What if gratitude is more than just a feeling?
What Western culture has kept me from understanding about gifts
I’m trying to reflect this Thanksgiving week on the various gifts God has given me — the gifts of life, financial security, relatively good health (headaches aside), my family, his presence and relationship with me, his mercy and his sacrifice on the cross.
And the right way to respond to gifts like these — to such wonderfully, gloriously undeserved gifts — is to be thankful.
That’s where I start to get stuck.
There is a basic level of gratitude that I understand how to practice. You think of things you’re thankful for, and then you give thanks for them. It’s so easy a green onion can do it!
But when I try to work on being thankful on a deeper level, I quickly find myself extremely confused about what it is that I’m trying to do. Should I just think about more blessings in my life? Should I think about them more often? Are my feelings insufficiently grateful? Much like when I try to pursue “love for God” in the abstract, I find myself chasing emotional experiences rather than the spiritual states they’re intended to signpost.
One of the things I’m learning this year is just how culturally-bound our ideas of gratitude are. In the subset of White Canadian/American culture I grew up in, the proper response to most gifts is an expression of thankfulness and maybe a card, at which point the gift is yours with no strings attached. If I give you a blender, it would be a social faux pas for me to then start inviting myself over to use your blender to make myself smoothies.
This isn’t some inherent God-given rule about gift-giving — it’s a custom that developed over time among a specific group of people for specific reasons. Other groups of people developed different social norms.
In many Native American cultures, for example, gifts are intended to be passed on, or to serve the whole community rather than to be something you add to “your private store of stuff.” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass describes some of the confusion that came when European invaders assumed their idea of “gift-giving” was normative [emphasis mine]:
Lewis Hyde wonderfully illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the “Indian giver.” This expression, used negatively today as a pejorative for someone who gives something and then wants to have it back, actually derives from a fascinating cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property. When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based in reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.
From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the “gift” is deemed to be “free” because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached. (Braiding Sweetgrass, pg. 27-28)
Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift gives particular examples of this phenomenon. He asks us to imagine a European explorer who is thrilled to be given a ceremonial pipe after smoking tobacco together with some new Native American acquaintances. He, believing it’s now his, prepares to send it home to the British Museum (where lots of valuable cultural artifacts seem to end up.) When he meets (and smokes with) some leaders from a different tribe, he is shocked when they expect to go home with the pipe that was given to him!
Or another example, which he associates with the Uduk culture (a group in Northeast Africa with similar gift-giving norms): I might give you a goat as a gift. But it wouldn’t be okay for you to add it to your flock and use it for milk or breeding — that would be selfish, and you would be treating it as property rather than a gift. Instead, you would be obligated to kill it, throw a party, and feed everybody around you.
Kimmerer’s entire book is a wonderful reflection on all sorts of things, including gift-receiving — not just from people but from animals and plants as well, and I would super highly recommend the 2/3s of it I’ve read so far (and, I presume, the rest).
(One more quote from the book before we move on — Kimmerer introduces an oral tradition in which a character named Nanabozho made trees produce sap rather than maple syrup because people were just lounging around stealing the trees’ syrup rather than treating the trees with the gratitude they deserved and doing the work for other people that they owed as the result of the gift. After that, it became a lot of work to produce maple syrup. She describes making syrup with her own children and letting the children drink the sap themselves.)
Sap, but not syrup. Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness. (Braiding Sweetgrass pg. 69)
But Colin,
I can hear a very specific voice asking me.
(It’s probably not you, don’t worry.)
You told me you were going to talk about being thankful to God, and all you’ve given me is an idea of gift-giving that comes from a culture described by a non-Christian author. What does this have to do with the God of the bible?
(If you grew up outside white Evangelical culture and are deeply confused by the premise of this question, just trust me that this is the sort of question that sometimes gets asked. The idea of learning about ethics from non-Christians can be extremely controversial in some circles I walk in, which is why the rest of this post will be devoted to interpreting lessons I’ve learned from Kimmerer’s book in a Christian framework, which she does not ascribe to.)
There’s a general, unstated assumption in white Evangelicalism that the white American lifestyle is more-or-less the standard of Christian culture. This is why missionaries spent so many years trying to spread not just the word of Jesus, but conservative American beliefs about alcohol, dancing, capitalism, and “acceptable” traditions.
And so, when we read in the bible about God’s grace (the Greek word means “gift”), we tend to assume that it takes place in a gift-giving culture like our own. God gives us gifts — our health, eternal life, his presence — and we smile and thank him and add them to our private stash.
