Gratitude may not be what it once was. Perhaps it’s better: not merely a thank-you whimsy for what you’ve been given — a turkey on the table, say — but a potent tool if you can just express it. An energy essential to health.
Whether or not that’s true, how grateful would you be if your family members or friends died suddenly and too early, or became debilitated by long-term illness?
How much gratitude could you express to others for the life you’ve lived — gratitude for their gifts to you — if you believed your life was worth little because you were worth little to anybody else?
How thankful would you be on Thanksgiving Day 2020, to eat Sobaheg — in a pandemic year requiring distancing, cute little masks and a tolerance for rowdy politics?
The dish was prominently featured at the first Thanksgiving in November 1621, exactly 399 years ago, when uncertainty and trouble were a lot more significant than now, historians say.
Your thankfulness might depend on how hungry you were and what was in the Sobaheg. A Wampanoag stew, it consisted of what they had at the moment — from nuts and berries to root plants to various meats or fish.
Gratitude, it seems, is like that. One stew from many ingredients, whether you like each ingredient, or not.
Whatever the Wampanoags felt of it that first Thanksgiving, their gratitude probably wasn’t what the Puritans felt who shared the Sobaheg with them, or what we may feel now, that’s for sure.
So what is gratitude?
Florida Weekly decided to answer that question this week — to look at what Americans think of gratitude and thanks nowadays, what they once thought of it, and how they express it.
Being damn (or damned) grateful
“How do you have gratitude when you lose someone close? For a person who constantly works on being thankful, that’s the toughest question I’ve been asked,” said Harold Balink, a celebrated chef whose south Lee County restaurant, Harold’s, received the coveted Golden Spoon award from Florida Trend magazine last December. He lost his wife, who was also his best friend and partner, Julie Balink, in October 2017, to cancer. She was 52.
“I really had to dig deep for the answer. I came up with this: Grace is a divinely given talent or blessing; it’s the condition or act of being favored by someone. There’s the genesis for my answer.”
And gratitude springs from grace, he surmised.
“The chaos that life is encapsulates all of us and makes it fair, so I can’t complain,” Mr. Balink said. “But finding light each day after Julie passed is a chore, let alone finding gratitude. The sheer fact she chose me, loved me, cared for me, shared every molecule of her being with me while she was alive — well, there it is. That’s what I’m grateful for in her death.”
The Puritans at the first Thanksgiving might have understood that answer, but hitched it to a reason that isn’t Harold’s.
“The 17th-century English Puritans, including those who immigrated to New England, had a view of gratitude that differs significantly from what is common today,” explained Paul Smiley, a teacher and theologian at the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, in Grand Rapids, Mich.
“They did not believe we are entitled to a good life, much less an easy life, but that we deserve God’s punishment in hell forever because of our sins against God’s holy law. As a result, they believed that any good thing we enjoy in this life is an undeserved mercy from God, a sign of his free and gracious love, worthy of much gratitude.”
To create that first Thanksgiving, they emerged from a world where having no electricity or running water was the trifling least of their troubles.
“They lived in a time of great hardship. A significant number of their children died in infancy. Their land was repeatedly visited by deadly plagues. In the early 17th century, they suffered severe persecution from the state church (in England),” Mr. Smiley said.
“In mid-century, their land was torn by civil war. In the latter part of the century, they were again severely persecuted until religious toleration was secured. During those dark times, the great city of their nation, London, was consumed in fire (the great fire of 1666). Consequently, they did not take for granted the simple blessings of life.”
And they accepted as blessings events many of us would be hard pressed ever to view as any more than unwarranted, senseless tragedies.
“They were able to be grateful even in suffering, because they trusted that through suffering God was cleansing his people from sin and preparing them for glory,” Mr. Smiley said.
Evolution
We haven’t escaped either suffering or mortality these four centuries later, it seems — but we’ve begun to redefine gratitude as an active tool, one that brings us together.
The advantage of gratitude, acknowledge many now, may ultimately lie in throwing up a stiff resistance to suffering and its sometimes dehumanizing power — together.
And that advantage may come by first acknowledging mistakes, either personally or community and country-wide, suggests the Rev. Burl Salmon, a priest at Bethesdaby the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach.
In the midst of recent racial strife in the United States, Rev. Salmon, Mississippi born and raised with an undergraduate degree from Millsaps College and a master’s in theology from Yale University, introduced his congregation to the history of their church, not long ago.
