BEING GRATEFUL

We all have so much for which we should be thankful, so very, very much. Perhaps so much so that we do not realize just have blessed we really are. One of the reasons, I suspect, that we fail to grasp our blessedness is that often we find ourselves comparing our blessings with those who we deem to be more blessed than we are instead of those who are obviously so much less blessed than we are.

Doing so may be human nature. It may also be the product of the world in which we now live and especially in this great country of ours. We are blessed to live in this country and because of that we are so much more blessed than those who live in other parts of this world, parts of the world sociologists call The Third World or the Three-Fourths World. We take our blessings for granted and only, rarely, if ever, it often seems, pause to give thanks for them.

Truly, because we have so much for which to be thankful, gratitude should be a way of life for us. The word itself, gratitude, comes from the Latin word gratus meaning “thankful”. Gratus is close to gratia which means “grace” – which gives us a clue as to why we should be thankful in the first place, which is why we should never, ever take our blessings for granted.

We are graced people, you and I. We have done nothing to deserve that grace, nothing at all. Why we are so graced and why so many others are not is something we can neither understand nor explain. All we can do, all we should do, is be thankful to God for so gracing us and not, not even once, compare our gifts, our blessings, to those of others or, worse yet, somehow begin to believe we deserve those blessings. We do not.

Gratitude should be like a fuel that gives power to our lives. It should propel us to be the person God created us to be, endowed with the gift’s God graced us with, so that we can become a source of grace and blessing to those who are not so blessed, while not judging them for their lack of blessings but, rather, being thankful that we are so abundantly and undeservedly blessed.

One can only wonder what this world would be like if we, each and every one of us, lived a life of gratitude. Instead of being envious of those we deem more blessed, we would share some of our blessings, some of our time and talents and financial resources, to help bless those who do not have what we have in abundance. Instead of hoarding our blessings, we should share them with those in need. To live more simply so that other may simply live is living a life of gratitude.

Good people that we are, and we are good people, we sometimes can find ourselves not doing what we know deep in our hearts we should be doing. It is so easy to get so caught up in our own little world that we forget about those who are not part of our world. Living a life of gratitude not only makes those with whom we share our blessing more blessed, it makes our lives even more so. We know that when we have done that. We just need to make gratitude a way of life and not simply an occasional part of it.

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO GO

Jesus’ last words on the cross were his most important not only for us but even more so for himself. “Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.” There are two parts to that sentence, both important as they are two parts of the same coin, if you will. They go together. We do not and cannot have one without the other.

Take the second half of that statement first: “because they do not know what they are doing.” The people who were putting Jesus to death truly did not know what they were doing. By that I mean that they did not know who Jesus was. But it was more than that. They did not understand the implication of what they were doing because their actions would have far-reaching consequences and effects.

So do ours. We, too, when we do something we know we should not be doing, truly do not know what we are doing. Yes, we know that when we say something to hurt another person, we know what we are doing. And when we deliberately hurt another person, we know what we are doing. However, as with the case with those who were putting Jesus to death, so with us: we truly do not know the ramifications of our deliberate hurt. They always go far beyond the one we have hurt.

No sin is ever relegated to one other person even if that person is ourselves. When we do something to hurt ourselves, we also hurt those who love us because they have to deal with what we have done, with the consequences of our actions. The same is true when we hurt another. Those who love the one we have hurt have to deal with the one who has now been hurt, to minister to that person in love. And while they are ministering to the one we hurt, those others who are dependent on their time and talent will have to put their needs on hold. And those who are now on hold will have to put those waiting on them on hold as well, and so on down the line.

Thus, we really never truly and fully know what we are doing when we sin. If we did, if we could somehow in some way fathom the consequences of that sin, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant that sin is, we would never walk down that path. We would avoid it at all costs.

But we do walk down that path. That is why those who unjustly, and knowing that they were doing an injustice, put Jesus to death needed to be forgiven not only for their sake but for Jesus’ own sake as well. Jesus would not allow himself to die with an unforgiving heart. Whether his words of forgiveness healed or helped heal those who were putting him to death, whether those words transformed them, we do not know. But they were transforming to Jesus and allowed him to go from this life to the next in peace.

Forgiveness is the only way to go in this life as well. We have to forgive those who hurt us and we have to forgive others for hurting us and we have to forgive ourselves for hurting ourselves if we want to fully and faithfully live in this life. There is no other way than the way of forgiveness as difficult as that way is all too often, in fact, all of the time. Forgiveness is akin to being crucified: it is painful but it is the only way to go.

WE MAKE OUR HEARTS HARD

No one likes to suffer. Pain hurts. To deny that truth is to live in another world. There are degrees of hurt, of pain. We know that. There are also different kinds of pain. The pain from a broken leg is different from the pain of a broken heart. Both are painful. The degree of pain and how one endures that pain is different, also, according to the one who is suffering.

Some are better than others in dealing with pain. Some people have a higher threshold for pain than others, but a higher threshold does not mean no threshold. Pain is pain, suffering is suffering, and no one escapes either in this life in this world. Jesus did not. Neither do we. One can debate why one has to suffer at all given our faith in and all-good and all-powerful and all-loving God. But that is another matter for another time.

In the meantime, suffering and pain are the lot of each and every one of us. How we deal with physical pain is one matter. Therapists of every kind have ways to help us do so, some better than others. Mind-over-matter often helps. Medication can help even more. What both do is mask the pain making it easier for us to function. But the pain is still there and it is felt if the mind rests or the medication wears off.

Often, however, the greater pain is not the physical. It is the mental suffering that stops us dead in our tracks. It is the suffering without physical pain that sometimes overwhelms us. It is the suffering, the pain, that is inflicted upon us by another, by circumstances beyond our control, by something we did not do or simply by who we are that causes so much personal grief.

Persecution, the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, where we were born, our physical features – all these and more cause us pain and suffering because others deem them to be humiliating, debasing and degrading and then make that known to us by what they say and, even more, by the way they treat us. We see that every day in this world of ours by the way others are unjustly, unfairly and unlovingly treated simply because they are somehow different.

But we all are in one way or another. Yet what is important is how we respond to the other when our hearts and souls are hurt because of who we are and not because of something we have done. We can harden our hearts and souls and act accordingly, which will do nothing to transform the one who is hurting us and will not lessen our pain. Or we can soften our hearts and souls by forgiving their ignorance and acting accordingly. 

The truth is that when we harden our hearts, we only make the pain, our pain, worse. It is when and only when we soften our hearts, consider the source of the pain and forgive the ignorance and foolishness of the one or ones who are hurting us that we can find peace of mind. Even more, in the process of forgiving, we might convert the one who has hurt us. Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross of those unjustly inflicting on him both physical and mental anguish is our example. Jesus could not die with a self-hardened heart. We cannot live with one. As with Jesus, so with us: the choice is always ours.