Family and food. That’s what most folks think about when they think about the Thanksgiving holiday. We try to conjure an atmosphere of warmth and celebration. Maybe you’ve felt more like a slave than a celebrant, hurried and worried. Hurried to get the house and meal ready on time. Worried that you or someone else might ruin the group’s expectations for the day. Maybe you’ve struggled to connect prayerfully to God in gratitude, or to participate and serve from a place of joyfulness. Maybe you’ve felt conflicted about just taking a day for fun and feasting, as if true thanksgiving should be characterized by austerity for the sake of charity.
Think about this: the Bible is full of celebrations and feasts. When God calls his people to offer thanksgiving sacrifices to him, he has them eat the sacrifices themselves. Our gratitude to God is somehow directly connected to our enjoyment of his gifts. Delight and thanksgiving go together. If you’re not enjoying, you’re not grateful. This is how we are made, in God’s own image. The Triune God dwells eternally as Giver (Father), Gift (Spirit), and Thankful One (Son). Being created in God’s image means that we have the capacity to receive, enjoy, and be thankful for the gift of God himself, and the world in him.
You can try to enjoy without being grateful, which ultimately undermines your enjoyment. What if you are thankful for something, but not thankful to someone? “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is really thankful and has no one to thank” (Chesterton). And you can try to be grateful without enjoyment, which ultimately undermines your gratitude. The “disinterested spiritual person” who dutifully offers thanks to God without appreciation for the beauty of God and his gifts isn’t truly thankful. We really should keep delight and thanksgiving together, like God tells us to do (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).
You might think that the best and highest form of thanksgiving would be to enjoy God himself and to be thankful to him for his self-gift to you, apart from enjoying his gifts. You would be almost correct to think this way, except for the fact that God tells us that he has given us everything—himself and the whole world—for our enjoyment and gratitude. Our thanksgiving to God really is to include our delight in his gifts, not just in mystical prayer or asceticism.
Here’s a great quote from Robert Capon:
Let me tell you why God made the world.
One afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems, he had had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things – new ways of being and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, “Really, this is absolutely great stuff! Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?” And God the Holy Spirit said, “Terrific! I’ll help you.” So they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Holy Spirit put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pine cones kept dropping all over the place, and crazy fish swam around in the wineglasses. There were mushrooms and mastodons, grapes and geese, tornadoes and tigers – and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them, and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and said, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind! Tov! Tov! Tov!” And all God the Son and God the Holy Spirit could think of to say was the same thing: “Tov! Tov! Tov!” So they shouted together “Tov meod!” and they laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for beings to be, and how clever of the Father to think of the idea, and how kind of the Son to go to all that trouble putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing. And for ever and ever they told old jokes, and the Father and the Son drank their wine in unitate Spiritus Sancti, and they all threw ripe olives and pickled mushrooms at each other per omnia saecula saeculorum, Amen.
It is, I grant you, a crass analogy; but crass analogies are the safest. Everybody knows that God is not three old men throwing olives at each other. Not everyone, I’m afraid, is equally clear that God is not a cosmic force or a principle of being or any other dish of celestial blancmange we might choose to call him. Accordingly, I give you the central truth that creation is the result of a trinitarian bash, and leave the details of the analogy to sort themselves out as best they can.
Capon is no heretic. His is an “orthodoxy,” a “true glory” that we need. God has made us so that he might give to us himself, and the world in him. This is the gift of family and food. It’s simple, but profound: fun and feasting. Our delighted participation is our thanksgiving, patterned after the nature of our Triune God in his own eternal Thanksgiving.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum, Amen.
