Thank God!

          A few years ago, Peggy asked to meet with me.  Life had taken a bad turn, and she needed to talk.  When we got together later that day, Peggy explained what was going on and told me how mad she was at God.  With anger in her voice, Peggy recalled how her family faithfully attends Mass every Sunday, sings in the choir, and volunteers in several church ministries.  “What more do we need to do?” she shouted.  “Where is God now when we really need him?  I feel like God just left us to deal with all of this alone.”  Pausing to dab a tear from her eye, Peggy sighed and said, “Well, thank God we have our friends.  They haven’t left us.  They’ve been so good to us during all of this, bringing us food, driving us to doctors and spending time with us.”  After a moment of awkward silence, Peggy turned to me for my response.  I said, “Thank God, indeed.  Who do you think sent them?”

I feel so blessed to live in a country that sets aside a day to give thanks.  There’s no shortage of things to lament about in our lives, so it’s especially important to take a moment to focus on what we’re grateful for.  Gratitude isn’t just saying thank you every once in a while.  Gratitude is having a positive attitude about a benefit we’ve received.  It’s an immediate, crystal clear sense of how fortunate we are.  As jazz great Lionel Hampton once said, “[g]ratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.”

You know, there’s a reason why the word thanks, thanksgiving and related words appear in the Bible over 150 times[1] – gratitude is downright good for us!   Studies have shown that people who express gratitude experience deeper levels of happiness, fulfillment and well-being.  Gratitude reminds us of the positive things in our lives.  Every time we’re grateful, we relive the benefit we received over and over again.  Gratitude helps us discover the good that always seems to arise out of bad and reminds us of what’s important in life. 

The key to experiencing the benefits of gratitude is making the conscious choice to be grateful.  It’s all too easy to cling to the negative things in our lives because to some extent we find a little comfort in them.  A “woe-is-me” attitude often attracts the sympathy and attention we seek.  But after a while, that attitude gets old.  Like the Saturday Night Live skit, people ultimately run away from the Debbie Downers in our lives.  It’s a survival instinct.  Grateful people, by contrast, have the opposite effect.  We flock to them and can’t let them go.  Grateful people bring God’s blessing and grace into our lives, and when we’re grateful, we do the same for others.  When we’re grateful, people want, no, need to be around us.

Choosing to live a grateful life begins and ends with God.  All good things come from God – our lives, our family, our friends and everything we need to live a happy life – so we owe God our unending gratitude.  As the German theologian Meister Eckhart so aptly put it, “If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”  I’ve personally found that beginning my day with a small prayer of gratitude – usually as simple as, “Thank you!” – is just what I need to face life’s challenges armed with a glass that’s at least half full.  And I’m a happier person for it, because “[y]ou cannot be simultaneously grateful and unhappy.”[2]

That’s what happened to Peggy.  On hearing my words, Peggy froze and stared at me intently.  I didn’t know if she were going to slap me or hug me.  Slowly, a wry smile graced the corners of her mouth like a phoenix rising from the ashes.  She said, “I guess you’re right.  God hasn’t left us after all.  Thank God!”

Happy Thanksgiving!

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[1] Robert Emmons, Thanks!:  How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) at 95.

[2] William J. Byron, S.J., “Gratitude, the Most Essential Virtue,” The Catholic Spirit (April 10, 2014) at 20.

Persevere in Faith - A Homily for the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

In the classic novel, The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, the worldly-wise old demon named Screwtape writes letters of advice to his nephew, a novice demon named Wormwood.  Wormwood is charged with securing the damnation of a particular young man’s soul.  In one letter, Screwtape warns his nephew that the Satan’s cause is never more in danger than when a human, who no longer has the desire to do God’s will, still obeys God even when he finds no trace of God in the universe.[1]  This perseverance in faith that’s so frightening to Screwtape, is exactly what Jesus is calling us to do in today’s readings.

