Sabbath Devotional :: Ye Shall Have a Song

Classical: Cantus and the National Lutheran Choir: Ye Shall Have a Song

My friend Lavina Fielding Anderson died this week, and that means Thanksgiving is earlier and sadder for me than usual this year. Lavina introduced me to this beautiful passage from a sermon of John Donne, and I make everyone listen to it every year before Thanksgiving dinner. I have been reading it over and over, along with Lavina’s beautiful essays on mercy.

God made sun and moon to distinguish seasons, and day and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons; but God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies. In paradise the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumn; his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe tomorrow, but today if you will heare his voice, today he will heare you.

If some king of the earth have so large an extent of dominion in North and South as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: he brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter though thou have no Spring. Though in the wayes of fortune or understanding or conscience thou have been benighted till now wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the Spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest to fill all penuries. All occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

Donne preached this sermon, however, not at harvest time, but on Christmas Eve in 1624. I’ve always been mildly irked by his timing. But then again, I’m always mildly irked by the timing of American Thanksgiving (the Canadians’ is much more sensibly situated in the calendar!) Sometimes I am also irked by the enforced gratitude of the holiday. (Apparently, I am easily irked!) I am grateful, but sometimes it is hard to feel grateful on command at this time of year, when I am stressed about a million things, (and especially on Thanksgiving Day, when I am stressed about a million things AND I have to reach into the body of a dead bird to pull out a weird little packet of things even grosser than the rest of the turkey, and oh no I burned the rolls!).

I think it is for people like me that Donne included so many ways to describe the failure to feel what one hopes to feel: “benighted, . . . wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupified.” We will all feel that way sometimes. And even in those times, it is good to count and name our blessings. I love the story from Carthage jail, of Joseph asking John Taylor to sing “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.” Taylor replied, “Brother Joseph, I do not feel like singing.” And Joseph said something like, “Never mind — commence singing and you will soon get the spirit of it.”

It’s like that with giving thanks. We are commanded to be grateful as an act of will, to tell the stories of our lives with emphasis on God’s goodness and mercy to us. And we have to practice telling our stories this way, so that it becomes the narrative we know best — perhaps this is why we begin our prayers with offering thanks, and try to do it when we don’t much feel thankful. Even when our thanks are routine or a little perfunctory, when our feelings don’t quite match up, it is useful to cultivate the habit of praise and gratitude. Discouragement, despair, sin can all feel like exile — when we feel like strangers in a strange land, we will not feel like singing. We will want to weep. And yet, if we have learned to sing the song of gratitude by long practice, then even in exile, in despair, when we are longing for “an heavenly country,” as Paul says, we will be able to remember the words of the songs — we will be cheered by the singing of those around us and the memories of those whose faith has lighted our way.

The habit of giving thanks prepares us to receive God’s mercies, just as our Autumn rituals of memory and thanksgiving prepare us for the sudden glory of Christ’s birth, in the middle of the darkest nights of the year.