Thanksgiving is a Practice with Cornelius Plantinga

Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Cornelius Plantinga on Thanksgiving is a practice. I’d also like to thank our friends at Brazos Press. It’s a real pleasure to be able to collaborate with you, and we just so appreciate your support. And I’m delighted to welcome so many of you to today’s online conversation, and just really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. We also want to give a special shout out to both our nearly 100 first time guests, as well as to our international guests joining us from all over the world. So if you haven’t already done so, drop us a note in the chat box. Let us know where you’re tuning in from it’s always fun to see. If you are one of those first time attendees or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a space to engage life’s biggest questions in the context of faith, and offer programs like this one to do so, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. And we hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today, as we look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday later this month. It seemed only appropriate to give thought to giving thanks. It’s a topic that is not only a perennial focus of parents trying to raise their children the way they should go, but also of many philosophers and theologians. Cicero asserted that gratitude was both the greatest of all the virtues and the wellspring of all others. Martin Luther called gratitude the basic Christian attitude. And Jonathan Edwards described it as, quote, a sign of true religion. It’s also a virtue with remarkable upsides and advantages. The last decade or so has brought a slew of medical and psychological research that has found that gratitude may be considered among the most potent of biohacks, helping to improve one’s sleep, one’s mood, immune function, heart health, energy levels, even memory.

And yet, for all of the reasons for and benefits of gratitude, cultivating an attitude of gratitude as well as the practices of thanksgiving remain a struggle for many of us, both in our private lives as well as our common life together, which seems often far more characterized by anger and division rather than grace and gratitude. So what keeps us from a practice of gratitude? What does it mean to be a grateful person or a grateful people? How might we better see, savor, and celebrate the gifts and graces that we enjoy. And how would such practices change our lives, both individually and corporately? These are big questions and to help us wrestle with them. I am so glad and thankful to welcome our guest today, Doctor Cornelius Neal Plantinga. Neal Plantinga is a systematic theologian, scholar, writer, speaker, and ordained minister. He served for nearly a decade as the president of Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan, and currently serves as the Senior Research Fellow in the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. He’s also the author of more than 200 articles and essays and eight different books, including Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be and In Engaging with God’s World, as well as reading for Preaching and Beyond doubt. I’ll also note that two of his eight books have actually received a Christianity Today Book of the year appellation. His latest work, gratitude, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss, is one that we’re really looking forward to digging into. Neil, welcome.

Thank you. Cherie. Thank you for inviting me.

It’s great to have you here. So any book represents a significant immersion of one’s time and life into the writing of it. And so as we start out, I always like to get the story behind the story. What led you to focus so much of your life on gratitude?

Well, thanks for asking. I guess I first noticed what would lead to the book when I was a boy and saw that my mom had an extremely light trigger for gratitude. Every single thing seemed to elicit it. You know, if the weather was great that was due to God’s goodness. If it rained, sure you can’t play baseball, but boy, do we ever need rain. She found a way to give thanks for almost everything. And, I noticed that I took note of it and, admired it. And then when I became a serious student of the Bible, I saw giving thanks, appear almost on every page in the Psalms and, in Paul’s writings. It’s a major dimension of dressing up like Christ. You know, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, and so on. But then he says three times, be thankful. Sing with gratitude in your hearts. Whatever you do in word or deed. Give thanks to God through Jesus Christ. So three times in a row and I thought now this one is very important to Paul. And then in my own reformed tradition, we have, a gem of a confession, the Heidelberg Catechism. Its third section is all about gratitude. It’s a major motive of the Christian life. So putting all that together, I thought it would make a good book topic. And then I’m aware of something you mentioned earlier, Cherie, in your introduction, namely, that the field of positive psychology in the last 25 years has discovered that gratitude is the single best predictor of human well-being. And I thought, what a terrific thing that something that that’s our duty is also going to make us flourish. Can’t beat it.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about what gratitude actually is. And you just mentioned the word duty. And you’ve referred to gratitude throughout your book variously as involving grace, a gift, a duty. Concepts which people don’t necessarily intuitively think all go together. So how should we understand what gratitude actually is?

