I’ve spoken to a number
of people recently who have articulated to me in different ways the same conviction:
that they wish they’d been more grateful for certain things before the
pandemic. That there were things they’d taken for granted that they promised
themselves they would never take for granted again. And my reaction to all of
that is… complicated. In some ways it isn’t. I think gratitude is a wonderful
thing, of course. It’s an act of justice towards God, the giver of all good things,
and towards people of good will who when they cooperate with God’s generosity. Being
grateful for what we have can keep us from being proud over what we have, or
jealous of what others have, and can make it easier to be generous with what we
have. The reason that my reaction to
this impulse is complicated isn’t that I think gratitude is unimportant, and
more that I know how hard it is.
I remember
one time in Haiti. I was only in Haiti for less than two weeks, but there was a
lot I found hard about being there. There was the existential hardness of
coming face to face with poverty, disease, natural disaster, and amazing faith
and joy and hospitality; there was the physical hardness of long days in high
heat. But a week into our time, it was Sunday afternoon, and we had some free
time, and we found some shade, and someone brought out some ice cream. I had
never been so grateful for ice cream. At that moment, gratitude was really easy.
And I made myself that same promise, that I would recommit to always being that
grateful. But in air-conditioned Miami airport on our journey back, waiting for
the connecting flight back to Chicago, there was a somewhat unusually long line
for something (something that would have been inaccessible even to us,
incredibly privileged visitors, to Haiti), and I wasn’t grateful; I was
frustrated. It didn’t take long to forget.
Gratitude
is hard. Gratitude is hard, at least in part, because memory is hard. In our
first reading, we heard Moses trying to stir up the people’s memories and engender
gratitude. He tells them remember, remember what God has led you out of,
remember how God has fed you. When God led his people out of Egypt, when they
walked through the dry sea, when he made the sea turn back from them, then it
was easy to be grateful. It would have been harder not to have been. The
Israelites started singing and banging tambourines and praising. But that didn’t
last. Not because they forgot in the sense that they couldn’t have narrated it
if you asked them about, but because the memory wasn’t sufficiently alive in
their hearts. When the manna first came, they were similarly amazed and
awestruck and grateful and full of praise. But then they got bored with manna.
And they started to complain. Remember, Moses tells them. Remember what God has
led you out of. Remember how God has fed you.
But it’s
easy to forget ordinary food. It’s easy even to forget the sea being held back.
So, God gives us more. God feeds us not just with bread from heaven, but with
his very flesh, Our Lord Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity. A gift,
not frail and forgetful like ourselves, but godly. Robustly godly, which means
strong enough to break for us, to be poured out, and to transform us. And God
keeps doing that. The ultimate gift of self, the ultimate arms open wide, the
ultimate “I love you more than life itself,” the cross on Calvary, is
re-presented to us at each and every Mass. We call the Mass “Eucharist,” from
the Greek word for Thanksgiving, because that’s part of what God induces in us through
this re-presentation of the greatest gift ever, where the giver is the gift. God
keeps on feeding us. And God keeps on leading us out of slavery, even when we
complain and want to go back there, because this pilgrimage is getting
tiresome; the wait is too long. God keeps on feeding us, because we forget. And
in that feeding, God keeps on leading us, out of selfishness or pride or
jealousy, into generosity, into being able to love like he loves.
Let’s
return to that speech of Moses. One fascinating thing about it is that for some
of the things that Moses asks the people to remember, most of them weren’t born
they happened. This is forty years after the Exodus. Most of them were never in
Egypt. But Moses still says, “Remember. Remember how God led you out of Egypt.”
That call to remember is a profound call to solidarity, to being able to say
that “God led us out of Egypt” when, more literally, it was our parents.
It’s being able to say that God’s saving action is always for us, even if it happened
before we were born. It’s recognizing our profound interconnectedness and letting
ourselves be moved to gratitude because of what God has done for another.
In Christ,
God breaks that we may be made whole. God consented to know isolation and
abandonment on the cross that we might know his profound accompaniment and that
we might be wrought anew into one human family, one pilgrim people, being led
to love, as we’re fed by love. And this love, as backwards as it seems,
sometimes leads us to physically separate from one another right now, for
safety, as an act of generosity. And this love leads us to be willing to listen
to and learn from those who still feel trapped and say, “let’s walk together to
freedom. Let’s walk together because that’s where God is leading.” Remember.
Remember that God acts to set us free, to feed us, to lead us. Disease will not
have the final word. Racism will not have the final word. Evil, oppression,
division will not have the final word. Remember. God keeps on feeding us and, thereby, leading us into love. And, for that, thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment