Despair sometimes seems the most reasonable response to life, especially these days. A partial list of things that might cause even the most devout people to fear for the future include: seemingly intractable divisions in society and the church, a poisonous political climate, the normalization of name-calling and ad hominem attacks, plus more personal crises like financial woes, medical problems and emotional distress. Not to mention widespread climate change, famine and war. I don’t need to go on. 

In such times, at Thanksgiving it is tempting to throw up one’s hands and say, “Thankful for what?” For many people, the prospect of spending time with family over the holidays only intensifies these feelings of dread. 

Let’s define despair as the belief that nothing will ever get better and, in fact, is bound to get worse. Again, looking around, that might seem the most rational conclusion one could draw. But digging into despair, especially at Thanksgiving, makes for a poor feast. For despair does two things that work against our happiness: First, it denies God’s ability to change things in the future and, second, it denies the reality that God is already doing something, right now. 

Interestingly, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton described despair as a form of pride. “Despair,” he wrote, “is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that God is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves.”

When I share that quote with people, they often recoil, feeling as if Merton is blaming them for their despair, when, again, it can seem reasonable. But his point is that despair denies that God is above us, and therefore that God can change things—even if we can’t see how a situation can be changed. Despair says that the future will probably not change and is bound to be even worse than where we are today. Thus, despair says, “I know better than God. And what I know is that God is powerless to change anything.” The world will just get worse; our church will just get worse; our family will just get worse; our workplace will just get worse. 

But time and again, God shows that this is false. For me the most potent example of this are the stories called the “post-Resurrection narratives” in the Gospels, that is, stories of the Risen Christ. Jesus overturns despair, just as he overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple. 

After the crucifixion, the disciples are described as cowering behind locked doors in Jerusalem, or walking away on the road to Emmaus dejected, two of the most vivid symbols of despair in the New Testament. “We had hoped…” say the disappointed disciples walking away from Jerusalem to Emmaus, words that one of my spiritual directors described as the saddest words in the Gospels. 

God, however, has other plans. The risen Christ appears while the disciples are still cowering behind closed doors and, later, while the two disciples are walking to Emmaus. His presence shocks them because they were so caught up in despair they couldn’t imagine anything good in the future. But the message of the Resurrection is that hope is stronger than despair.

Let’s take a more contemporary example. A Jesuit scholar preaching at a retreat for Jesuits this summer joked that, as a historian, he often told his students two things about the papacy: “First, there can never be a Jesuit pope. And second, there will never be an American pope.” He laughed and said, “I was not only wrong, I was wrong twice in a row!” No matter what you think about Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV (I think they’re both pretty great), you have to admit that God can certainly bring about unexpected change.

Despair also takes us away from God in the present. It keeps us focused on all the terrible things that may happen in the future, and that means that we can be blind to all the ways—even if they are small—that God is communicating with us now. 

That is one reason the daily examination of conscience (also called the Examen), a review of the day, is a great way to ground yourself in gratitude. We tend to skip over the small ways that God has blessed us, to miss things to be thankful for, in the midst of our busy lives. And not seeing God in the present means that it is harder to see God in the future—and harder to see God in general. 

In turn, despair makes us less grateful, more jealous of the perceived “good fortune” in someone else’s life and more acquisitive, as we want more and more, even though we have enough. This is why St. Ignatius Loyola called ingratitude “the most execrable and the worst sin,” in fact the origin of all sins.

So even though things may seem bad, despair is not something to feast on at Thanksgiving. Gratitude for what God has already given us makes a much better meal. With a side dish of belief in what God can still do in our lives and in the world, also known as hope.