Well, I think gratitude is a sense we have a glad sense of having been gifted by someone with something, and therefore feeling like to close out the round. I ought to do something back to the giver, that I have a debt of gratitude to the giver. So I’ll say it’s a glad sense of having been gifted by someone with something, and then feeling a debt of gratitude. Back to the giver.

Okay, that’s really interesting. As we think about this, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is that definition seems to contain within it a need for discernment and that if there is a sense of indebtedness that is conferred as a part of a gift, that might be why people reason. People often refuse gifts. And it also seems like there’s at least the potential danger of a sense of manipulation being kind of included within that. So what’s the what’s the role of discernment in gratitude as well, such that, you know, that people kind of can be able to discern between, something which merits gratitude in that sense of indebtedness and perhaps, something which may be manipulatively conferred to, to basically kind of grow a sense of misplaced obligation.

Yes, that’s a very pointed question. And I think a necessary one, because we’ve all had the sense of having gotten a gift that had strings attached. Somebody gives us something and it’s obvious that they have in mind maybe a means of controlling us, or a means of impressing us with how, luxurious their gift is. They’re showing off with their gift. they may, enjoy the fact that we will now feel indebted to them. It may even be a reason for their giving. Giving a gift, like every excellent thing can be corrupt. And that’s partly why we need the gift of discernment. It can block our sense of gratitude if we think that the giver has ulterior motives or, has strings attached to the gift.

You know when you mentioned the sense of indebtedness, too, of course. It makes me think about forgiveness, you know, and that, you know, part of what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer is that to forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. A sense of being released from any obligation. And you know, you’re a systematic theologian. You’ve written, a wonderful book on sin, and called Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be. What do you see as the link between gratitude and the sense of feeling indebted for a gift? and forgiveness? The releasing of such indebtedness.

I take forgiveness to be the act by which I drop anger. I have a right to and deliberately reconstruct the offender. So if somebody hurts me, What I owe the offender, is probably something like rebuke or retribution. But what if instead I freely and generously drop my anger and try to reconstruct the offender, it would be very appropriate for the offender to feel gratitude to me, because what I have done is a generous act. I have forgiven the offender, something that the offender might have expected retribution for. So, gratitude, can be connected to forgiveness in that way. If I offend somebody and they instead of rebuking me or condemning me or cussing me, they forgive me. I will, of course, feel gratitude to the forgiver. That’s entirely fitting.

Let me go back to something you said earlier. And in fact it’s even the subtitle of your book on why giving thanks is the key to our well-being. And I mentioned in my introduction, as you mentioned, just a few of the benefits, of gratitude, but I’d love to hear you kind of talk a little bit more about what do you mean when you say it’s the key to our well-being? What happens as a result of gratitude?

Well, that’s a that’s one, one trigger for explaining that gratitude is a not only a fitting response to being gifted, and I think our moral duty, but it’s also, the key to unlock a whole host of treasures, grateful people, do. Well, one of one of the things that we don’t always think about is that gratitude can be a consolation in time of trouble. If I lose a loved one, my natural response to it, of course, will be grief. And my grief may be very heavy. It may be, quite enduring. But if, by the grace of God, gratitude for the life of my loved one, gratitude that I had this precious person in my life may gradually on begin to eclipse my grief. And when it does, it will become my consolation. The main response that I will eventually hope for about the life of my beloved person whom I lost, is gratitude for having had them in my life. So consolation can be a great benefit of gratitude. Contentment is another. Many of us have, spent times in our lives when we were unhappy and discontent, but a grateful person finds that they are much more likely to be content with their circumstances now. Their expectations have to be realistic. For example, I can expect my marriage to give me pleasure and joy, but not necessarily ecstasy. And if I’m expecting ecstasy all the time, I’m not going to be content with my marriage. I have to have a realistic expectation about it. Same thing with my job. I can I can expect it to provide me with a living, but I can’t expect it to provide my final fulfillment.

