Ingratitude: Sermon by Reverend Andrea Abbott November 13,2016
Preacher: Reverend Andrea Abbott
Opening Words: #445 The Womb of Stars
Chalice Lightings: #452 Life is a Gift…
Responsive Reading: #512 We Give Thanks This Day
Closing Words: #506 May the glory…
Hymns: #67: We Sing Now Together #18 What Wondrous Love
Ingratitude
We’re coming up on the season devoted to thinking about gratitude. And, perhaps more immediate for my family, we have a five year old living with us and, for five year olds, learning manners is up there with what comes after “Q” in the alphabet. Our dinner table conversation is punctuated by “what do you say’s” and treble “pleases” and “thank you’s”. So gratitude is on my mind. And its abuses.
I took the definition of gratitude, which, presumably, gives me a clue to its opposite, ingratitude, from Wikipedia, which had a nice article about this emotion and defined it as this:
Gratitude, thankfulness, or gratefulness is the proper, fitting or called-for response to benefits or beneficence from a benefactor.
And the article also made a distinction between gratitude and indebtedness, defining indebtedness as:
Gratitude is not the same as indebtedness. While both emotions occur following help, indebtedness occurs when a person perceives that they are under an obligation to make some repayment of compensation for the aid.[5] The emotions lead to different actions; indebtedness can motivate the recipient of the aid to avoid the person who has helped them, whereas gratitude can motivate the recipient to seek out their benefactor and to improve their relationship with them.[6][7]
This is a significant difference and I suspect that I am not the only person to mix up these two emotions. Maybe I am thinking about indebtedness. Perhaps that’s the emotion that is more suspect for me. I think indebtedness involves a transaction between people, not between a person and Providence, or God, or Nature, but a feeling of being indebted to another person. Now maybe this is what gives me pause. Because indebtedness calls forth associations like debt, benefactor, even Victorian associations like debtor’s prisons and the treatment of the poor. It seems like a human transaction that can be good or that can be suspect. And perhaps it’s these associations that give me some uneasy thoughts about gratitude. Because I have had a lot of reservations about gratitude. Some of them have to do with two other words. The words as “they” and “I”.
I will explain later why I am all in favor of gratitude, but, for the moment, let me talk about why I think it is sometimes misused. Gratitude is something that is sometimes forced upon others, those “they’s” and “them’s” who don’t feel sufficient gratitude for what is given to them. And, just as I mentioned the teaching of gratitude to the young, people who have gratitude forced on them often resent it. When you are five or six, do you really have to express gratitude to Aunt Tillie for the gift of socks when you had so hoped for at least a toy of some sort? Even a worthless, easily broken toy? But socks, really? In the same way, some often feel that poor people should express gratitude for things that are given them, even if they aren’t things they particularly wanted, like other people’s cast offs. Similarly, the poor are often made to feel that they should express gratitude for food, for shelter, for a lot of things that sustain life in such a way that makes them feel they are not worthy of those things. Unfortunately, a by-product of this insistence on gratitude, the insistence on forcing this emotion on other people, is that the people who are told they should be grateful become less, not more thankful to their benefactors.
In a way, the insistence on gratitude is much like insistence on the benefit of forgiving those who have offended us. Yes, forgiveness is a good thing to do, yes, it is helpful to our mental health, but it is not an emotion that can be turned on and off like a faucet. Like so many other things that we should do for our betterment, it is more effective when it comes from within, when it comes as the result of struggling with our emotions and coming to a personal resolution with them. Personal. As when we, ourselves, each of us, work through our feelings about our relationship to those things we have that we may not have earned, things we have by grace, not our own unaided effort When we think of things this way, gratitude becomes an emotion that is one we are responsible for. It becomes an “I” statement. I am grateful for this day. I am grateful for my good fortune. Not a “they should” demand, but a personal confession of our own sense of what we feel. And, yes, suggestions and guidance can be good in developing this feeling but are usually more effective when they are offered as loving assistance, not as demands. And definitely not when expressions of gratitude become a prime way in which people’s moral character is measured.
Unfortunately, a byproduct of a demand for gratitude is that people either become defiant, as in expressions of ingratitude, or become hypocrites, learning to fake gratitude in order to get what they need to survive. It is a short step from that to hypocrisy as a way of life and false expressions of gratitude become the price people are willing to pay to continue to live. It is a high price. It erodes character as much, if not more than the inability to be grateful.
Various attempts to control and discipline the poor have been tried by probably every society. The idea that there are deserving and undeserving poor is at the heart of each system of aid. We, too, use various means to control how much we give and how we give and to whom we give. When aid is based in governments, local or national, there are often strings attached and an attempt to ensure that freeloaders and moochers are not able to game the system. And yet it is often the most intelligent, perhaps those with potentially the most to offer society, that are able to work their way around the system while those who are not as able, possibly more in need of help, who are unable to get assistance because they do not as readily understand the unspoken rules. In both cases, we have to ask ourselves about the systems we have constructed. Perhaps we would be surprised if we were asked to be the recipient of this kind of help.
