It is the Thanksgiving season, but for me the holiday has little to do with giving thanks. I simply can't relate to Pilgrims and their harvest festivals. They are too remote in time and they don't relate in any way to my ethnic identity. And besides, as we all know, the holiday is shrouded in mythology much of it not benign. My mother's parents were Polish Jews who arrived in poverty around 1900. My father came to this country from Cuba after World War II. The intersection of American history with my personal identity and evoking cultural resonance is much more recent.
Nevertheless, as with many, Thanksgiving is among my favorite holidays. It is not memories of Pilgrims but the bonding with loved ones amid the joy of satisfying meals that evokes warm feelings. Some people try to manifest the theme of being thankful through an exercise around the table of shared reflections on what they are grateful for. This, I opine, is an honorable effort, but seems too contrived and lightweight to authentically embrace the importance of gratitude as a felt value we might strive to incorporate more fully into our lives.
A feeling of gratitude I increasingly believe as I age is an orientation to life and to others that brings a deeper meaning to our existence than a life embedded solely in quotidian routines.
In my career as a leader in the Ethical Movement, I have long asserted that values can be divided into two families, the hard and the soft. Among the hard values are justice, equality, respect, global peace and the panoply of values, political and economic, found in the human rights culture. Among the soft values are compassion, empathy, approbation, honor, kindness, love and gratitude. For the most part, we find and exercise the hard values in the public sphere. The soft values are found primarily in the realm of human relations and in our private lives (though values such as respect and honor straddle both the public and private domains).
I am an avid obituary reader. I find the way people have lived out their lives to be a source of enduring fascination. It is also an interesting way to educate myself about the environments and the times in which they lived. Those who merit full-length articles have been notables who have made significant contributions to the wider culture. And so I read of the lives of scientists, statespersons, artists, writers, business people, those who have contributed in important and often path-breaking ways to society and as such have influenced the lives of many. It is their public achievements that win them an extensive obituary in the New York Times, the paper of record. One generally does not receive such recognition because they have been loving to their children or exceeding kind to their friends, or were women and men who lived lives of compassion or were helpful to those in need in the smaller circles of life. In short, we tend to valorize the public contributions of others and attach great merit to it, while the private lives, perhaps understandably, go unnoticed and consequently, by implication, are deemed less important. Yet it is in the private sphere that most us live out our lives and wherein our deepest, most important and cherished experiences are felt.
Admittedly we may feel the joy of public recognition in our work or in the victories we may have won on the athletic field. But I contend that life is a succession of experiences, and it is in the recesses of our subjective feelings that whatever satisfaction, contentment and happiness we may enjoy are found primarily in the smaller spheres of private relations and our internalization of the experiences produced by them.
By this scale of evaluation who is to say that vaunted public achievements are more significant and important than the softer, more modest manifestations of our humanity such as compassion, love, kindness and the ability to feel and express thankfulness? It is here that the purest forms of the human experience are to be found. There is a beautiful line from Williams Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” that expresses this sentiment and has long stayed with me, viz.,“The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
I will be personal for a moment. I have written before in this newsletter about my enduring sadness over the death of my wife. Linda had a demonstrative side to her. She was a militant feminist who strove to live life on her own terms and she often made that known. But there was another side to her as well, a quieter side, that often went unseen. She was a social worker with a compassionate heart who spent much of her life serving people with limited resources. My wife had a fundamental commitment to live by the norm of doing the right thing simply because it was right. She also shunned being evaluated for good or ill. Linda scrupulously avoided the spotlight. Her commitments led her to provide help to people in need, often in very basic ways, even if it were a single act. So she would do the laundry of clients who were temporarily incapacitated, of give them a ride to the doctor, or watch their small children as their need arose. None heroic, but all necessary acts that lightened the burdens of others. Even today, one of the few consolations in my grief is when I hear how my wife had helped another in need, especially if it were something I was hearing for the first time. It feels like a moment in which her transcendent goodness shone though.
Now on to gratitude. I must confess that I am attuned to the ubiquity of tragedy that afflicts the human condition. Perhaps it is my vocation as a clergyperson that has given me privileged access into the lives of others. What I have found is, all one need do is scratch the surface of almost any family and you find tragedy looming not far below. Perhaps it is a child with a serious chronic illness that will involve their parents' continuous care. Or a son or daughter addicted to drugs or ensnared in criminal activity. Perhaps the person herself is disabled or endures great pain, life-sapping depression, or struggles against loneliness or suffers the burden of being unloved. Life is hard and few persons or families go unscathed by tragic circumstance.
By accepting a tragic view of life — which is not the depressed view — I have long believed that the greatness of the human condition is not to be found ultimately in our manifest triumphs over life's adversities, though those are certainly important achievements to be celebrated and enjoyed. Rather I believe the most significant aspects of our humanity are to be found in the sheer persistence and doggedness people engage in the face of tragedy much of which confronts them as overwhelming of their resources. It is the relentless striving to reach the light beyond the darkness and achieve a better day. It is this persistence that I find inspiring in ways that touch the farther reaches of the human experience.
Among the manifestation of this light is the ability to express our gratitude. It is the rays of sunlight that shine through the clouds. We can express gratitude in particular instances; gratitude for the gifts we receive from others, and to receive a gift is to be the recipient of an act of grace. Such gifts are the sustaining interlude that even if for a small period of time interrupts the problems and burdens of life. To thank others for their support in our times of need, to thank them for their acts of consideration and kindness, for their company in times of loneliness, all of which are expressions of the their caring, touch, I believe, the deepest wellspring of humanity, theirs and ours.
And then there is gratitude in life's larger frame. In moments of solitude feelings of gratitude well up. Though I live modestly within the American context, I am thankful for the relative economic privilege I enjoy. I am grateful for the accomplishments of my children and grandchildren. Though I am generally in good health, I have suffered orthopedic breakdowns and am a cancer survivor. I have had seven major surgeries, some of which have not turned out optimally. But I am not embittered nor self-pitying. Rather I am thankful to my doctors, and more generally that I live in a time and place in which remediations are possible. Had I been born 70 years earlier, I might not have survived, or would have been confined to a wheel chair and submitting to pain killers of dubious efficacy, most likely with compromising side-effects. I am grateful for my good fortune, much a product of contingency.
But most of all in moments of solitude and against the background of hardships and travails, I am thankful for the gift of life. I am thankful for the caring of good fiends and moments of sharing I spend with them. I am thankful for experiences of beauty, for the grandeur and elegance of nature, and for being a part of the mysteries of life which engage my curiosity and wonder. These gifts and the gratitude that flows from them are sufficient to carry me through.
And a graduate of the Ethical Culture Schools to add!
The concept of gratitude, especially giving and receiving small gestures that might mean everything to us at the moment of need resonated. I shared this excellent reflection.
One comment about obits. While I’m not as devoted a fan, I often wonder about laudatory remembrances. Surely, not every deceased is fondly remembered. If I were an obit writer, for some the final record would be brutally frank. For example:
“Roy Cohn, a truculent lawyer to the likes of Senator Joseph M. McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, died on August 2, 1986, from complications of AIDS. Nobody mourned the SOB’s passing - not even a pet dog.”