The same goes for friendships and for so much else. If your expectations are realistic, then it will be easier for you to become content, and it will be a feature of having been grateful for your marriage, or for your job, or for your education. So, consolation. contentment. And of course, gratitude is a powerful engine of joy. There is probably no more powerful engine of joy in our lives than gratitude. If we reflect on the fact that we did not deserve to be forgiven by God, but have been, the natural reaction to that is, is joy. And our hymns and songs tell us rejoice. For the Lord is good. His love endures forever. The Psalms are full of this. Gratitude gives us consolation, and it gives us contentment, and it gives us joy. And then, of course, all those things that you mentioned. Uh Cherie. In your introduction that positive psychologists have pointed out, gratitude. Grateful people have lower blood pressure. Grateful people have hearts with more regular rhythms. Grateful people sleep better. They their moods are better. Their friendships are better. There is so much in their lives. They are more patient. There is so much in their lives that improves when they are grateful. And of course, as with everything, it’s possible to corrupt your knowledge of this and decide that you’re going to be grateful in order to engineer your well-being and that’ll spoil it. I mean, you’re grateful because it’s right to do.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask you about that in that, as you mentioned, just in the last decade or two, there just seems to have been an explosion of of positive psychology and the research about it, and on one way, it does almost sound like gratitude is like this miracle drug. You know, I mentioned, like, you know, an incredible biohack. Does it does it make you nervous at all that, that some people might. Yeah. Essentially try to instrumentalize this into, of course, a way to self optimize.

But if you turn it into, into a self-help gig it loses its authenticity and therefore its real power to actually make you flourish. Sure anything good can be corrupted and turning the search for gratitude into a self-help, endeavor is corrupting.

Yeah, well, kind of turning our attention to how we can become a more grateful people. You know, you’ve mentioned throughout your book that the gratitude is not just an emotion, but but a disposition that can be chosen and can be cultivated, by a number of means, including essentially attending to the world around us, noticing when a kindness has been done or a benefit received. Talk a little bit, if you would, about how one cultivates the practices that in turn cultivate a grateful heart.

Good. This is a wonderful topic. And I’ll begin by saying that, most of us learn gratitude from a parent or guardian or older brother or sister. Somebody hands us when we’re a little kid, hands us a toy or a piece of candy, and says to us, what do you say? In other words, I’ve just given you something, and now it’s fitting for you to say something back. And little kid, if the kid needs to be needs to needs to have some kind of prod. The mom will say, what do you say? What do you say? Can you say thank you? Child says thank you. And there we go. Now we’re going down the route. A lifelong route of learning gratitude in, religious homes. Children will be exposed to prayers of thanksgiving. what is called the grace before a meal is really a thanksgiving for grace. Namely, the grace that involves, this roast beef or these wonderful vegetables or this salad. So, Thanksgiving at meal times. thanks for favors. All of this is cultivated in our homes. And as a child grows out into the world, the child discovers that if somebody opens a door for them or puts their carry on luggage up into the overhead bin in the airport, the normal expected social lubricant is for you to say thank you. This is so common and so expected. In fact, so routine that we never really notice that we’re saying thank you all, all day long until somebody admits it. Yeah, we do a favor for somebody and they just stand there. We wonder what the heck is wrong with you.

So it’s a social lubricant. We learn it in our homes, in our schools, in our churches. And then, of course, in our churches, we, practice reciting the great acts of God, the mighty acts of God. Creation, the Exodus, the deliverance of the children of Israel from exile, the incarnation of Jesus. Jesus teaching and miracles. Jesus atoning death. Jesus resurrection. The Pentecost explosion that starts the church across the ages. All of these things are recited for us because they are incitements to our gratitude. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love, his mercy endures forever. And God’s goodness and God’s love is demonstrated by these mighty acts of deliverance. So we learn in church to recite God’s mighty acts, to give thanks for them. We sing our thanks. In church, we pray our thanks. In church, we get the occasional sermon about giving thanks. And we have the Eucharist, the Thanksgiving meal in which we have a prayer of great Thanksgiving prayer, in which we give thanks for our Lord’s body and blood sacrificed for us. So Christians learn thanksgiving in church, and then, of course, aware that Thanksgiving is right and fitting and proper for us, as the Book of Common Prayer says, we cultivate it deliberately. We keep a Thanksgiving journal. My wife and I both do this we write down during the day, five, six, seven things, usually five, but sometimes seven, particular things we’re grateful for. And at the end of the day, we have them, and it’s something we can center our evening prayers on. So, keeping a Thanksgiving journal, some people keep a Thanksgiving jar and they make a note and they drop it into their jar.

