USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #45

 

 

EVERY DAY SHOULD BE A DAY OF GIVING THANKS

Ten lepers were cleansed, but only one

of them returned to thank Jesus.

Luke 17: 11-19

The opposite of “feelings of gratitude” are “feelings of entitlement.”  Over the years, many parents have resonated with this famous sad line from Shakespeare’s King Lear, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

Some programs start out as a way to help people, but sometimes end up leaving people with a sense of entitlement, a feeling that those services are actually owed to them.  Many recent studies say that narcissism and a sense of entitlement has risen significantly higher in our country in recent years.  Even Time Magazine named the word “ME” as the “person of the year” back in 2006. Entitlement is the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment. People with a sense of entitlement see no need to say “thank you” because they have come to believe that they deserve to be taken care of and have things given to them.

When I worked in the seminary, I learned that even a few seminarians, after being “taken care of” throughout their seminary years, sometimes leave the seminary with attitudes of “entitlement,” feelings of deserving special treatment especially since they will be priests during a time of priest shortages. In my transition-out-of-the-seminary class, I spent one whole class teaching them to say "thank you." I reminded them to thank their seminary teachers, the many people in their dioceses who financially supported them, their vocation directors and even the seminary kitchen workers and janitors before they left. Sadly, many of them had never even thought about doing that before I mentioned it to them. I always began that specific class with a bit of cowboy wisdom, “When you get to where you are going, take care of the horse you rode in on!” One glaring symptom of our culture may be that growing sense of entitlement. When I “googled” the phrase “you deserve it,” I found no less than 322,000,000 sites!    

In the gospel today, Jesus heals ten desperate lepers, nine were Jews and one was a foreigner, but only one of the ten returned to say “thank you” and he was the foreigner!  Why?  Did the Jewish lepers think it was merely Jesus’ job, as a fellow Jew, to heal people? Did they think, “Why should I thank him for doing what he is supposed to do?”  This story reminds me that our sense of entitlement may even include God! Have we grown to believe that it’s God's job to take care of us because somehow we “deserve it?” Why are we so ready to be mad at God when things go wrong and yet never think of God when things go right, much less offer our thanks?  As a priest, I get pulled into situations all the time where people are angry at God for this or that disappointment, but I can't remember having many people call me to tell me the wonderful things God has done for them! 

Entitlement is an attitude that “life owes me something,” or “other people owe me something” or “God owes me something.” Our culture is constantly barraging us with messages that feed those feelings of entitlement starting when we are babies.  Back windows of mini-vans used to announce “baby on board.” Kindergartners were taught to sing, “I’m special.” McDonald’s built an entire campaign around the slogan “You deserve a break today.” Another company proclaimed “Pamper yourself with Calgon!” Another ad campaign told us “You owe it to yourself to buy a Mercedes Benz.”  Clairol told us to change our hair color, because “you are worth it.”

We are even conditioned by the Bill of Rights, which focuses on our entitlements. We may have a right to the pursuit of happiness, but we actually have no "rights" to happiness itself! The Ten Commandments, on the other hand, focus on our responsibilities and obligations. Demanding our rights, while shirking our responsibilities, is always a recipe for losing our so-called “rights.”  

When we feel entitled, gratitude is impossible because we believe that things are owed to us. If you’re like me and really sit down and think about it, we would probably have a whole list of things we feel entitled to, and when we don’t get them, we feel cheated.  

If we start believing that a favorable turn of events in life is owed to us, and then when things don’t turn out favorably, we feel angry, resentful or frustrated. We begin feeling we have been ripped-off and cheated out of what we deserve. In reality, entitlement is a lie, a perversion of the truth. The truth is life owes us nothing and everything is a gift.  When I was designing my tombstone, which is in place and ready, I took that reality into account. That's why it says at the top, "Simply Amazed - Forever Grateful." 

