Chaplain's Corner

I can’t blame people if they conclude that Thanksgiving is an absurd holiday. After all, we are living in a world that is moving more and more towards agnosticism and atheism. One weekend in August I was watching a news show and a report was given about why young adults are leaving the church. One of the persons interviewed in the piece was the head of an organization called “Friendly Atheists”.

In a world that is less and less, God-minded, where fewer and fewer people believe that there is a deity that is all powerful, all-knowing, everywhere present, and the sovereign provider and sustainer of the universe; where if a deity is embraced at all, it is a small deity, a regional deity, whose power and knowledge and presence are limited; what is thanksgiving all about anyway.

Originally the holiday in the United States and Canada was a day to thank the God of the Bible – the all knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present sovereign of the universe for the blessings we have received from his hand. But these days, the vast majority of the population of our nation would be more honest in conceiving of Thanksgiving Day as the day we take off to thank ourselves for how we have worked hard and provided for ourselves. After all, we do generally conceive of ourselves as having what we have because we have educated ourselves,  worked hard, sought advancement and been clever enough to dodge the health and economic pitfalls that others have fallen into.

For many a Thanksgiving Day in which the God revealed in the Bible was thanked would be nothing short of hypocrisy given the way we carry on day after day believing in our own self-sufficiency and moving forward as if the only thing that mattered was that we continue to work hard, make wise decisions and have the foresight to see disaster on the horizon and do all that is necessary to evade it. This is after all the unwritten, unspoken, but actual philosophy of much of the Canadian public, even many of the Canadians who go to church and “believe in God”.

But mine is a different world, I walk among the unfortunate ones who have been diagnosed with cancer, who have had a stroke or a life changing heart event. I walk among those whose vitality has been sapped away by chronic disease, mental illness, abuse. I walk among those who regardless of their economic well-being, regardless of the social standing, regardless of the adeptness with which they have dodged other pitfalls, are not in a position where they would give it all away if they could only have their health. These folks move in a number of directions as they approach Thanksgiving Day.

Some throw whatever faith they might have embraced to the wind and question the wisdom of having ever believed in a God that is the all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present sovereign of the universe who provides for and sustains all that he made. Trapped in the misbelief that this God’s existence means that they will always enjoy privilege, success and that the minor bumps in the road were provided as educational opportunities for us to learn to trust him more; these folks abandon their faith because it doesn’t work for them anymore. As if the value of faith in God were simply a matter of pragmatics.

Some conclude that their faith has been misguided and that god does indeed exist, but god’s power and knowledge and presence have been vastly over-estimated. Readjusting their faith they believe in a “lesser” being who of course is limited and therefore their expectation of must also be brought into line with this new conception. Needing to hold onto a belief in god, these folks keep adjusting and readjusting their conception of god to match their experience.

Others open their minds to the thought, “maybe there isn’t just one God, but maybe there are many, after all, when you study cultures this is far more common a belief than the belief in one, and only one all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere present deity who is sovereign over all that exists. These folks become syncretistic and begin picking and choosing ideas from many spiritualities to come up with their own custom designed faith that is comfortable and easy to live with.

But, if we embrace any of these alternatives should we be taking time off to “thank God” as if God were the provider of all that we have? I suppose if it makes us feel good; but really, wouldn’t that be more a cultural hangover that we perpetuate? If we don’t believe that God is the giver of all things, if we don’t believe that he is in control, absolute control of all that exists – all that happens – then why are we thanking God?

Call me old-fashioned, call me a theological dinosaur that has refused to slip into extinction as everything has evolved around me, call me what you will, but I believe it is rather silly to “Thank God” for everything (this is what God requires of us in the Bible) if we do not believe that he is all-knowing, all-powerful, every where present and in sovereign control of all that exists.

Absurd, some of you might think and certainly in the larger context of our world many believe this belief to be the result of “head-in-the-sand” ignorance and the symptom of mindless belief. I’m OK with that, who am I to prove to you God’s existence? What could I possibly say that could alter your conclusions?

But the only reason Thanksgiving Day makes any sense to me; unless of course you view it simply as a civic holiday and another day off work and have stripped it of any of the reasons it was instituted in the first place; is if there is someone to be thanked. Someone who can be thanked for everything: success and failure, health and sickness, birth and death, mental wellness and mental-illness – everything!

When I take the day off this coming Monday, it will be because I believe that even though I can not possibly understand how all that God gives and all that God takes is woven into good for me, I can trust that God alone is capable of doing this and that God can be trusted even in the face of matters that make no sense to me.

I have no need to explain evil, disaster, tragedy, death. I have no need to be able to “rationalize” God, for to do so would be to make God small enough for me to make sense of, and this is an impossibility as God is all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere present and the sovereign of all that exists. My only need is to trust God, not in “the idea of God”, but in the person of God. My need is to embrace the relationship he offers me, the invitation to become one of His children by believing that Jesus died for my sins and rose again to make that a possibility. My need is to live a life of gratitude, not for what God gives, but for God himself and the opportunity he extends to me to live as his child in this life and for all eternity.

“Hogwash” you may be thinking – I don’t think so, because I believe that God created us with the freedom to either trust him or reject and that each of us will one day stand before him and be judged primarily on that choice. My choice has been to trust him and that makes thanking God the most reasonable, appropriate thing to do.