Creating a Secular Ritual of Gratitude
The following is a guest post by contributor Tyler Owen. We support the sharing of ideas relevant to humanism here on our blog, but the views expressed in any guest post do not necessarily reflect the views of Humanists of Linn County.
After celebrating the American Thanksgiving holiday last week, the idea of “thankfulness” has been on my mind. Despite the tumultuous year that has been 2020, there are still a great many things to be thankful for. And for many families, those thanks were expressed in the form of a prayer around a table with loved ones. Of course, this stems from the religious axiom that “all things come from our Creator”. If anyone deserves thanks, it is God…
When I was a Christian, I can’t say that I was particularly invested in the concept of prayer. Prayer either felt selfish or just plain awkward. I couldn’t bring myself to ask favors of a divine being when I knew there were others that were far less fortunate than me. And when just trying to have a conversation with God he never seemed very interested in responding. But there was one quality of prayer that did resonate... Expressing thanks.
Thanksgiving was the time of year where this type of prayer was front and center. Every other day of the year we would recite memorized prayer-mantras (often in rhyme), but on Thanksgiving we would give special thanks to the many privileges we held with a unique, improvised prayer. During years of triumph and success there was plenty to give thanks for, and during times of tragedy and strife it was cathartic to search for the silver-lining. However, this tradition of giving thanks is not unique to Christianity. Appreciating what we have and recognizing those who are responsible for our good fortune is a part of being human.
As humanists we don’t have many traditions. It is common to maintain the more secular trappings associated with many holidays like Santa during Christmas, painted eggs during Easter, and turkey at Thanksgiving. But how do we adopt daily rituals like the thanks that Christians express through prayer?
A few years ago my wife and I were looking for a way to bring more positivity into our daily routine. A family member shared that they had started a habit of listing off one thing they were thankful for before going to bed each evening. The idea was immediately intriguing and for a while we started the same practice, but over time we began to recognize some troubling parallels to the religious rituals we were trying to avoid. Who were we thanking? It wasn’t a god. It was often a friend or family member who had helped us in some small way that day, but of course they were not present during our bedtime ritual. And sometimes we were thankful for things like a beautiful sunset or some random bit of good luck. It felt like we were giving some level of agency to a godless universe - personifying the cosmos in a way that felt uncomfortably similar to religious prayer.
Thankfulness vs Gratefulness
We made a small change to our routine that made all the difference. Rather than expressing our feelings in terms of “thankfulness”, we began using “gratefulness” instead. We could share with each other a sense of gratitude for the things we had and our positive daily experiences. It was a recognition of good fortune and an obligation to forward our thanks to anyone who had a part in it. We would remind ourselves of who we should really be thanking the next day. Thankfulness alone and given in the solitude of our homes had the effect of absolving our duty to uplift others. We were sending paper lanterns out into the universe that would drift and perhaps never reach some deserving recipient. In contrast, a ritual of gratitude became like writing mental sticky notes to record the debt we owe to those most responsible for our happiness.
This small change also resolved the friction we felt when the thing we wanted to recognize had no discernable entity to thank. Rather than thanking some personified version of the universe for that beautiful sunset, we could instead just be grateful we lived in a world that could reveal such breathtaking spendor.
This effect has become even more pronounced now that our daughter is old enough to share in our ritual of gratitude. We began listing things we are grateful for just before meals so that our daughter can participate as well. There is a 50/50 chance on any particular evening that she will be grateful for pickles, but we are often surprised by how thoughtful she can be even at just 3 years old - being grateful for playtime with her cousins, or book reading with her grandparents.
For us, there is a profound sense of duty that accompanies gratitude. We feel compelled to “pay it forward”. Gratitude is not a transaction that is completed through tokens of “thankfulness”. Gratitude is never ending. A daily ritual that inspires us to action.
