Times Square, Trafalgar Square, Red Square, the Place de la Concorde, the Piazza San Marco. These famous squares have long focused the hopes, ideals, or history of the cities where they are found. Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has an appropriately modern ring. But none is more timely than a square shortly to be completed in Dallas, Texas, and named Thanks-Giving Square.

In the chapel of this square individuals and groups will be welcomed to come and express, each in their own way, their gratitude to God by whatever name they call Him. And it is hoped to collect and focus here the Thanksgiving traditions of the world. So potent is gratitude, spiritually and scientifically understood, that, if every city possessed and fully used a Thanks-Giving Square of its own, many of today's pressing urban problems could soon be resolved.

When Christ Jesus said, "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth . . . ," his expression of gratitude was no social or religious convention; he followed it with the declaration, "All things are delivered to me of my Father." ^{Luke 10:21, 22;} His expressions of gratitude to God were concerned not only with the past; they were often the prelude to mighty works of power, feeding the hungry multitude, restoring the dead to life.

This potent gratitude of the Christ is well described in a stanza from a hymn:

And of this divine omnipotence in action Mary Baker Eddy writes, "To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160;} The entertaining and expression of gratitude are among the best ways to maintain this constant relationship that individualizes infinite power.

"Count your grievances" is bad advice. Whatever short-term advantages may be achieved by concentrating attention on grievances or encouraging others to do so, the longer-term results and undesirable side effects of this practice cancel out any momentary good. A sense of grievance or resentment acts as a slow poison, souring and making sterile the soil in which it is allowed lodgment. It fosters weakness, not power.

The opposite advice, "Count your blessings," may sometimes be bland counsel, encouraging submission to a state of affairs that needs change. To ensure that gratitude operates as the potent influence for good which it can be, we need to link it with divine Principle, God; we need to see it as an acknowledgment of God's irresistible government of the universe through His spiritual laws that overturn whatever is not good and bring whatever is good to fruition. This spiritually enlightened and inspired gratitude acts to sweeten and enrich the soil of consciousness, producing plentiful and repeated harvests of good and providing no nourishment for the tares of complacency with things short of the best.

It is a common thing for people testifying how they have been healed of disease or other troubles through Christian Science to speak or write of the part played by gratitude in their healing. Sometimes grateful acknowledgment of the irresistible power of divine Spirit has been the final step clinching a healing; other times an attitude of humble expectancy of divine good and of gratitude for good already experienced is the first step that has set someone on the road to healing.

Often when the one in search of healing is first recommended to be grateful to God, he may feel he has nothing at all to be grateful for. He may even have felt grievance and resentment boiling up within him at the very notion he should be grateful. Yet these have only boiled up in him to pass away. As he has resolutely persisted in being grateful for the smallest degree of good in his experience, he has found the list of things he can be grateful for expanding and growing until they have crowded out any sense of grievance or resentment and corrected the troubles these poisons foster.

In a letter to a group of metropolitan churches Mrs. Eddy wrote, "What is gratitude but a powerful camera obscura, a thing focusing light where love, memory, and all within the human heart is present to manifest light." ^{ibid., p. 164.} Anyone who has seen a large camera obscura at work will recognize how fitting this metaphor is. One enters the dark chamber and there sees on the brightly lit screen the detailed panorama of what is going on outside. So when all seems dark to us and we feel shut in and oppressed, the entertaining of gratitude shows us not only the good present in ourselves but all the light and wonder of God's spiritual universe around us. "Love, memory, and all within the human heart"—hope, for instance, expectancy, confidence—these start working for us, lighting up our day and leading us to the solution of our difficulties.

The annual season of Thanksgiving observed in many lands can help remind us to put the power of gratitude, gratitude both for the good past and for the good to come, to work in our lives every day of the year. Whether or not we have a Thanks-Giving Square in our city, all of us can maintain a Thanks-Giving Square in our hearts.

Peter J. Henniker-Heaton