Gifts of grace at Thanksgiving

It's getting harder.

As the tough times drag on, the most bedrock ideas of how our lives work are being challenged, and it's getting more difficult to summon the spirit of thanks into our everyday existence.

There is the fear, as we see young people graduate from college and return home to endless job searches and mountainous debt, that they won't have bigger and better opportunities than their parents did, or even ones as good. Worse, there's the sense for those in mid-career that the rules have changed on them. Where once there were the annual raise and the bonus -- regular as clockwork -- now there are the increasing health care contribution, the shrinking paycheck, the furlough, the longer hours, free time and purchasing power steadily eroded, assumptions about the future dissolving in sync with bank balances, and retirement plans crimped or crushed.

And that's for those who haven't lost jobs, and careers, and momentum and dreams.

We are, at least, in America. If that sounds like small solace, consider that this is a nation where for most of us hard times means a smaller home or a rented apartment when foreclosure comes. It means more pasta and less rib-eye. It means keeping the old car rather than trading in, canceling the vacation, cutting the holiday gift list.

In much of the world, hard times mean starvation. They mean drought. They mean war, disease, fear, pestilence and an utter hopelessness we cannot begin to imagine.

So today is a good time to reflect on this bigger, better life we thought we and our children were headed toward five and 10 years ago. Has the hope that each succeeding generation will have it better than the one before come to be defined entirely by the dream of amassing money and material possessions?

Do these dreams have any meaning at all?

Is it possible, even after the economy recovers, that we could redefine "giving our children a better life," just a bit? Would their lives be an improvement on ours if they found it easier to be grateful than us? Satisfied? Charitable? Would their world be better than ours if it contained more love, less hate, more social justice, less crime, more kindness, less blind materialism?

There must be such a thing, when it comes to houses and electronics and automobiles, as enough. There must be a level of wealth that, once achieved, satisfies, and allows us to point our efforts and energies in other directions. Most of us aren't at that place right now, feeling as we do the sting of lessened expectation and diminished prosperity, but surely we can see that it's possible to feel such things. Surely we can remember that there are other ways to measure wealth.

So if this is a more sober and thoughtful time, things could be worse. They will get better. For today, hugs and kisses are free, and love is plentiful for most of us, and these are gifts of grace that can endure when the material dreams fade. Perhaps they can even retain a heightened importance to us when the good times return.