Several months ago, I came across a conversation on X (formerly Twitter) that caused me to think about the horrors of hell in an entirely different way. Rather than shudder at the torture imposed upon damned souls by demons and other accursed creatures, I had to stop and consider the torture that damned souls impose upon themselves.
“There’s not a single grateful thought in hell,” said Father Brian O’Brien, echoing a statement attributed to noted exorcist Father Chad Ripperger.
Hell is eternal separation from God, as all Christians know, and most people think of hell as wallowing in an endless bath of fire surrounded by warring demons tormenting physical bodies that can no longer die. But, as Fr. Ripperger perceived, hell is also a permanent mental state that prohibits thoughts of God and the goodness of His creation, including our fellow man.
In other words, hell is endless fixation on the self. If there is no God, then man is his own highest being. Such a powerful position may sound enticing at first. As Satan infamously declares in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.”
But Milton’s Satan is lying, as the real Satan always does, and we are now living in a hellscape of our own making because we have accepted his lies and tried to recreate ourselves rather than accept our subordinate role as the created. People have irreparably mutilated their bodies — or even worse, the bodies of their children — in a vain attempt to change their sex. We have toppled statues and destroyed monuments in an effort to jettison the past.
In a recent op-ed in the Nation, two leftist writers even considered doing away entirely with Thanksgiving, a civic holiday that reminds us of our interconnectedness and shared smallness, and replacing it with “Truthsgiving,” which apparently would be little more than a yearly lecture from perpetually aggrieved activists.
Chase Iron Eyes called the story of the first Thanksgiving feast a “new myth” created by “aliens in a foreign land” who needed “a sense of people, purpose, and place.”
His colleague Sean Sherman argued that the “sanitized version of Thanksgiving neglects to mention the violence, land theft, and subsequent decimation of Indigenous populations … [and] causes tremendous distress to those of us who are still reeling from the trauma of these events to our communities.”
I cannot imagine a more miserable way to spend a day than to focus on the sufferings of those long since dead rather than the blessings of the present age. And everyone, no matter their circumstances, still has something and someone for which to give thanks.
The purest form of gratitude we can have is for God for His own sake. Those in recovery from addiction understand well the importance of God as He is, and a young people’s recovery group in my area has an apt motto that keeps Him in the forefront of their minds: thank God for God.
After thanking God for Himself, we must also appreciate His many gifts. Jesus Christ is Lord over all “in heaven and on earth and under the earth,” as St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians reminds us, and all that we have comes from Him. We cannot possibly repay Him for His generosity, but we can at least devote one day a year to reflecting upon it.
Finally, we must be grateful for one another. Mother Teresa, now St. Teresa of Calcutta, once said that “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” If we belong to each other, then we must love, serve, and give thanks for one another.
And by others, I don’t mean strangers of generations gone by but our family, friends, and neighbors in the here and now. We, of course, should remember loved ones who have passed away, but we do not honor the memory of the dead by forgetting the living.
Gratitude to God and to others gives our lives meaning and purpose. This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience and express that gratitude. Whatever it takes, I want to spend eternity standing shoulder to shoulder with all the saints of heaven giving thanks and praise to Him — and avoid forever the one place without Him, the once place where a “grateful thought” cannot exist.
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