BEN : Gratitude is something . . . .

Gratitude is something I am only beginning to learn. When I was young, I was told so often that my life was my own that I believed what they told me and told myself the same thing. “Everything is within your power. Success is in your hands. Failure is your responsibility.” Such a mantra left little room for grace.

I, too, have reflected on the words we have shared when we are together, the words we have pounded out on this blog, the words we have sent to each other on those portable computers we carry in our pockets. I am still thrilled that anyone might be encouraged or, even better, find themselves in the words we have shared. It reminds me that this is not so much a skill we are mastering as it is a gift we are receiving, this ability to occasionally transcend time and space and connect with each other in the midst of our humanity.

I began to learn to be grateful when things began to happen in my life that were so fragile that if it had been up to me, I'm sure I would have messed it up. Things like the birth of our baby boy (now 3 years-old), the gift of marriage to the possible reincarnation of Mother Teresa (if you lived with me you'd understand why she must be one of God's special saints), the discovery of an ability to write words and sentences and paragraphs that people want to read, and the moments here and there when people tell me that something I have done or said or written has inspired them in some way.

Looking back from the lofty perspective of the ripe old age of 29, I can already see the “slender threads” Robert A. Johnson talked about. Even when I was convinced that my destiny or fate or future — whatever your word — was completely in my own hands, the One Who called me into existence was actually shaping me for something else, something so strikingly ordinary I might have overlooked it were it not for a few people, a few special ones who taught me that it is in the ordinary in this world that one most often finds the Holy.

And there is no other appropriate response in the presence of such Holy things than gratitude. Everything I am and everything I am becoming is a gift from above. My calling is to keep saying “yes.”

Since we seem to be ending with prayers lately, here is one from Thomas Merton. It is becoming my own prayer these days.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always. Amen.