Gratitude is the only response to the realization that everything in life is a gift. We deserve nothing. Ultimately, everything is a gift.  So, saying thank you is more than good manners. It’s good spirituality. “Thank you” is the simplest and most powerful prayer a person can say.

Why are we Catholics, who are so blessed in so many ways, not beating down the doors of our churches to give thanks to God every weekend end? We have every reason to be grateful because we have come so far! Being Catholic wasn’t even legal in the early days of this country. Many of our great, great grandparents were uneducated, dirt-poor immigrants from equally poor Catholic countries who endured persecution. We, their ancestors, have so often forgotten to be thankful for how far we have come because of their sacrifices! 

The Church calls us together each weekend to celebrate the Eucharist. The word eucharist means to give thanks. Why is there not a rush to offer thanks within our parish communities? Could part of it be that we have come to believe that everything we have is something we earned and we are therefore entitled to it?  Could part of the drop in Mass attendance be about a sense of entitlement? Maybe if we were to discover once again that everything we have is on loan, maybe we would again be compelled to gather in great numbers with other “Eucharistic” people, people who need to express their gratitude, on a weekly basis. “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” (William Arthur Ward)      

Challenged by the nine no-show lepers in the gospel today, let’s all take a good hard look at our lives and everything in them and remember that it’s all a gift! Let’s resolve today and every day to be that one cured leper who bothered to return and give thanks.

When I was in the seminary from age 14-26, I was always wanting to give my mother something but never had the money. Looking back, what I gave her was what she needed most and that was my attention and appreciation. I liked to make her laugh, be with her and dream with her about “what I was going to do for her someday when I was ordained and had some money.”

Lacking money, I gave her time and attention. During breaks from the seminary, we would stay up late at night just talking. She never complained, but I always wondered if she didn’t often feel that people were more interested in what she could do for them than what they could do for her. I have no regrets now that she is gone. I couldn't give her lavish gifts, but I am proud to say that I expressed my appreciation for her freely and often.   

That's exactly what we need to do each day - say "thank you" to God the source of everything we have! As the spiritual teacher Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is "thank you," it will be enough!"

THE TRUTH ABOUT GRATITUDE

 AS WE APPROACH A DAY OF THANKSGIVING

A DIFFERENT KIND OF KING FOR SURE

  

"My kingdom does not belong to this world. My kingdom is not here."

John 18:33b-37

Surely, you have heard the expression “God’s ways are not our ways!” It means that God thinks differently from the way we human beings think and God does things differently from the way human beings do them.  We see the most dramatic example of just how differently God thinks in today’s feast of Christ the King.  Christ our King is presented to us, stripped and naked on a cross, dying in agony between two common criminals, spit running down his face, a sarcastic note nailed above his head, a “crown” of thorns mockingly hammered into the blood-matted hair of his head for all passers-by to laugh at!  Now that’s not exactly how we picture royalty! We are used to seeing kings powerful, pampered and pompous!  Our King is different, very different!  “He bore our infirmities.  He endured our sufferings. He was pierced for our offenses. He was crushed for our sins.”

Showing up as this kind of “king” is so typical of God.  He has always done this kind of shocking thing!  Centuries ago, when God began to prepare a people from whom he would send a savior, he chose Abraham and Sara, two childless senior citizens ready for the grave!  After choosing this people as "his" people, they end up enslaved in a foreign country.  Even when they are led out of slavery, God picks a man with a speech impediment to lead them. Even his messengers, the prophets, were, more often than not, hesitant, even whiny, sometimes. One had a dirty mouth. One tried to beg off as being too young and inexperienced. Another tried to run and had to be swallowed and spit out on the beach and told to go Nineveh. Their most famous and beloved king, David, was a murderous bigamist!  Even when the birth of the Savior of the world came, he was born not from among the rich and educated, not at a state-of-the-arts birthing center with the best of doctors, but in a barn, to an unknown teen-ager, pregnant before marriage, away from home, after riding for miles on donkey back! God just keeps going and going!  Even before Jesus’ birth, Mary predicted that God’s ways would not be our ways. “The rich will be pulled from their thrones and the poor will be lifted up from their manure heaps.”

