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| I, for one, am thankful that most of the batch of broiler chicks that we picked up at the post office this morning made it safely all the way from Iowa despite the snow and cold! |
I have a penchant for looking deeply into the etymology of words, where they come from and how they work in other languages. My students sometimes get impatient with me in this regard, and not wholly without reason, as the meanings of words are really some combination of where they come from and how they're used in the hic et nunc. After all, language is about getting your point across to somebody other than yourself, and any dictionary worth its salt--with the saltiest by far, in my opinion, being the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary--will include both the roots of words--that is, where they come from--and examples of these same words in usage over the course of the millennium or so that the English language and its immediate predecessors have been around.
BUT, I beg your patience for the moment, as I often beg the patience of my students, as I drill into word thanks in this Thanksgiving blog post. BECAUSE... after all, etymology is half of the picture.
Thanks, in any case, is Germanic in origin, with the modern German expression Danke schön being evidence enough of that fact. Any good dictionary--even the online ones--will associate the Old English þanc with both satisfaction and grace, and therein lies our crux interpretum, as the former word implies that a thank you is merely repayment in satisfaction of the debt in which a gift places us, whereas the latter implies that saying thank you is itself a gift of our own initiative freely, even eagerly, returned to the giver.
As I puzzle over this, I recall how hard it is to teach my own four little boys to say thank you of their own accord. You can imagine the situation: My dear wife hands one of our perfect, prim, proper young men a plate of food, as occurs at Kleinshire practically every day (yes, we do feed our children every day), and then she gives the aforementioned young man that certain meaningful look. There is an extended pause. Finally, begrudgingly, so, so, so slowly, the muttered, mumbled thank you is ineluctably, ever so reluctantly drawn forth.
You're welcome could be the subject of a future post.
BUT for now, in the above example the child clearly begins to associate his saying thank you with payment. Thank you becomes something that he owes in satisfaction for the food which he has received. The same thing then applies to birthday gifts from grandma, the holding of doors, the receipt of 4-H fair premiums, etc., etc.: All these supposed gifts become not so much gifts, but more so situations of quid pro quo, where the quid is the supposed gift, and the pro quo is that ever so reluctantly returned payment of those precious words: thank you.
And what's to wonder at the fact that the thank you is so reluctantly given, even if Aristotle would say that the magnanimous man finds pleasure and ease in the exercise of all the virtues, including, most certainly, the human virtue of justice? Aristotle aside, I do not find myself jumping up and down in eagerness to write the check for my mortgage every month. Nor do I sit eagerly at my computer, just waiting for the newest doctor or electricity bill to arrive in my email so that I can enter my credit card information and send off yet another payment into cyberspace. Yes, I pay these bills as a matter of justice, and yes, justice is right and meet. But surely there's more to our thank you than giving unto others what is their due.
What I know of the Romance languages backs me up on this point. Most everybody knows that thank you is gracias in Spanish, or grazie in Italian, and the connection of gracias and grazie with the English word grace is obvious. Gratitude, of course, is synonymous with thankfulness, and grace itself, at least theologically, is a free gift from God, totally unmerited and undeserved, bestowed upon us for our salvation.
God, in other words, fills us with a spirit of thankfulness, which, by its very nature, at least insofar as we are open to this wholly undeserved, unmerited gift, spills over into our everyday lives and our choices and interactions both mundane and major.*
In other words, to be thankful is to be who we are called to be as Christians living in the world.
To give thanks is simply to be Christian.
We don't really use the phrase thank you to mean all of that. But maybe the more that we think about it, the more that our everyday thank yous can begin to transcend the mere requirements of the human virtue of justice and enter the heady realm of the theological virtue of charity.
It's certainly something to ponder on this national day of thanksgiving, which President Abraham Lincoln set aside in perpetuity for Americans to "reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations."
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* Which is why the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom the Archangel Gabriel calls κεχαριτωμένη, gratia-plena, grace-ful, thank-ful one, really is the perfect Christian. The Holy Spirit overshadowed her, and she had within her, literally, the gift of Christ's presence. But Christ's presence is a gift that by its very nature cannot be contained. Again, literally in this case, as Mary gives birth to the Christ-child, sharing His presence with all of us. I suppose that the parable of the buried talent is also relevant to this reflection as a sadder example, that is, of the gift that does not give.
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