More on Gratitude

This week, we welcomed yet another child into our family. Christopher's safe arrival was an occasion for joy, thanksgiving, and secret relief that all went well. For human beings are notoriously fragile, especially newborns, and each year they not only survive, but actually grow and flourish, is thus a kind of miracle.

Yet behind healthy, happy children stand adults who have devoted themselves to the cause. They have worked hard and unselfishly to provide the necessities of life for their children. They have set aside their own private hopes and dreams, sometimes for decades, in order to nurture the next generation. Their commitment is all-encompassing, and their courage profound.

Thank heavens, I thought, that my grandchildren have parents like these! Yet as I gazed down at beautiful little Christopher, asleep in the crook of his exhausted mother's arm, I found myself having to accept an additional truth, one that flies in the face of contemporary wisdom about what constitutes good parenting. When God tells us to honor our fathers and our mothers, he is asking us to acknowledge the monumental sacrifice that any parent--good, adequate, or barely sufficient--must make in order that a child might grow. According to his commandment, it does not matter whether we at the same time receive those blessings that psychology insists are mandatory for human flourishing: affirmation, encouragement, unconditional love. It is enough, God says in this difficult commandment, that someone takes on the burden of providing for our physical needs--that someone cares enough to get us through. Our obligation in return is gratitude in the form of everlasting respect for those who bring us into the world and who (however ineptly, and with whatever lack of skill or tact) enable us to survive and grow.

Though this insight made me uncomfortable (I was nearly forty before I could forgive my own hardworking, committed parents for all the "necessities" I was convinced they'd failed to provide), it was also a relief to have the obligation of gratitude spelled out in such simple and straightforward terms. Parents do not have to "earn" their children's gratitude; babies arrive in the world with this debt on their shoulders. And it is likewise in our relationship with God, our heavenly Father, who not only knits us together in our mother's womb, but breathes into us the very breath of life, and whose creation provides for us the means of growth and flourishing. Our thanksgiving, worship and praise are rooted in this most basic truth: without God, we would not exist. Every other good thing that comes our way is simply added blessing.

Gratitude is thus a necessary aspect of our spiritual identity. When we fail to grasp this reality, our vision becomes narrow and skewed, for all we can see is what we want and do not have. Instead of joy that God has promised us, we feel resentment and bitterness. The goal of the contemplative life, however, is true seeing, which begins with continual thanksgiving. The childlike lightheartedness and joy of holy people is a reflection of this unshakable gratitude.

Contemplation, in Place

Every so often I'm contacted by readers who suggest (politely, but pointedly) that it's all well and good to pontificate about time-consuming spiritual disciplines when your kids are grown and gone and you no longer have an 8:00-5:00 job, but what about people in the real world? The implication being that normal life automatically precludes spiritual luxuries like the kind I write about and, worse, people who do enter the contemplative path must be part of a privileged elite. Having raised four kids--two of my own, and (on a part-time basis) two step-daughters- I do understand the objection. Before everyone grew up and moved on, before I could quit full-time teaching, my spiritual path was often characterized by frustration, even grief. I loved my family and my students, but I secretly longed for silence and solitude. How could a person even pray in the midst of such chaos?

Thus, when our oldest daughter and her husband and two-year old Eli relocated to California and joined our household last month, I wondered: would those skeptical readers of mine be proven right after all? Would the re-entry of a super-cute but demanding little person into our peaceful world change everything?

I must admit, I've been privately waiting for signs of that old frustration to arise, the long-ago fear that if I didn't regularly escape the boisterous family compound, I'd fly into a million pieces. But so far, all is calm, all is bright. What's going on?

I found a clue in a new book out from Ave Maria Press, Compassionate Fire: The Collected Letters of Thomas Merton and Catherine de Hueck Doherty. One was a world-famous hermit, and the other, the matriarch of a large network of intentional spiritual communities. The physical circumstances of their lives could not have been more different: his way of life was rooted in the legacy of St. Antony of the Desert, and her spiritual ancestor was more like the ever-active Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. Yet in the dialogue between them lay the confirmation I was seeking: the contemplative life is not confined to the monastery, and never has been. I should have known this before, back when the kids were young and my students swarmed around me like bees. But I didn't; I couldn't help but think back then that physical circumstances were all, and mine were not conducive to a serious life of prayer.

Since those hectic days, however, I have found, praise God, what I was so ardently seeking. Most importantly, I've come to realize that a change in surface conditions cannot disturb what lies beneath. To live contemplatively means to live where we are--and to see God's hand in all of it. In this state of being, the inexhaustible exuberance of a two-year-old leads not to stress and weariness, but rather praise and thanksgiving, and family cacaphony becomes song.

Lauds

Last week sometime, the spring hatch began. Within a matter of hours, flies arrived in the chicken coop, spiders materialized in the bathroom, fleas invaded the winter coats of our dogs and cats, and mosquitoes came humming off the pond. Most dramatically, three of our hives split and swarmed within minutes of one another--huge buzzing masses of bees, circling gyroscopically over the fava beans, then settling in the nearby oaks and forming thick, protective clusters around their new queens. Before evening, migrating blue birds, goldfinches, and red-shafted flickers had zoomed in for the feast.

When I stopped to think about the event we'd just witnessed, I found myself astonished--first, at the sheer numbers involved, then at the intricate timing and coordination required to make it happen, and finally at the realization that such phenomena are commonplace in the natural world. This daily astonishment at the munificence of God is what inspires Lauds, I think.

"The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with your joy," sings the Psalmist. "You care for the earth, give it water; you fill it with riches. Your river in heaven brims over to provide its grain. And thus you provide for the earth; you drench its furrows; you level it, soften it with showers, you bless its growth. You crown the year with your goodness. Abundance flows in your steps; in the pastures of the wilderness it flows" (Psalm 64).

My theory is that the simple act of noticing what goes on, even at the level of the insects, irresistibly leads to thanksgiving and praise: Lauds.