On June 3, 1923, an African-American man named Henry Simmons was lynched on what became church property a few months after his murder. The property and church flank South County Road, where parishioners continue to worship today. It’s less than a mile from the town’s tony Worth Avenue.
The larger acknowledgment — even larger than the fact that 314 lynchings were recorded in Florida between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, and 4,400 in the United States in roughly that period — is that slavery, and its accompanying murders, rapes and centuries of abuse, began with the arrival of the Puritans about the time of the first Thanksgiving.
“How do we look at thankfulness now, in an America divided, in an America still so imperfect?” the Rev. Salmon asked during an interview with Florida Weekly.
Not by being afraid of our history, or of hard answers, he suggested. We must not back down from the truth, or stiff-arm the gift that embracing our history can ultimately give us.
Instead, he insisted, we have to know what’s real, to be grateful.
“Gratitude is the basis for life — and for me personally. That’s informed by the Anglican tradition,” he said.
“To live in fear is to live in scarcity, and to live in gratitude is to live in generosity. That’s the way I approach life. God loves us, wants the best for us, and living in fear is not what he wants.”
But hiding from history is living in fear. The Puritans felt the same way — about hiding from “sin.”
“So out of all this comes a thanksgiving,” concluded the Rev. Salmon.
“We give thanks for the chance to be better. And how can you be better if you don’t acknowledge fault in the first place — if you don’t acknowledge the breach — and so you miss that wonderful opportunity to move forward, to be thankful for the chance not to make your mistakes again?”
The savage garden
His passion is shared by advocates of gratitude in contemporary American life, people who don’t mention religion. Among them is Ryan Duffy, a psychology professor at the University of Florida. Professor Duffy defined and explained gratitude as an act that advances health in a 14-minute TEDx talk he called, “Giving gratitude to those who need it most,” recorded in 2017.
Although he did not return telephone or email messages to Florida Weekly, his observations can be heard here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCGGl__ qAxE
“I’ve been teaching thousands of undergrads about it,” he said.
“Gratitude is an act of behavior, it’s something you do because someone has been intentionally kind to you, and that kindness has value in your eyes.”
What’s the impact and long-term value, he asked.
“A number of studies have had people write and deliver letters to people who have helped them, and then tracked levels of happiness and depression over time to see how they’ve changed.
“Results of those studies are similar: Even one month after delivering a letter, people (who wrote a letter) feel more happy and less depressed.”
Professor Duffy cited two reasons: “One, when you sit down and write, it forces you to focus on the positive in your life. And (two): When you deliver a letter, it acts as a real social connector.”
A social connector. Another way of saying, “Gratitude creates community.” It brings us together. It puts sinew and muscle on our bones. And that requires habitual action. That’s exercise.
Finally, it helps us personally, especially if we exercise gratitude — if we take it out for regular runs.
“I think we should be writing letters all the time to people in our lives who are actively helping us,” he said. “I can promise you that if we do this — I promise you — you will be happier.” He even proposes finding people with no one else in their lives, with little sense of self worth, and showing them gratitude as well for helping create empathy in the gratitude giver.
Others understand this, too.
“For me, gratitude is the act of thanking someone,” said Jeff McCullers, born and raised in the citrus groves of Estero. With a doctorate in education, he abandoned citrus groves and later academia to spend 35 years as a teacher and administrator in Lee County schools, where he was celebrated among other things for writing letters of gratitude and thanks for their work, each November, to his faculty and staff colleagues.
“Thankfulness is a beautiful feeling, but it comes with a personal obligation and a moral duty to show my gratitude — to close the circle,” he said.
“Life is a savage garden: There are some pretty places, here and there, but the garden is mostly full, from end to end, of scary stuff. In this garden, death is without question the only certainty. That is a simple fact of nature and one we would do well to understand early in life.”
Sticking together — helping each other — is our greatest strength in the savage garden, he suggests. But it can’t be done without gratitude for each other.
“My life was made possible by my family, (and made) larger than it ever would otherwise have been by my teachers. So I will always be grateful to them. Each year, writing it all out filled me with a sense of connection that is hard to explain but transcendent to experience.”
