Once upon a time there was a farmer who thought the price of feed was getting too high. He decided to do something about it. One of his neighbors asked him how it was going. “Well,” the farmer said, “I just about had trained my horse not to eat anything when he up and died on me.” Church, there are certain things you have to do. You have to eat. You have to breathe. You have to sleep. These are necessities. If you can’t do them, you will die. The spiritual life is like that as well. There are certain necessities that must be done or you will die spiritually. However, this business of necessity is a little more complicated than it appears at first glance. For example, it is necessary to eat. We all know that. But it is also necessary to eat the right things. If you ate chocolate cake everyday because you like it pretty soon you’d get sick. That’s why mother always told you to eat your greens. Not just eating, but eating well is what’s necessary. It is necessary not simply to breathe but to breathe clean air. The pollution, the industrial waste, the chemical soup poured into our atmosphere has undoubtedly impacted the quality of the air we breathe. We must have clean air to breathe. So even in the necessities of life there are certain pre-requisites that must be present in order for human life to flourish. The same is true in the spiritual life. We not only need to pray, but we need to pray well in order to flourish.
St. Luke’s account of the healing of ten lepers by Jesus illustrates the most necessary prayer: gratitude. At first glance, giving thanks might seem like an addition, a bonus, a good thing to have but more like icing on the cake than meat and potatoes. And that might be true in the work-a-day world. As a matter of fact, in the daily circumstances of life, all too often the efforts we make are unacknowledged and unappreciated. Wouldn’t it be a great day if we remembered to thank Erin for her prayerful guidance, if we thanked Darren for all of his efforts keeping our church in good order, if we thanked Mary Ann for organizing our hospitality. A great day, yes. A good thing to do, certainly, but it is not necessary. The generous don’t do the things they do in order to be appreciated and noticed but because it is their way of using their time and talent in the building up of the kingdom of God on earth. So gratitude in the realm of human interaction is a good and beautiful thing but not a necessary thing. It is not so in the spiritual life. In the spiritual life gratitude is necessary. In the spiritual life if we don’t give thanks, we will wither up and die. Look at the encounter between Jesus and the lepers.
In the story the ten have a seemingly chance encounter with Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. They take this serendipity as the occasion to ask for something. “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” Jesus then sends them off seemingly unanswered. On the way, they realize they are healed and one of the ten, and not the one you might expect, returns and gives thanks to God. Then the pronouncement by Jesus, “Your faith has saved you.” I suspect that the ten lepers weren’t grateful about their condition. But they still needed to give thanks, as we all do in our particular dreadful condition, for the blessing of the day. In fact, a seemingly random meeting was the occasion for grace. We must be grateful for the people God sends our way. We give thanks for the providence of our everyday life when God surprises us with something new instead of the same old, same old. And, we need to give thanks for the symbols and structures that speak of God. Jesus sends them to the priests as a reminder that fidelity to our religious practices provides God the opportunity to gift us at a time we least expect. Finally we give thanks for saving faith. Jesus wants the leper, and us, to be grateful that we have the gift of faith which provides us the blessed assurance that all will be well.
For Catholics, giving thanks is at the heart of our worship of God. The word Eucharist, which is the term for our worship service, is a Greek word meaning “thanksgiving.” In other words, we are at our very heart a thanksgiving people. We have to give thanks because we have a God who has given us the sun to warm us, the sea to wash us, the wind to cool us. We have to give thanks because God woke us up this morning and started us on our way. We have to give thanks because the Son of God shared a human life so that we might share a divine life. We have to give thanks because God has given us brothers and sisters to forgive and be forgiven by. We have to give thanks for God is good, all the time.