Again, in his ministry, we see that God’s ways are not our ways. Jesus was a layman, not a clergyman. He was kicked out of the synagogue, rejected and hounded by the religious establishment. His closest companions were a personnel department’s nightmare: a hated tax collector, a liar, two mama’s babies, an agnostic, a former terrorist, and a petty thief, to name a few!  His closest friends were a motley collection of marginal types: prostitutes, lepers, the un-churched, women and children, the dirt poor, the least, the lost and the losers. The gossip about him was that he “welcomed sinners and ate with them,” helping him earn the nick names of “glutton and drunkard.”  That’s certainly not what most people expect of God! Even his final “big entry” into Jerusalem was not in a gleaming chariot with white horses or on a golden throne carried by slaves. No, he deliberately makes his big entry riding on the back of a jackass!

No wonder most people missed this king. They were looking in the wrong direction. They thought they knew how God would act. They thought he would act as they would act.  As one preacher put it years ago, “In the beginning, God created us in his own image and likeness and ever since we have been trying to create God in our own image and likeness!” Instead of thinking as God thinks, we try to make God think the way we think. No wonder we experience God as absent, more than present, in our lives! We keep trying to make God reasonable, we keep looking for God among the rich, the beautiful, the self-righteous and the powerful!  No wonder Christianity is dead in countries where power, prestige and money are prized, but alive and well and growing in countries where the poor, the powerless and the suffering live. The latter understand how God thinks!  The former is still trying to get God to think as they think! The rich and powerful and beautiful and so-called smart people think they can do without God. The poor and powerless know that they need God! 

One the most common ways we do not think as God thinks is when we think that God is absent when things go wrong and present only when things go right.  Looking back over my own life, I can say with confidence that it was during those times that God seemed most absent is when God was actually most active! I could not see it at the time, but it is crystal clear from hindsight! (1) As I look back over my life, especially over a very painful childhood lived out in an atmosphere of regular psychological abuse, I am amazed at my own survival. It was painful and I would not want to go through it again, but I have come to realize that God was certainly using it to prepare me for helping hundreds of others as a priest, especially the marginalized, the rejected and left-out.  I can say with certainty that that experience, and the triumph over it, has helped my effectiveness as a priest in helping them more than any other thing! (2) When I was sent to the home missions right after ordination, I certainly felt at the time that God seemed to have abandoned me. In reality, looking back, God was extremely active at that time in my life. God was preparing me for my life’s work as a preacher, as a "revitalizer" of parishes and as a person sensitive to religious prejudice. Looking back, I have realized over and over again, that that period of my life was preparing me for what I have been doing ever since!

On this Feast of Christ the King, a feast in honor of the king that is the reverse of how we think of kings, we are challenged to think differently about God. Its message is simple: God’s ways are not our ways, it is precisely when we feel God most absent, is when God is most present! So, I say to all of you who have things going on in your life that you don’t like, things that make you feel that God is absent, just wait! Trust God! I believe that you will someday realize that, even in times of loss and tragedy, God is very active.  Scriptures tell the story in a million ways: God’s ways are not our ways! Contrary to popular opinion, breakdown is a sure sign of a breakthrough, there is a crown on the other side of every cross, resurrection on the other side of death!   That heart attack may just wake you up to what’s really important! That relationship breakup may be the best thing that ever happened to you! That firing may just take you to the best job you ever had! That unexpected death may bring you closer to others!  Ugly ducklings today may just turn out to be swans tomorrow! Getting what you want may turn out to be your worst nightmare! That child that disappointed you most may just turn out to be the child that makes you most proud! That feeling of God being absent, may be the beginning of feeling closer to God than ever! Never ever underestimate the value of a so-called tragedy!  God’s ways are not our ways!