Do-good transcendence
Dr. Ivan Seligman, a Naples pathologist, trained and worked in emergency rooms at the University of Florida in Jacksonville, at Parkland Memorial in Dallas, and as the only emergency room doctor in Athens, Texas, and other small Texas towns. He also volunteered his medical skills overseas, in New Guinea, Belize, Indonesia, Myanmar and Micronesia, and collected thousands of dollars of medications and supplies from the Neighborhood Clinic in Naples, and local doctors — then distributed them to clinics and missionaries in China, Tibet and Cuba.
He first experienced the transcendence of gratitude as wonder, beginning in his Miami boyhood, he recalled.
It started when he saw tadpoles become frogs, or seeds he planted become tomatoes.
But his wonder at the world evolved through other experiences, emerging as a full-blown gratitude he’s grown into, he acknowledged — now when he can love fully, now when he can experience life at its best in painting and sculpture, music, food or his scuba explorations of a magnificent water world he cherishes, he said.
“Traveling the world opened my eyes to the best and the worst in people, and their situations, too. A man on the streets of India with advanced leprosy had a beatific smile, even though no one came near. We can see gratitude on the faces of others — it can transcend all languages and circumstances.”
He’s seen more hardship in the world, and saved more people, than most of us — and lost them, too.
“As a physician, I’ve been privileged to be at the bedside of those facing their end,” he said.
He uses the word privilege because of what he could see. “Despite all, their undying faith and gratitude for life burned strong. Loss and love have honed a profound depth to my daily sense of gratitude.”
For Dr. Seligman, perhaps, the ligament connection of gratitude to sometimes hard-to-endure reality is key to the soaring anatomy of thankfulness.
“It’s an appreciation of being connected to a God, to a universe, to a ‘something’ that’s far greater than I can ever comprehend,” he explained. “A sense of gratitude may give people a light to withstand life’s storms, and give them hope when darkness seems overwhelming.”
Beth Preddy, owner of Preddy PR in Naples, puts it this way: “Gratitude is an antidote to gloom. True gratitude is more than, ‘Thank God I have my health.’ It’s a deeper acknowledgment of love given and received. It’s not about what is owned.”
And it’s personal, she says — even at Thanksgiving.
“It takes strength to sit in the consciousness of your small place in the cosmos, beyond pandemics, wars, a run of bad luck, or the common travails of existence. The enormity of it is overwhelming and ultimately what matters are the simplest acts of love and kindness in daily life.”
Like visiting or zooming with people unlike you at a Thanksgiving table, to eat Sobaheg and chat cheerfully.
“We don’t have much control over what happens in the world,” Ms. Preddy observed. “We’re responsible only for our own state-of-being in the moment. Gratitude helps to root you in that present moment.”
Remembrance of things past
Early on a Saturday morning, Brittany Wallman shared the following expression of love and gratitude on social media from her home in Fort Lauderdale:
“I’m lighting a candle this morning for my grandmother, who 60 years ago today, became a U.S. citizen,” she wrote.
In her professional life, Ms. Wallman is an investigative reporter and member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, on Valentines Day 2018, for the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
But this was personal, not professional, as gratitude always is.
“She came here from Russia as a teenager, to Ellis Island. Her family was persecuted because they were Jewish. Her mother was murdered. She escaped all that to come to the Land of the Free,” Ms. Wallman revealed.
Later in the day she explained to Florida Weekly why she put up the post.
“Being grateful and sharing that feeling (of gratitude) is one of those magical acts — like apologizing — that takes the sting out of a difficult day,” she said.
“I am in the regular practice of sitting down and listing what I’m grateful for.
“Some days it’s hard to see through the clouds, yes. This has been a tough year. So I have to force myself to ask, ‘What’s going right?’ — and then express that gratitude.”
Her Facebook post didn’t end there, though.
She added this:
“Remember the song, ‘Great American Melting Pot’? The opening lyric is, “My grandmother came from Russia …”
Recorded in 1977 as part of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the song included these lyrics too, Ms. Wallman said:
“You simply melt right in,
It doesn’t matter what your skin.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from,
Or your religion, you jump right in
To the great American melting pot.
The great American melting pot.
Ooh, what a stew — red, white, and blue.”
Need an excuse to be grateful this year? You can join us in being grateful for this notion of the red, white and blue at Thanksgiving — even if we are sitting at a significant social distance, trying to avoid the Sobaheg in favor of the roast turkey or succotash quiche. ¦
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