​GIVING THANKS FOR IT ALL

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.     Stephen Colbert
 
Maybe you know his story and maybe you don’t.  Long before Stephen Colbert became the Broadway and television star he is, he was the youngest of eleven children of committed Roman Catholics, loved and cared-for by his stay-at-home mother and his very successful physician/academician father.  When he was ten years old, his father and two next older brothers were killed in a commercial airplane crash.  The bottom fell out of his world.
 
Colbert remains a practicing Catholic with a deep faith in God.  Asked in an interview how he can look back on the tragedy he suffered and the hard times that followed and still profess a faith, he responded, “If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.”
 
So many of us, myself included, find it difficult to imagine the world around us as cause for unflagging gratitude. To be sure, as Americans we live with far more cause to appreciate the circumstances around us than so many others in the world who face daily challenges to mere subsistence for themselves and those they love. However, as I learned from Rabbi David Aronson, of blessed memory, on my very first day of seminary, a rich man with a stone in his shoe hurts just as much as a poor man with a stone in his shoe.  You cannot comfort a ten-year-old by pointing out that he still has one parent and eight siblings left.
 
Being grateful for all of your life does not mean deflecting the bad by appreciating the good.  It is an extraordinary feat of affirmation to be thankful for the sting of the bee in the same measure as its honey, and yet a person of such perspective understands the richness of being human that is present in every experience.
 
My own tradition affirms this approach as well. In the Mishnah, the collection of legal teachings derived from the Bible, there are instructions about acknowledging God’s beneficence in expected circumstances – upon seeing something majestic in nature, rediscovering a separated friend, enjoying a meal, acquiring new household goods. But a general principle also applies: One is obligated to recite a blessing for the bad that befalls him just as he recites a blessing for the good that befalls him.  That instruction is derived from a teaching familiar to Jew and Catholic alike: Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.  That is, not only with the happy parts.
 
I don’t know that in the moment of bereavement, little Stephen gave thanks for his life and all it had just become.  When I was much, much older – at a time when I might have simply glided to the end of a long career and retired – I made a decision write a new chapter instead.  The year that followed was an unmitigated disaster.  I was unsuccessful in my new endeavor.  I found myself marginalized in my former community.  Beloved relatives died. There was a roster of lesser and greater challenges that felt amplified by their sheer volume and context.  I was one miserable human being.
 
I was dared by my wife to be happy.  With her help, I looked around and understood I had a choice about how I reacted to the turmoil around me. I could be defined by it, or I could work my way through my troubles with an appreciation that I indeed had that choice.  I am grateful to her as well.
 
I caution you (and myself) against considering this attitude first-world privilege.  Of course, Stephen Colbert is on the other side of his tragedy, and I am on the other side of my significantly lesser challenges.  Gratitude is not dependent on overcoming the obstacles put before you; it is a conscious decision to live in a state of appreciation for the very fact of life, no matter its trials and tribulations, even as you feel the pain.  That’s why adherents of different faith traditions respond with some version of gratitude to any situation.  I most appreciate the call-and-response in charismatic Christian circles where one person proclaims, “God is good” and the listener responds, “all the time.”  But I equally appreciate the simple declaration in Hebrew to any moment – “Barukh Hashem,” Praise God – the truncated version of the instruction in the Mishnah.
 
With a table of bounty spread before us and a day set aside for giving thanks for it all, it is easy to consider them the fruits of being alive and sustained and arriving at this moment.  The virus has not disappeared, the challenges of society have not evaporated, and troubles and tragedies, as always, lie ahead.  But whether you take your cue from Stephen Colbert, the Mishnah or the teachings of your own tradition or philosophy, this much is true: If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.

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