From Feeling Thankful to Giving Thanks

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we begin to hear more and more about feeling thankful. For example, students at both public and private school are often directed to merely think or write about the things for which they are feeling thankful.

The feeling of thankfulness, however, is a feeling – an emotion. We are often taught to think of our emotions as something neutral at best or negative at worst. We should, as they say, control our emotions so that our emotions do not control us. This is completely true in most cases. Yet we sometimes fail to recognize that our emotions have a very positive role to play in our moral lives.

Emotions, while properly controlled and regulated, should lead us to acts of moral virtue. There are countless passages in the Gospels, for example, in which Jesus’ feeling of compassion led him to perform miracles like healing the blind or feeding the multitudes. We could think also of the feeling of fraternal love that drives a soldier out of the safety of his foxhole to run into a hail of bullets when he sees a brother soldier wounded and exposed. Or imagine how the feeling of maternal love pulls a mother out of bed to feed her newborn child through the night.

Sadly original sin and the destructive work of vice have weakened the positive role that emotion should play in our moral lives. Unchecked and disordered emotions can, and often do, lead to disaster. Yet there are times where we are given the opportunity to form our emotions, and in doing so we are given another important tool for our moral toolbox.

Thanksgiving should be one of these opportunities. It is good and holy for us to cultivate a feeling of thankfulness - but like Christ, the soldier, and the mother, we must let that feeling find completion in action. We must give thanks to God.

Just as we would never merely tell another how thankful he's made us feel when doing something kind for us, so we must never simply feel thankful for all that God has given us without giving Him thanks. While this is something we must all do every day, Thanksgiving Day is a national act of giving God thanks for His many blessings upon us and our nation.

It is not enough for us to merely feel thankful this week, we must put that feeling into action by giving thanks to our Creator. It is not Thankfulness Day that we celebrate, but Thanksgiving Day. We must move from a subjective experience to an objective action. Doing so not only cultivates proper emotion, but it also builds us up in virtue - the virtue of religion, which is justice toward God (CCC 1807). That's what Thanksgiving is really all about.