Legs in Stockings

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

—G. K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

When does a person cross the line from giving thanks for her daily bread to taking it for granted?

Do you remember a time in your life when you were more thankful than you are now?

I know, I know, you will say you are thankful, now and ever.  We all say that, and it might well be true to a degree, and very true under some circumstances.  But do give my questions some reflection and your life recollection.  Was there a time when you were not as conscious about your thankfulness, that being thankful was just the way you were, without you searching for a reason to explain it, to justify yourself?

You see, being thankful is such an aberration, a deviation from how we live a normal day, that when it happens it's a cause célèbre: we would mark the strange occasion and enunciate "I am thankful for..."  (We've done that a lot during Christmas, right? trying to squeeze out items of thanks, to stay joyful, hopeful, and peaceful--really mostly to keep worries and sorrows at bay.)

I don't say "I am spending a Canadian dollar now" when it is the currency of my daily transactions.  If I am to mark it out that way I am speaking within a context that makes the moment peculiar, noteworthy.  Like banging pots and pans at 8pm to express our gratitude to health care workers.  So you can say thankfulness is not exactly what runs in our blood, not the mother tongue we speak.

"Objection, your honor!" I hear you.  Good enough.  I am not trying to be more cynical than I need to.  I am just pointing out something obvious to try to locate where humanity might be.

We pay big money for others to tell us obvious things, don't we, such as "there's no need to make resolutions this new year"?  (I don't know what the heck a "life coach," a "self-help guru" is--sounding board for our self validation and collective denial?)  The coming new year will be challenging without us resolving to challenge ourselves.  Dah.

What the "guru" didn't say--and very disingenuously so, is that all these years before, we were able to resolve to challenge ourselves because there were unchallenged givenness, taken-for-granted favorable conditions in our contemporary, ever-progressing, strenuously contained and anxiously controlled life, that to come up with special resolutions for ourselves was optional, exceptional, and thus often a rather frivolous, inconsequential diversion.  A farmer prepares for locust and drought he knows for sure will come; he doesn't and wouldn't want to ask for more just to feel accomplished, inspired.

To put it positively our living condition has been very conducive to our flourishing.  Which is to say if thankfulness has not been the currency of our daily thoughts and actions we've been conducting our life with a different story in our head and heart.

I was trail-walking with a pretty smart physicist the other day and he commented on his surrounding, "Things are in chaos here."  I couldn't quite believe his ignorance but did try to explain, in a language he could understand, with elements from his shriveled story: Everything is finely tuned for the ecosystem to flourish.

"For example, someone laid the gravels on this side of the trail," I pointed to the right for him, "and if the width of this particular laying adjacent to the stream bank yonder is narrower than it is now, the gravels--and with them, this very path we are walking on now, will be eventually washed away, maybe slowly, but for certain surely."

We didn't expect a pandemic.  If someone was to show us last Christmas news footage from end of March we would have thought it's from a corny, phony TV show.  Our road to progress was paved with gold: our good intention, genuine effort, guaranteed success.  We made resolutions to achieve, to conquer, to create.  We made the impossible possible, built a world we wanted according to what we thought we knew to be the best for ourselves.  As to the road leading to our utopia, we kinda take for granted it would keep its shape, not be washed off.  It has never been washed off; so why now?  (It has been, many times.  But gurus told us Noah's Ark is for Sunday School kids.)

The line I was talking about at the beginning, if you still recall, was crossed a long time ago already, by one person, and then two, and now we are living in this collective, willful amnesia, couldn't see the most obvious, that we are finite creatures sustained by grace, every atom of our createdness.  If there ever were the intention for us to flourish and the will to make it true, they would have been from the one who led us out of the dark tunnel of our mother's womb to greet the light that is this very life.

Do you remember how it was when you were a child?  "When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time," G. K. Chesterton observed.  "Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?"

Yours, Alex