The Theology of Thank You

Letting it in

Thursday, March 14, 2024

During a leadership team meeting in an earlier career, we’d been asked to go around the table and offer observations about where each of our colleagues could improve. It felt like a set-up of some sort so consequently I felt myself becoming very defensive. But there was one person, a senior leader, who was amazingly calm and cheerful throughout this process.
 
Afterwards I went to him, told him how difficult it was not to be defensive and asked what you’re supposed to do when receiving round after round of criticism.
 
“You say, thank you.”
 
“Oh,” I said, dumbstruck by the simplicity.
 
“It’s an offering. You simply receive it.”
 
I felt the wisdom start to compute. You put down your defensiveness and let it in. Maybe there’s something in there for you. Maybe there’s not. But you let it in and let it be whatever it is.
 
Despite the simplicity, it also felt a little impossible. There is a cost of humility in saying some things. Kids know this and often won’t have any of it. Certainly not “I’m sorry,” but sometimes even a simple, “thank you,” feels like the price is too high. It can be counter to our own sense of personal power and identity to be beholden, not a power move for kids trying to develop a sense of you’re-not-the-boss-of-me. To say thank you means now you must be humbly grateful. It means you need other people.
 
With a little maturity, mundane thanking gets easier for most of us. It costs us nothing to thank someone for what we are buying from them with money we have earned. It’s a courtesy thank you for something we are owed. There have been no favors extended. But I started to re-think that attitude a little when I heard someone talk about having a Theology of Thank You. It took me back to the wise words of that senior leader. Something about thank you keeps getting me. As I thought about it, a “theology of thank you” is more like a belief system. Not an end-of-day tally of gratitude. A whole re-orientation. It felt semi-revolutionary.
 
To see the world through the eyes of thank-you would mean no matter the money we earned and how hard we worked for it and no matter the contracts and agreements that have been signed entitling us to services rendered, there is still the deep recognition that we did nothing on our own to be in this position of receiving. Everything that ever came to us required a great orchestration of factors we were never entitled to. Like the other day when I found myself irritated that, once again, someone else’s mail had been put into my mailbox. Just do your job, right? How hard can it be when there is a big 62 right there on the house! But look at the infinity of factors that would have to align for the right mail to land in my box, down to the mail carrier getting a good night’s sleep. What if he has a baby with colic and only got two hours of sleep the night before? Am I entitled to a mail carrier with a sound-sleeping baby? No colicky babies for mail carriers allowed! Now that would be ridiculous.
 
There is an entire world being orchestrated for us. At the same time, I’ve also noticed that a lot of crummy stuff happens, making a Theology of Thank-You hard to square. Then I realized a Theology of Thank-You says of course there will be war, of course houses will slide into the ocean, of course hearts will stop, and of course we will hurt. That is to be expected. But look at the sheer number of hands and stunning confluence of factors that right in this very minute have come together to allow me to type these words and, later, you to read them. Thank you fingers. Thank you eyes. Thank you sleeping babies.
 
In a weird way, a theology of thank you makes living in a world of barely controlled risk less threatening, the extraction of simple goodness a counter to that ledger we keep of how many bad things have happened to us and all that have yet to come. And a counter to an unconscious kind of entitlement numbing our ability to take it all in, take in the miracle that brings mail to our door and food to our mouth. In that way, maybe most of all, a theology of thank-you is a prayer…
 
Please, let me be touched.
 
Thank you for being my conversation partner.
 
E