Today’s readings are tough.  Wars, earthquakes, famine, plagues – these signs mentioned by Jesus have been observed in every age since Jesus walked the earth.  We even see people carrying signs demanding our repentance because the end is near.  But Jesus was right:  all of these things have occurred, but the end hasn’t come yet.  It was tempting to come up here and give a fire and brimstone homily, but that would miss the point entirely. Jesus’ message isn’t about damnation and death; it’s about salvation and life. 

In our Gospel, we find Jesus in the Temple for the last time.  It’s the end of his teaching ministry.  He has spent the last three years preaching about the Father’s Kingdom, and teaching us, by word and example, how to live the Kingdom here and now.  And his last lesson, the words we hear today, is to persevere no matter what.  Jesus isn’t trying to frighten us – he’s warning us of events, some of them horrific, that might distract us from living the way he taught us to live.  He’s encouraging our unyielding faith by assuring us of two things:  first, that he will be with us throughout the trying times; and second, that salvation is the reward for our perseverance in faith.  All we have to do is live in faith to the end. 

A few months ago we were reminded of a wonderful example of this unyielding faith with the canonization Saint Teresa of Calcutta.  Mother Teresa was hailed in her lifetime as a “living saint” for her tireless charitable work for the poor and the dying.  But only after her death did we begin to learn exactly how difficult her life was.  She was very ill through much of her adult life.  She was harshly criticized for the conditions of the hospitals and orphanages she ran and for not using enough of the money she raised to improve their conditions.  She was even criticized for baptizing the dying.  And in recent years, we’ve learned that for some 30 to 40 years, she suffered the “dark night of the soul”– she experienced a spiritual emptiness, a feeling that God had abandoned her.  Not long after she heard the voice of God calling her to her ministry of charity, not long after she experienced the ecstatic joy of having found her true vocation, Mother Teresa sank into a world from which God had appeared to have vanished.  She even questioned the existence of God. 

This spiritual darkness, this profound sense of absence, continued for the rest of her life.  For forty years she felt like God had abandoned her.  So what did she do?  She pursued her new calling anyway.  She kept on ministering to the poor and to the dying.  She built hospitals, hospices and orphanages.  She lived the life that Jesus taught us to live.  In her time of emptiness, faced with squalid conditions, extreme poverty and harsh criticism, she persevered in faith when she had no sense that there was anything to have faith in.  By doing so, she became the greatest threat to Satan’s cause, and she made the world a little better. 

I admit that I struggle with today’s readings.  Life can be very difficult, and it’s easy to give up under the weight of life’s tragedies and the emptiness we all feel from time to time.  I also know that our brutal election cycle has left many people feeling bitter, frightened and anxious about the future of our country and the world.  But our response to these challenges shouldn’t be to retreat into our own sullenness, to gloat or to lash out at others and certainly not to incite violence against our neighbor.  What good does any of that do?  Our response should be to persevere in faith.  If we truly want a better world, if we want to experience the Kingdom of God here on earth, we have to push through the tough times and live as Jesus taught us:  we need to live each moment as if the Kingdom of God were at hand.  We should greet our neighbors with a smile and a helping hand, without regard to their immigration status or for whom they voted.  We should clothe the naked feed the poor, give shelter to the homeless, and visit the sick and imprisoned.  We should respect and honor the God-given dignity of every human being, even when their opinions differ from ours.  Sound familiar?  That’s Jesus’ message in a nutshell. 

Now I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m no Mother Teresa, but she didn’t think she was either, and look what she accomplished.   Just think of the good we all can achieve if we simply persevere in faith.  If we live our lives in faith to the end, we will make the world kinder, gentler and safer.  More importantly we’ll earn the gift of everlasting life.  If we persevere in faith, we’ll be Screwtape’s worst nightmare.

 Readings:  Malachi 3: 19-21a; Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-12; Luke 21: 5-19

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[1]C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001) 40.