No, Thank You
I want to live in a world without thank-you cards. I send them. I receive them (and notice, with furrowed brow, when I do not). I realize how important it is to say “thank you.” I learned that when I was two. I taught my girls to say the “magic words” whenever anyone proffered a lollipop or a simple glass of water. I know—totally—that gratitude is the key to happiness and joy, the only kind of life worth living. So why am I damning thank-you cards?
I’m against “gratitude” that keeps track of debts. I tire of listening to people who are angry, bitter and resentful because some gift has not been appreciated or acknowledged. A friend was telling last week of a man who volunteered for twenty years at a charity, came in every week and worked, and then one day he left without a word. Why? His gift had not been properly acknowledged. This same neediness takes root in my heart; I know it well. I get grumpy when no one notices that I actually cleaned the garage!, no one appreciates what I am sure was an amazing homily.
In those grumpy moments I realize how selfish my “gifts” really are.
In his book, The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber examines a kind of giving which is not really virtuous at all, but merely an act that creates an obligation. It’s a “gift” that places me “above” you and requires some kind of payment, even if that payment is an expression of gratitude. Graeber recounts “the words of an actual hunter-gatherer, an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: ” ‘Up in our country we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.’
“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.”
All right, I’m not really against thank-you cards. That’s a lovely social convention. But as I get a little older (can I say that now that I’m 55?) what I want are moments of true gratitude, where I give my gifts just because. Where I don’t have to wait till the barista comes to the cash register before I drop my dollar in the tip jar. Where I’m simply thankful for wind-blown trees and rainwater puddles, the darkness of evening and the sun of morning, black coffee and red wine—the gifts that grace everyone, for which we can only be thankful to God.
It’s funny you should write this today because I’ve been reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. There’s a scene in her book where this Indian tribe has given something to this woman and she wants to know how to thank them in their language. The person with her says they don’t have a word for thank you. I wish I still had the book for the exact quote, but it’s similar to your story. Anyway… thanks!
Thank you David – and I mean it.
Is there anything more rewarding than the thrill of anonymously giving or doing something for somebody who will never know who gave it or did it and that only you and God will ever know it?
On the other hand, I do now publicly thank my friend Dr. Pete Goodhue for bringing you into my life. He mailed me copies your sermons for a number of years and then sent me your epiphanic book for breakfast.
Thanks, Dave–Peter tells me lots about you, and I am in awe of your long, long friendship.
Pete and I often have taken the road least traveled.
Glad he is in both our lives.
Reading David’s “Finding Your Soul” must be magic because I opened right up to the page in State of Wonder (one of the best books I’ve read recently):
“How do you say thank you?”
“To the best of my knowledge the word doesn’t exist in Lakashi. I’ve asked other people that question and no one comes up with anything.”
This is an ancient tribe of the Amazon with no calculations!!
Thakns for giveing Pam the “chapter and verse”!
I’m grateful to God for sending St.Luke’s you,David, at the same time Bill and I are here. So thanks David for being obedient,and listening to God. That says it!. Mugsie
I see myself in the part about the person who becomes bitter that their gift hasn’t been acknowledged. Having repeatedly sent birthday cash or check gifts, to nieces and nephews every year without any sort of acknowledgment has built up that anger in me. Your post makes sense when helping out a person in need. No thanks is needed. I suppose I have to look at the gifts I send in that way. I’m not looking for heaps of thanks bestowed on me. Just a note, email, quick call to say that my gesured mattered to them.
DITTO to Margaret Anderson’s comments- and I mean it! Ginny
Thanks so much for bringing up the many issues and concerns in this life, and making me think about them!
God, I needed this. Thank you, Dad.
I love this post so much.
And ugh – I always make sure the barista sees me put the tip in. You’re right. That’s about me, not the giving. Every time I’m tempted to do that now, I’ll be thinking of you and this post!
Kim
Thank you so much for this. It is so important to remember that gifts are gifts, not transactions. I have always felt this and you put it into words perfectly.
Can I get an amen? Thank you so much for this beautiful reminder. Seriously. Thank you.
This post reminds me of when you, Pam, Maggie and Sharon would make the rounds to deliver Christmas goodies to your friends without so much as knocking on our door to let us acknowledge your visit. And to top it off – tucked in every basket, a little note issuing a blanket thank you letter exemption. I have often remembered those acts of kindness; how crazy it must have been to prepare, package and deliver all of those packages during your “busy season” – and to do it with a stealth that I can only describe as elf-like. That, to me, is what it truly means to give a GIFT.
So, for all of the spiced nuts and olives and life lessons – THANK YOU.
Wow–Can’t believe you saw and noted that as a young person–the “blanket thank-you amnesty”. Thanks for your response.
It’s a wonderful story to sweetly remind us to admire one another without expectations. Gratitude is one of my most favorite emotions to experience.