And when it’s time for them to to relieve their sense of discontent or unhappiness, they pull one of those slips out of the jar and are reminded what they have to be grateful for. Some people drop photographs into their jar to trigger their gratitude. We can cultivate gratitude by, deliberately reciting what it is, testifying to what it is we are grateful for. Very common among, Canadians for their Canadian Thanksgiving for Americans in three weeks at the Thanksgiving, dinner table to go around the table. And each person says something that they are particularly grateful for that happened during this past year. Testifying to our gratitude tends to increase it, and it tends to become contagious, and then other people feel like they would like to recite what they’re grateful for. By the way one of my my friends, Gary Schmidt, who’s an author of books for middle schoolers, remembers when he was a boy, a Thanksgiving Day dinner in his parents home where his grandparents were present. And during the prayer before the meal, Gary, who is seven, became aware of a slurping sound, and he opened his eyes and the family dog had its paws up on the table and was licking the side of the turkey. And Gary’s maternal grandmother opened her eyes because she heard the slurping, too. And she saw Gary watching, and she put her finger up to her lips to shush Gary to not mention this when the prayer was over and he said this was, a special memory he had with his grandmother until the day she died. They never talked about it.

That’s great. You know, one of the anecdotes or parts of your book I really appreciated is you not only talk about what you’ve just been talking about. Now, the importance and the invitation to notice and attend to and remember, you know, recollect and reflect on. And I think you used the great word savor the gifts in our lives. But one thing you mentioned that is far less rote than simply like saying thank you. You mentioned, I think it was another author who had written a book where he one day he was savoring his coffee and decided that he was going to try to thank everyone involved in, basically bringing that, you know, getting that cup of coffee to the point where he could enjoy it and then came to realize that there were like well over a thousand people to think. And essentially a very small example of the vast web of benefit and interdependence and gift giving and receipt that we are all, inevitably a part of, if we will only stop and notice and attend to it. And that’s far less common. and I’m just sort of curious, how does one go about cultivating that?

Well, thank you for mentioning that Cherie. The book is by A.J. Jacobs, and it’s titled thanks a Thousand. And, you know, think of the expression thanks a million. Well, he wants to give thanks a thousand because he figured out that there were probably a thousand distinct people who are responsible for giving getting his cup of morning coffee into his hands, and he started with his barista. He would go to his corner coffee shop, get a cup of coffee, and of course, his barista hands it to him. So there’s that. But then, behind the barista is the owner of the coffee shop, the supplier who has done the pre-testing and the distributing the distributor and he goes all the way up into upstate New York, into the Catskills to thank the people who send clean water to New York City from which coffee can be made. He goes all the way to South America to find coffee farmers and thank them. He thanks the people who bag coffee, who ship it, who put it on pallets, who lift it with forklifts, who put it on trucks. He added up all the different kinds of people involved in putting a cup of steaming, flavorful coffee in his hands and thought it was at least a thousand. So that’s a powerful illustration of the fact that almost everything good we enjoy has countless people behind it who are responsible for getting it into our hands or into our mouths or into our lives.

You know, just as a certain disposition cultivatable disposition, you know, of of attending to gifts and graces, noticing them, savoring them, remembering them, recollecting them, talking about them, celebrating them, you know, and paying it forward can cultivate gratitude. You also mentioned several things that can inhibit or even kill it outright, and would love to talk about some of those and how one helps root out those gratitude killers even as one tries to cultivate the gratitude, givers and a few that you mentioned. I would love for you to just elaborate on some of these. Our cynicism, self-sufficiency, greed, apathy, resentment and entitlement. tell us a little bit about this and both how it kills gratitude and how we can have some gratitude killer blockers in terms of our spiritual disciplines and where we place our attention.