Too often people seeking to leave the system of welfare find they do not have adequate resources, and cannot get adequate resources, to enable them to be independent. In addition, people often feel judged and humiliated by the system that was supposed to help them. This often prompts feelings of the desire for revenge or anger at the system that has consistently judged and humiliated rather than build the confidence that is necessary to surmount obstacles. So, whether people are able or disabled, gamers or compliant, the system that they feed into is often more focused more on preventing loss than in building gains and understanding the motivations and circumstances that have brought people into the machinery of welfare.
It is also the demand for gratitude that drives the more able and stronger to commit fraud as well as larceny and other anti-social acts. People who are desperate often do not want to face humiliation and would prefer to act than to be acted upon. Many of the men I knew in prison had been raised in welfare and took a somewhat different route than we would have advised to get off it. They did not wish to be demanded to feel grateful. They did not wish to be humbled. Few people do.
I’m certainly not advocating a criminal life but I would like us to consider this sociological fact. Every immigrant or minority group that has ultimately found itself accepted has, in the process of assimilating into society, developed a system of organized crime. There have been many groups called Mafias that are not Italian. And all of them have given some members of that group, a group often despised by those who considered themselves true Americans, a way to become respected. People will do a lot not to starve, a lot not to be humiliated. People will do a lot to be feared, if that is the only way they feel they can gain respect. It is amazing what a force that is, that drive for respect and honor.
And we, of all people should be thankful for that force. It is the force that fueled those who saw America as a country in which all would have a chance.
We have sung the hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, particularly when we have done Blessing of the Animals. The original hymn, in addition to celebrating all living things, also contained, in verse 3, the following lines:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
These lines are dropped from modern editions of the hymn and I guess we can figure out why. It would be hard to find people who believed in that blatant an affirmation of inequality, and yet that sentiment was pretty much what most people would have believed at the time our country was founded. It took some ungrateful people to say that the social order of the time was not God’s design. It took some ungrateful, and gutsy, people to say that the divine right of kings was a human invention. That the hierarchy of the aristocracy was not God’s devise. It took people who were good grumblers about the social order to stand up and say, we are all equal. Of course, a lot of the “we are all” took some time to develop.
But that discontent, that ingratitude for their place in the social structure, that was certainly the force that drove our religious ancestors to cast off a theology that they could no longer believe in. It is the force that led them to prize the right of conscience and the power of individual minds.
It is the same force that drove uncounted groups to fight for their rights, from immigrant groups to racial groups, men who did not have enough property to vote, slaves, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities all sorts of people had the ingratitude to say “No, I am not content with crumbs. I am not content with abuse. I am a human being and I demand to be treated as one. They said things like: We are equal to anyone. We want to vote. We want to own our own bodies. We want to marry the person we love. We want to be full participants in the world.
The first principal of us U-U’s is the worth and dignity of all people. Worth and dignity goes beyond the idea that we are all God’s children. If we are equal, in the sight of God or the sight of nature, we equally someone’s or something’s adults. That we are able to think, able to make decisions, able to make mistakes and learn from them. And able to discover our own need for gratitude and our own sense of to whom or what we should be grateful.
Our seventh principal is the recognition of the interconnectedness of life, respect for the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part. It cautions us to remember that we are not separate, that our actions affect each other. It also reminds us that what we have is never entirely through our own efforts. We are dependent on each other at each stage in our lives. We are dependent on millions of people we do not know. We are dependent on the earth and on the entire universe to even exist. And so between the two poles, the first the affirmation of each of our lives and the second, the recognition of our dependence and the grace that surrounds our being, I think we see a proper place for both gratitude and ingratitude.
We need to foster gratitude that lets us recognize and give thanks to the immense forces that have led to our being and to our flourishing. We need to give thanks for the force of love which has given us our lives and which sustains our live, that love which is carried out by human hands. But, at the same time, we need to resist any demand for gratitude that would diminish anyone’s worth or dignity. We need to resist any demand for gratitude which would justify harming our earth.
So, find some time this Thanksgiving to give thanks, to truly feel what it is to be held in the love that flows throughout all creation, from our beginnings to our endings. But also find some time, before you bite into that turkey or tofu, to give thanks for ingratitude. To give thanks for the human spirit and its manifestation in its myriad ways. And to offer a prayer to whatever moves your heart that this force may continue until we have built a world in which everyone’s worth with be affirmed and in which all creation is made whole.