But one of the most important discoveries of the past fifty years of biblical studies is that our ideas of ancient grace and gifts are really, really inaccurate. Currently the most forceful and well-researched exposition of this is John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift, which I read last year while high on pain medication after getting my appendix out (I reread the relevant section last night to make sure I got it right in this post.) Barclay, building on the work of scholars like E.P. Sanders and James Dunn, points out that we are misinterpreting first century Judaism when we claim Jesus (and Paul) founded a religion of “grace” in contrast to the then-standard Jewish “legalism”.
In fact, Barclay points out, first century Judaism had a deep and diverse understanding of God’s gift of grace, and that Paul’s letters are closer to entering a debate within Judaism about grace’s nature than inventing a completely new concept. There is a lot to get into (the book is wonderful), but for the purposes of this post I want to zero in on a single norm we often enforce in white American culture around gifts.
In contrast to the indigenous customs we saw above, white American gifts are often supposed to be “non-circular” — if I give you a gift, I’m expected not to ask for anything in return (except perhaps some thanks and a nice card). So when we hear that certain things are “gifts from God”, we understandably assume that they are now ours with no strings attached, because that’s part of how our culture defines gifts.
But Barclay convincingly argues that this isn’t a part of how the ancient world (including the first-century Greco-Roman world and first-century Judaism) saw gifts. In the ancient world, gifts created social ties and obligations: if I give you a lavish gift, this might strengthen our bond of friendship, but would also create a debt I might ask you to repay at some point by calling in a favor. Barclay writes:
The sense of obligation arising from the gift is particularly clear in papyrus letters, where individuals, across the social range, call on favors from those they have helped and express their gratitude in what seem to us tactlessly explicit and extreme terms. Authors routinely indicate their obligation to return some favor to their beneficiary, and according to Ps.-Demetrius’s template of a letter of gratitude, one should put oneself under practically limitless obligation: “if you wish anything that is mine, do not write requesting it, but demand a return favor. For I am in your debt.” (Paul and the Gift, pg. 27)
If you grew up in a culture with similar gift norms to mine, this can be jarring — “these aren’t real gifts, because people keep tying them to demands”! But the thing to keep in mind is that “gift” isn’t some abstract platonic ideal that everybody can aspire to: my culture has an idea of what gifts ought to be, and ancient Greco-Roman had a different one. Mine seeks a sort of “pure” generosity towards my friends, while the Greco-Roman ideal sought to establish bonds of loyalty and provide social ties between the powerful and the less-powerful.
So how do we tie this back to God? When we read early Christian writers describing God’s love and blessings using gift language, we need to remember that their idea of “gift” was different from our own. Barclay goes into a lot more detail about other aspects of gifts (being freely given, being abundant, etc.), but today I’ve just been meditating on the fact that God’s gifts aren’t non-circular. They come with strings attached. I am blessed and I ought to be grateful, but thankfulness isn’t just about cultivating the purest possible feeling of gratitude. It’s about carrying out the obligations we have in return for the gifts we’ve received.
We certainly have direct obligations of worship and honor to God, but it’s not always clear how to tie this back to specific gifts. And that’s why I’ve found Kimmerer’s discussion of gifts in her own Potawatomi culture so powerful: even if I can’t reasonably give blessings back to God, I can recognize them as gifts — not my own personal stash of stuff but things I have no claim to except to be freely shared and used for the benefit of all.
And not just in the abstract, but as something I can actually do.
I think of a couple at my church who have been given the gift of a wonderful, loving family, and who have shared that gift by inviting me and a group of other (mostly) single people to their house on Sunday evenings and created a loving community and sense of family in a city and university that can be isolating.
I think of a friend with the gift of an extraverted, friend-making personality — the sort of person everyone just immediately likes — and the years she spent volunteering with (and then running) a homeless outreach ministry and making people feel seen and listened to in ways that the introverts among us struggled hard to do.
I think of a radiologist I know who has been given the gift of a very high-paying job, and whose family budgets on a much smaller $50,000 per year in order to share the majority of their income with the global poor, and the many lives that have been saved and changed as a result.
And I start to think of all the blessings in my life and I wonder if maybe gratitude can be more than trying to feel the right emotions or find the prettiest words to use when thanking God for things. Maybe being truly grateful is joyfully and freely giving what God has given. Maybe it’s recognizing that gifts are meant for us, not for me.
How will I share God’s love this week? How will I share my health? How will I share my education, and Jesus’s death on the cross, and my family and friends and the book of poems I got from the library?
Every time I thank God for a blessing this week, I will try to ask God if there’s a way I can share it with others or my community or pass the gift along instead of keeping it for myself. And in doing so I hope the barriers to gratitude will become clearer and the fruit of success will be more joyful. The more I try, the more things start to look tantalizingly close to the portrait Jesus paints of the kingdom of God.
“When all the world is a gift in motion”, Kimmerer writes, “how wealthy we become.”
On earth as it is in heaven, I guess.
🔥🔥🔥