Yeah. And again, every good thing can be corrupted and every good thing can be blocked. So, there are natural inhibitors of gratitude. If I’m depressed, if I’m anxious, if I’m ashamed, if the giver has strings attached. But then there are also things in my own life that may inhibit my gratitude if I’m cynical. Cynicism is essentially, distrust of other people’s motives. So somebody gives me something, and I cannot fully and freely or simply receive it with thanksgiving. I first have to question now what’s behind this? Why is this person giving this to me? What’s their real motive? A cynic is going to find gratitude uphill work because they can never trust the givers motives, even if the givers Giver’s motives are innocent, the cynic will suspect them. So cynicism is a miserable and powerful block of gratitude, and so is the sense of self-sufficiency. I have everything I need. I don’t need anything else. In fact, I don’t want anything else because I don’t want to feel obliged to anybody. I will block any attempt to gift me because I don’t want to be indebted to anybody. The self-sufficient, sufficient person is not likely to be grateful. The same is true of the apathetic person.

You know, the Desert fathers and mothers had a list of seven deadly sins pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. And by sloth, they didn’t mean mere laziness. They meant indifference in the face of wonderful goods. The slothful person says to God, you are not interesting and neither are any of your goods. The slothful person is incapable of responding with innocent thankfulness because they have an apathetic indifference to goodness. So apathy is a terrible block, and greed is because the greedy person never has enough. The greedy person is never content always has to be more, always more, always more. And when you are restless for more, you are not going to be grateful. So cynicism, apathy, self-sufficiency, greed. And then the Mother of All Blacks entitlement. I deserve every single good thing I have. I earned it, or I’m so special that I ought to have it, even if I haven’t earned it. I deserve every good thing I have, and because I deserve it. Nothing is a gift. Everything is something to which I’m entitled. So the entitled person is almost entirely incapable of innocent and free Thanksgiving.

Wow. You know, I want to dig into that in just a second. But, one question that came to mind as you were talking about the, you know, in some ways fairly pathetic, condition of the slothful who can no longer take delight and feel thankful. And it made me think back to a thing that happened to me once where, I was at a conference, a bunch of us had gone out on a boat, and we were right by this huge whale breaching. And it was it was such an incredible, wonder provoking sight. Almost all of us individually. Our reaction was to jump up and down, squeal and clap our hands like delighted kids. And, you know, and each of us recall feeling very grateful for it afterwards, too. And I’m kind of curious, what you saw as the link, if anything, between wonder and gratitude, because there was such a, there was a joy and an awe and a sense of yeah, of wonder before this great beast who had done us no good, you know. You know. But there was a sense of just complete gratitude for what we had just seen. Is there a link or what are your thoughts?

Oh, yeah. Well, that’s a gorgeous story. I had something similar happen one time. I used to be in a position where I had to raise money for an institution, and so I would spend time with donors, and some of them had a lot of money. And so I was on the stern of a yacht of a donor early one morning with my cup of coffee. And as I stood there, not six feet away, three porpoises breached and dove and breached and dove, you could have laid a yardstick across their snouts. They were in such perfect alignment, and it was as if they saw me with my coffee on the stern of this boat and they said, ah, isn’t life fun? Don’t you want to enjoy this with us? And they kept that up for, I’ll say, three minutes just right there, and then all of a sudden they just dove and disappeared. I never forgot it. It was to me a sign of the new heaven and earth, in which I think our relationship to non-human creation will be much enhanced. More intimate may involve communications of various kinds. yes. These are wonders. And the link between gratitude and them can be discovered in the word wonderful. If something is good, if it’s a gift, we say wonderful. And of course, the word wonder is in that word. And it’s particularly Applicable. I think when it comes to natural wonders, to the majesty of mountains and the sound of crashing surf and my pond right outside my window right now as I look out on my pond. This is a season when Canadian geese in their migration will land on my pond honking and skiing to a stop. That is wonderful, and I am grateful for it. Sure, gratitude for things that have that that elicit our wonder is totally natural.

Yeah. That’s beautiful. We’re rapidly running out of time. There’s so many more questions to ask you, but I do want to. Before we turn to questions from our audience, I want to ask you a little bit about some of these other blockages. One other Potential blockage. At least it seemed to me. It’s not mentioned in your book, but it’s sort of implied is distraction and we are living in the most distracted and distracting time in human history. You also, kind of wondered aloud in your book, about some of the challenges of living in a meritocracy and I think you asked the question, could it be that the very structure of society breeds both entitlement and resentment and therefore suppresses gratitude? So I wanted to ask you about what practices we should be considering in terms of cultivating gratitude, not just in our personal lives as people of faith, but also as neighbors and citizens who live within the context of deeply distracting times of certain societal expectations. How do we think about this in terms of our common life together?

