Thank Everyone for Everything

I've been thinking about gratitude recently, about how--to paraphrase my colleague Mary Herman on Stone Soup Sunday--Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that commercialism hasn't been able to ruin. There's something just essentially human about the impulse to be thankful, to thank each other and thank the universe and thank the spirit of love or life or God, or whatever works for us. Anne Lamott, the writer, has a new book out about prayer called "Help, Thanks, Wow" because she thinks a prayer is always one of those things, and the 13th century German theologian Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is 'thank you,' that would suffice." In a humanist community, we can be a little itchy about prayer, but we're rarely itchy about saying thank you--or anyway, we certainly shouldn't be. But sometimes it's hard to think whom we are thanking, if it's not another person. There are things out there that no person gave us, but that we love and marvel at and appreciate all the same. Are we thankful to the world? To science? To evolution? Actually, I feel thankful to all of those things, or at least about them. I'm also thankful for what I call grace: for the sort of accidental, or at least serendipitous, beauty in the world. For the care and love that people show each other, and the wonder of the world, and just the way life is so nice sometimes. There was a poem by Marilyn Nelson that I came across a while back which says this better than I can. It seems a little morbid at first, and it's titled "Psalm," which you might think is another of those itchy words. But please do click on this link and read it (I don't want to paste it here for copyright reasons). And then tell me if you see the connection, too, the connection to...I'm not sure, just the luck sometimes of being alive in this world. Happy Thanksgiving.