Living in reality and gratitude: A Thanksgiving meditation

AI-generated baby animals, getting a decent meal, and the perfection of happiness

Not what baby turkeys look like

Sometime in the last year or two, you’ve probably seen examples of a viral online trend: images of excessively adorable baby animals. Some merely look too precious to be real, but others are adorable in glaringly unreal ways—for example, baby peacocks, penguins, and other birds with colorful adult feathers. They’re AI-generated, of course, though often presented as real: “Bet you never knew what a baby turkey looks like!” 

What’s more, some people seem not to want to know that real animal babies do not, in fact, look like that! “Why would you tell me that?” a friend complained when I pointed out that baby turkeys don’t have fan tails. (Perhaps raising seven children has made me extra sensitive to zoological inaccuracy. Or maybe it’s just me. Am I the only one bothered that Curious George is called a monkey, but he has no tail, meaning he’s probably an ape?)

Not a monkey, unless he lost his tail in a traumatic incident. George is best thought of as a young chimpanzee, a species of ape.

We don’t always want to know or think about reality! Around Thanksgiving, for example, some people would rather not think about what live turkeys look like. On the other hand, we don’t want to get lost in unreality. “I’m not crazy about reality,” Groucho Marx once quipped, “but it’s the only place you can get a decent meal.” 

We need to live in reality—and this isn’t some kind of “eat your vegetables” discipline. Or maybe it is, if you like vegetables as much as I do. Vegetables are real; so are turkey, mashed potatoes, pie, and cranberry sauce (both kinds!). 

Nothing against Rockwell, but Groucho was right—as was Magritte: This is not a decent meal.

Reality is good. At least, it was God’s idea, and he thought it was “very good”! God himself is ultimate reality, and the source of all reality. Fully living in reality includes recognizing our total dependence on God for all things. Another name for this way of fully living in reality, it seems to me, is “gratitude” or “thankfulness.” 

What is gratitude? As a young theology student in the 1990s, I thought a lot about gratitude: what it is, why it’s important, and why it seems so profoundly linked to happiness. We all know what it means to feel thankful, but it’s always seemed to me that something so important can’t be reduced to a mere emotion. Like love, gratitude must be a choice.

Many years later, while in diaconal formation, I wrote somewhere, “Happiness is perfected in gratitude.” Then I thought a sentence like that must have been written before … so I Googled it. While I didn’t find that exact wording, I did find a remarkably similar sentence from Thomas Merton: “Knowledge of God is perfected in gratitude.” Which I figure is essentially the same thing.

We all owe debts we can never repay, and our debt to God is without limit. I think gratitude is choosing to recognize and embrace the good in our lives that comes from others—a choice that not only points us to the goodness of the gift, but tends to draw us into to a deeper relationship with the giver. 

I’ve thought a lot about gratitude, both because I recognize how important it is and because I know I have so much to be thankful for. I hope you do too.

Adapted from a column written for the weekly bulletin at my parish