Yeah, what a great question. Of course, distractions are everywhere, and maybe never more than in an age of hand-held devices and of constant social media. You go to a restaurant and you see what appear to be a father, a mother, three kids. None of them is talking to each other. They are all looking at their hand. A friend of mine is a college is a Calvin professor Rebecca. Rebecca DeYoung, wonderful author and teacher. she does an experiment with her philosophy class each year in which her students have to put away their devices for 48 hours. When the 48 hours are over, they routinely confess to her that these were the most difficult 48 hours of their whole lives.

They couldn’t know what to do with themselves without this constant input. Constant input. And of course, if you have constant input, it’s not just, you know, every hour, it’s every minute. It’s every second that will distract you from virtually everything else, distract you from a conversation at a dinner table, distract you from a free exchange, face to face with a friend of yours. Distract you from noticing the graceful swimming pattern of a swan. Distract you from countless things that you would otherwise notice and be grateful for. Yes. So distractions are a huge challenge to the person who wants to be grateful and require deliberate mindfulness of things that we want to attend to so that we are not distracted from them. And deliberate periods without our handheld devices. Deliberate periods in which we spend time in God’s good creation, noticing, all the delights there and then. Besides living in a society of distractions, we live in a society in which. People think that, they have to earn their way and they spend so much of their time trying to do it. There are winners and losers in this society, and the winners believe that they have gotten everything that they have by their own efforts, and so they tend to feel they deserve what they have. And this makes gratitude difficult for them. The losers in a society like this are, inclined to feel resentment and resentment can block gratitude. So yes, the very structure of our society can make it difficult for us to feel gratitude both as winners and as losers. When society is structured that way. A society of winners and losers?

Yeah. Well, Neil, this has been fascinating. We’re going to turn to questions from our viewers. And just as a bit of a reminder, if you are watching, you can not only ask a question in the Q&A box, but you can also like a question. And it helps give us an idea of what some of the most popular questions are. So our first question comes from Derek Sherman, and Derek asks, how do we give thanks in all circumstances, end quote. Even circumstances that are profoundly painful.

A thoughtful question, Derek. Yes so scripture in the epistles tells us to give thanks in all circumstances. And this is going to be very challenging. Some of us have reasonably good lives, but there are people all across the globe whose lives are crummy. They are oppressed by political tyranny. They have to live with poverty. They’ve got somebody in their household who is abusing them, they are neglected. How do you give thanks when life is bad? Well, it is possible. We know it’s possible because the psalmists do it. The Psalms of lament are at least a third of the Psalter. The psalmists lament to God how hard life is. God seems to have gone off duty. My enemy is across the border again, nobody understands me. People persecute me, life is terrible. And then by the end of the Psalm, all the psalms of lament except one, the psalmist turns to say something like, and yet I will thank you. My God, your goodness endures forever. So it is possible to give thanks even in times of difficulty. And one of the strategies that I think we learned from biblical wisdom and from the wisdom of the ages, is in every circumstance to look for something in that circumstance that is redeeming.

So it’s the time of year when I clean my gutters. I don’t enjoy getting on a stepladder and cleaning my gutters, especially not that I’m now 79 years old and have been doing this forever, but, I don’t give thanks for having to clean my gutters, but I do give thanks for the fact that having gutters means I’ve got a roof over my head. I don’t enjoy paying taxes Every letter to the IRS that I’ve ever written that starts, dear IRS was a lie. I don’t enjoy paying taxes, but mean paying taxes means I’ve got an income and I am grateful for that. In three weeks, we will have Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t enjoy cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner, but having to clean up means I was just surrounded by loved ones, and I am grateful for that. So in every circumstance, even though there is something that is, really disagreeable, you find something to give thanks for. And that strategy, I believe, relieves us of the almost otherwise unremitting, darkness that would attend us in times of difficulty.

