Editorial November 24, 1945 Issue

True Thanksgiving Is Thanks-Living

John Randall Dunn

The most thankful people in the world should be those who have gained some measure of spiritualized consciousness. Without this priceless boon, no material possession or achievement can bring to the human heart a taste of real or abiding joy and satisfaction. Take, for example, the individual who avers that with the accumulation of a certain amount of this world's goods his goal will have been reached and happiness attained. Suppose his material success is realized and he is able to retire from his accustomed labors; what then? Is true happiness and contentment the order of the day? Hardly.

How many inactive men and women are happy? When a devotee of the game of golf tells you that when he can "break one hundred" he will be content, he little knows what he says. If he manages to get into the nineties, his zeal to lower his score to the eighties may rob him of that which should be an enjoyable pastime: thus before the mesmerized sons of men ever fits the will-o'-the-wisp of evanescent material pleasure and satisfaction. In the words of the wise Preacher in Jerusalem (Eccl. 1:8). "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing."

Small wonder, therefore, that at the Wednesday testimony meetings and the annual Thanksgiving Day services in Christian Science churches we hear people expressing gratitude, not alone for the physical betterment brought into their lives through Christian Science, but for the understanding of God and of man's relationship to Him, which is bringing daily and hourly a quietude of thought and an inner satisfaction not even glimpsed before. The Scientist's thanksgiving for health restored is twofold. Not only is he grateful for relief from pain and bodily discord, but he thanks God that the healing proves the actuality of His benign law, which outlaws, as unreal, everything unlike harmony.

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