.  Well, I was trying to focus and block everything out, but there was this little girl, maybe 6 years old, sitting by the window across the aisle, traveling alone.  She was looking out into the night sky as we were coming into Dallas, and she was calling out all the colors she could see in the sunset.  She was oohing and aahing so much she got the attention of everyone in a three- row vicinity.  We all starting looking at each other and smiling, realizing she was seeing things we were missing for all our sense of hurry and worry.  So we all started straining to see the colors.

I would need to remember that scene when I landed and realized I had lost my keys somewhere in the journey and was stranded at the airport with my daughter waiting for her daddy to pick her up.  My son, Rhett, came out and rescued us both, but the spirit was strangely light in the light of all that had happened.  I realized why on the way home, when Cameron asked me if I saw the sunset coming in on the flight.  She lit up as she described an orange band of color that stretched across the bent rim of the prairie horizon.  It was like a poem, she said.  And I understood my sermon right then and there.  High thoughts from child-like wonder lead to persistent gratitude and deep joy.

Learning to be thankful for what is, instead of being resentful for what is not, comes from looking into it all with 6 year old eyes of wonder—whether you are 6 or 46.  When we brood over how we wish things were, we don’t change them: they are what they are.  But God’s gifts are what they are, too.  We might wish they were otherwise; we might wish people acted differently; we might wish we were different, too.  But that brooding will only rob us of the joy that God wants us to occupy ourselves with.  It’s a joy that gets us outside ourselves, a joy that rises up to God as a life of thanksgiving.

So in this season of our plenty, I'll go first, since I'm looking out at you now. Thank you, most gracious God, for the joy of this wondrous chruch. Amen