Yeah. You just mentioned Thanksgiving, and we have a question from an anonymous attendee who asked, can you talk about your family’s Thanksgiving rituals? Presumably this is other than, your disappointment over cleaning up. And she asks, are there specific things you have added over the years that have made Thanksgiving more meaningful to you?

Yeah. Well, I think like other families, like many other families, we take time at Thanksgiving dinner, to go around the table and to ask what people during this past year have been especially thankful for. And often it will include something that went wrong, but which was at least partially redeemed. So Thanksgiving in trouble, is an especially precious Thanksgiving memory. To give thanks for, a job that they didn’t think they would like, but tended turned out to be better than they had hoped. To give thanks for a new friend. If we have a new grandchild, of course. People go around the table and each person gives thanks for something in their past year of living. And then the person who gives the thanksgiving prayers tries to incorporate, as many of these things into the prayer as they can remember. Sometimes they write them down. I have found over the years and many, many, many other families have found over the years that this is a wonderful prelude to enjoying Thanksgiving dinner. I learned from my mom, and I have sometimes incorporated it into our own Thanksgiving dinner to give thanks for particular foods on the table. For the turkey with its protein that gives us energy and builds our cells to give thanks for the refreshing salad for the cranberries, for the juice, for the white wine, for whatever it is that’s on the table to single it out and to mention something about it that is delightful. And if that seems like too tall an order for the person who is entrusted with the thanksgiving prayer, person can do this before the prayer. you know, from a handheld list. And then during the prayer, give thanks to God for the foods with all their benefits that we have just recalled. So those are some of the practices that our family has done over the years and that have been, of course, repeated across so many other households in the land.

Yeah. That’s great. So a question from Eva Holder and Eva asks. She says sometimes non-religious friends say that they’re grateful for something. For example, a beautiful landscape or a hike. I find this to be a moment of connection, but also bemusing. If they don’t sense the need for an object of their gratitude. How might I creatively respond in a gospel oriented way to their understanding of gratitude, or understanding or misunderstanding of gratitude?

Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful, insightful question and a difficult one. the conviction behind the question is that gratitude requires a giver. You don’t issue thanks out into a void. You give thanks to someone for something? And this puts an atheist in a bind, an atheist sitting in front of a sunset or a seascape or a majestic mountain vista. Strictly speaking, cannot give thanks. The atheist can be glad. The atheist can be delighted. The atheist can be awed. But in order to be thankful, the atheist would have to have someone to thank. And by the way, in the literature of gratitude, our books and articles by atheists who explicitly recognize this and deeply regret that in the face of natural beauty, they have no one to thank. Now, as for a friend who is in a predicament like this, that’s going to require an awful lot of delicacy. How good is the friend? Is the friend an intimate friend? Then it may be that there is a way to say, I wish you had someone you felt you could thank for this. Or, do you feel any, regret that you don’t have anyone to thank for this? And by the way, there are plenty of atheists with regrets. They feel they have to be atheists because they think all the evidence is against the existence of God, but they don’t necessarily like being atheists. So not every atheist is defiant. Some atheists are wistful. And if you have one of them as a friend, you are likely to have a pretty, pretty interesting conversation.

For our next question, I’m going to combine two somewhat related questions. We have an anonymous attendee who asks your comments on becoming a society of winners and losers is powerful at the level of a church or Christian community. How do we move away from that perspective to one that gives space for gratitude? And somewhat relatedly, John Stow, asked in light of the 250th anniversary of this nation, how can we be grateful yet not whitewash the sins of subjugation of various communities? So I guess kind of together, how do we essentially acknowledge the fallenness of institutions, organizations, even nations that have also been, the givers of great goods and, you know, to which we have an obligation for for thanks and gratitude.

Yeah, yeah. Another intelligent question. I think that sheer honesty is going to require that in any, candid account of a great institution, there will be both pluses and minuses. Institutions like human beings are flawed, and the mature observer does not, deliberately bracket the flaws when giving an account of the institution, but takes them into account and at some point in the process says, and yet there are so many good things for which we can give thanks. United States of America is a great blessing to all of us who are our citizens. We have a marvelous, intelligent constitution. We have a form of government that by and large, works. We have, unparalleled natural beauty and variety in our country. I happen to live 30 miles away from the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, whose eastern shore has 300 miles of sandy dunes and beaches. unique in the world, our country is a source of great blessings to us. And yet, slavery and yet, sometimes harsh treatments of immigrants unwelcoming, resentful. So any full account will mention the Deficits and then say and yet or mentioned the benefits and then say. And yet and then add prayers Petitionary prayers for God’s blessing on the things that need to be addressed.

