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| AHYMSIN NEWSLETTER, ISSUE - November 2020 | ||||||||
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In Praise of Thanksgiving©Randall Krause December 2020This year, 2020, has been out of the ordinary. It seems that dharma—virtue—is at a low ebb in the world at this time. Disease, political upheaval, public lies, cruelty, violence, and economic distress have been at a high. Yet, in the midst of this calamitous time, in November 2020, came the North American Thanksgiving holiday. Several years ago, Swami Veda Bharati wrote about the Thanksgiving holiday, saying, “Once a year in November, everyone thanks everyone, friends to friends, relatives, parents to children, children to parents, spouses, and any others that one can think of. Thanks for all that one has received in life and through the year. Some friends are invariably invited to evening dinner at one’s home. This, too, needs to be adopted worldwide, except for the killing of the poor turkey bird to eat for the occasion. Do think of ways of popularizing these sacred days worldwide…” One might wonder why Swami Veda suggested popularizing Thanksgiving around the world. Could it be that this holiday provides some way to navigate challenging times like these? The essence of the Thanksgiving holiday is gratitude, and gratitude is one of the most positive and fulfilling of human sentiments. Gratitude uplifts the spirit, provides strength and fills the heart with joy. An article, In Praise of Gratitude, published on the internet by Harvard University Medical School, indicates that gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Similarly an article entitled Thankfulness: How Gratitude Can Help Your Health, says, “Are you feeling overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, all the changes it has brought to your life and everything you need to worry about to stay safe?” “Or do you sometimes feel like you just can’t catch a break? You know — the truck that cut you off, the weird feedback you got from your boss, the grocery item you need but is never on the store shelf? Do you sometimes feel negative and cynical?” “Sure, we all do this a little, but doing it a lot can lead to depression, which is linked to poor heart health, more inflammation and even a weaker immune system. Yikes!” “Some neuroscience experts think our brains focus on negative information as a way to remember pain so we can avoid it in the future. They call this the ‘negativity bias.’” “To balance out this natural tendency, we can practice gratitude.” Many people are devotees of the practice of gratitude. The website, https://gratefulness.org/, provides information and practical steps one can take to practice gratitude. Besides the more mundane reasons for practicing gratitude, there are also spiritual or religious benefits from practicing this sentiment. From a book titled Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, by Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, and from a beautiful commentary on that same book by Swami Nijananda Bharati, we learn that one can adopt an attitude of gratitude toward everything that happens in life. According to these writers, if one accepts that God is good and could do no evil and that God does all things, then it follows that everything that happens to us is good and for the best. In the face of such blessings, the authors say, gratitude, thanksgiving, is prescribed. Now this may seem crazy. How, one might reasonably ask, could harm, disease, disaster be a blessing? But, the authors say, these situations are brought by God and God can do no evil but only good. So, although they may seem terrible to us, they seem that way because we have a limited view rather than the awesome overall Divine perspective. If we were to gain God’s perspective, we’d see the blessing. As is said in Trustful Surrender, “Experience shows that even the gravest misfortunes can have good results and the greatest successes end in disaster. A rule also that God usually follows is to attain His ends by ways that are the opposite to those human prudence would normally choose.” In his Commentary, Swami Nijananda gives a way to be able to feel grateful even when doing so seems impossible. He says that one can make a silent inner prayer, saying something like, O Divine Being, I’m sure that this circumstance is for the best and I am grateful for it, but due to my limitations I’m not able to understand how. Please grant me the wisdom to understand. Here, again from Trustful Surrender, is a quote indicating how maintaining gratitude in all things can help one maintain constant pleasant mindedness (which Swami Veda often advised for meditators): “St. Francis Borgia, the third General of the Society of Jesus, provides us a good example in this matter. He was once traveling to a house of the Society when it was snowing hard and bitterly cold, and his arrival was delayed until a late hour of the night when everybody was in bed and asleep. He had to wait some time before his knocking aroused someone to let him in, and then to the apologies for keeping him waiting so long in such foul weather he answered cheerfully that it was a great consolation to him to think that it was God who had dropped so much snow on him.” Thus, practicing thanksgiving in our lives, whether as a holiday or as a daily practice, can ferry us across difficult waters to greater peace of mind, health and wellbeing.
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