• Religion •
• South America •
Thank You, God
Wellcome Collection
Infinitas Gracias
October 2011-February 2012
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In certain parts of Mexico a child who falls off her bicycle will later thank God for her recovery. She will, with her parents’ help, commission a votive painting from a local artist. This painting will then be displayed in church; an offering of thanks to both God and the saint whose intercession sped the healing along. Such paintings are the subject of Infinitas Gracias, an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London that runs until the 26th of February. It’s not all bike accidents: other thankful worshippers have fallen down mine shafts, been electrocuted, shot, abducted by gangsters, and all sorts besides.
In certain parts of the US a professional athlete will kneel after a successful play to offer a brief prayer of thanks. By reflecting a little on Tebowing, alongside the Wellcome exhibit, we can approach the act of thanksgiving as a problem of the human condition, without geographical or cultural constraint. After all, Tim Tebow’s spiritualisation of his footballing performance isn’t that different from the lady, interviewed on film at the Wellcome exhibit, who gives thanks to St Francis for the miracle of making her first perfectly round tortilla.
While both Tebow and Infinitas Gracias frame thanksgiving as a specifically religious phenomenon, it isn’t really. Who hasn’t, after some small but significant victory, let a muttered “thank you” slip? It’s an acknowledgement that our achievements are not all our own. In one room of the Wellcome exhibit, a wall is covered in items of celebration. Wedding dresses, baby clothes, and photos of teenage couples stand out. Each of these was tacked up on the church wall as thanks for the joy they represent. But it’s not so much this display as the purchase of a wedding dress in the first place that represents the real sacrifice. When we invest in rituals of celebration, aren’t we offering a sort of thanks, whether or not we believe someone is up there to be thanked?
Desire for religious faith is often described, by its proponents as much as by its antagonists, as an experience of lack. A “God-shaped hole,” as I recall the evangelist Ravi Zacharias saying once. But what if faith could also be found in a feeling of undeserved abundance? After all, some people die after bicycle accidents. Recognising our own desire to give thanks might tell us something quite good about ourselves: that life’s randomness and unfairness doesn’t go unnoticed; that we know nobody simply gets what he earns.
This sense of thanksgiving is not simply one of resignation. It is rather a sense of resistance. Like the amulets on display in the neighbouring exhibit, Charmed Life, thanksgiving has magical power. The ostentatious display of humble thanks to a higher power, like any thank you in our ordinary lives, is part of an implicit transaction: you gave me something; I thanked you; we’re even. Thanksgiving, in that way, is a reassertion of control over our own lives, a challenge to both God and blind fate.
Could this duality in the nature of thanksgiving offer an insight into our political conscience as well? We are capable of experiencing our vast good fortune just to be alive, to be saved from gangsters, or to be able to make perfect tortillas. At the same time, we feel a desire to resist such arbitrariness, and to control it. Perhaps we can find in these feelings some motivation to fight against injustice, for an equal distribution of grace.
Tom Cutterham is reading for a DPhil in US History at St Hugh’s College. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.