Now, there was a question before the national question that I’ve just forgotten.

Yes, essentially the viewer asked / mentioned that your comments on becoming a society of winners and losers was powerful at the level of a church or Christian community. How do we move away from, you know, essentially a place that focuses on winners and losers, losers to a space that to one that gives more space for gratitude?

Yeah, what a great question. I think that the church has to be the champion of grace and that the the church that’s the champion of grace will remind us all that God loves us not because we are good tennis players, or because we are smart, or because we are pretty, or because we, we got runner up in the peewee division, the tennis tournament, when we were ten years old. But because we are God’s treasured sons and daughters. God loves us because we belong to God. God loves us because we are God’s children. God loves us not because we are winners or losers. That’s completely subsidiary. God loves us because we are we. We are us. We are the person. Each one of us is an unrepeatable, divine thought that God has breathed life into. And each of us is unique in God’s eyes because we are an unrepeatable divine thought and God’s grace. God’s goodness means that we are loved because of who we are, not because of what we do. And that atmosphere, that ethos, that mentality has to be permeating our church congregations so that everybody in the congregation, rich or poor, Democrat, Republican, smart, not so smart, employed, unemployed, unemployable. Everybody belongs to the children of God and is precious in God’s sight. That has to be a dominating ethos in our churches.

Yeah Neil, thank you for this. There are so many other great questions. We’re just simply not going to have time for. But in just a moment, I’m going to give you the last word. Before we do that, a few things just to share with all of you watching us first. Immediately after we conclude we’ll be sending around an online feedback form. We’d love for you to fill this out. I say this every time, but we read all of these. We really do try to take your feedback to heart and as a small token of our appreciation for you taking the time to share your thoughts with us if you do that, we will send you a digital code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice. A few readings that we would recommend that are germane to the topic we’ve discussed today. Include Babette’s Feast, purchase of a Soul, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Gift of the Magi. So we hope that you’ll do that. In addition, for everyone watching, tomorrow, right around noon or so, we’ll be sending out an email which includes a lightly edited video link, as well as a list of readings and further resources to go more deeply into the topic. Be on the lookout for that. We’d love for you to share this conversation with others. Start your own conversation about the importance and the practice of gratitude. In addition, we’d love to invite all of you watching to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who help advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of this community, united around trying to preserve the Christian intellectual tradition and nurture new growth, there’s also a number of benefits of being a society member, including a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum readings, a subscription to our daily What We’re Reading list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive for all of you who are joining the Trinity Forum society with your gift of 150 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Neil Plantinga’s book, gratitude.

So we hope that you’ll avail yourself of that opportunity. In addition, in terms of activities and events coming up for all of you who are in or near the Washington, D.C. area, we would love for you to join us on November 19th at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where we will be hosting the inaugural Michael Gerson Memorial Prize for Excellence in Writing on faith and public life. This will be the first time this award has been given. It’s the first of its kind, and we’ll be giving to an emerging writer who really exemplifies Mike’s conscience, courage and craft. There will also be a panel, a selection panel. The same panel who will be selecting the winner, including Pete Wehner, David Brooks, Russell Moore, Karen Swallow Prior, and Christine Emba. Speaking together on the moral duty of the writer in an age of confusion. So we would love for you to join us in person. We’ll also be announcing more online conversations and more podcasts shortly as we wrap up. I would also just really love to thank my colleagues, the Trinity Forum team, Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marianne Morris, Macrae Hanke, and Frances Owen. They’re behind the scenes, but they are the ones who put the mission of the Trinity Forum in action, and I am grateful to them. Finally, Neil, many thanks for you and for being here. And the last word is yours.

My last word is that gratitude makes me content. Because gratitude makes what I have enough.

Thank you. Neil. This has been great. Have a great weekend.