This month begins with a celebration of saints and saintliness and concludes with a celebration of both all that we have for which we can be thankful and the phenomenon of thankfulness itself. This month also marks the end of one liturgical year and the beginning of the next. The convergence of all these events reminds us of a basic truth of Christian life: relationship with God is oriented around gratitude. Thankfulness toward God for all that makes up our lives is the guide to and the product of being saintly.
“The original sin of Adam and Eve, the prototype of all sin, is presented as a failure to be receptive and grateful.” So writes theologian and author Ronald Rolheiser in his recent book, The Shattered Lantern: rediscovering a felt presence of God. He explains: “God makes Adam and Eve and places them in the garden and showers them goodness and life. They are given gift beyond measure and are promised that life will continue in this rich and good way on one condition – they are not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.” He goes on, “The condition God places on them is not an arbitrary or petty test…God has told Adam and Eve that they may receive life as gift, but they may not take life as if it were theirs by right.”
It’s important to note that there is nothing in any of this about being perfect, without flaw, without sin. There is only a call not to be without repentance, i.e. to turn back to God with gratefulness that God is here to be turned back to. A saint is not someone who is morally or religiously ‘better’ than the rest of us. If anything, a saint is someone who would reject such comparison. Rather, a saint is someone set apart by God and for God, and who consciously embraces such a state of being.
Our time in history and the general culture in which we live don’t respect, much less revere, saintliness by this definition. More commonly, society tends to look for exaggerated examples of self-imposed poverty or selfless generosity; examples so extreme that people can find them inspiring of their awe, but also , once their need for inspiration has subsided, can set them aside as impossible to emulate in their own lives because of the very fact of their extremity. It is true that God calls some people to expressions of saintliness that the rest of us will perceive as extreme. It is equally true, and more importantly so, that God calls all of us to saintliness, i.e., to inviting God and allowing God to set us apart for relationship with God; and
that said saintliness is most often experienced not in the extreme, but in the ordinary and the mundane. In the ordinary events of life, the advantageous and the hurtful, God is speaking to us. And for this alone, if nothing else, we may rightly cultivate within ourselves a practice of thankfulness to God.
Rolheiser writes, “To have a sense of God’s presence in everyday life, we don’t need the kind of [extreme events] that drastically change ordinary reality. No. We need a deeper sense that God is already present and acting in the seemingly ordinary events of our lives….When we find a penny on the street, then we need to feel that God is blessing us.”
To awaken spiritually to God’s love for oneself and to one’s love for God finds the new Christian often overflowing with joy and effusive with gratitude. You may have experienced this in your life; you may be experiencing it now. Then, over time, the maturing Christian meets life’s events and finds that these can still be both hurtful and advantageous. And the maturing Christian comes to realize that the endpoint for the Christian life, the life set apart for God, is the constant renewal through practice of one’s continuing thankfulness to God. Thankfulness is characteristic of both the beginning and the fulfillment of saintliness.
Not to be confused with adopting ‘an attitude of gratitude’ or with ‘the power of positive thinking,’ the practice of thankfulness in Christian saintliness is not an act of personal willpower. It is more an act of surrendering to God, of allowing God to show us what there is for which we may be rightly thankful. And what it is that God shows us and enable us to be thankful for will often exceed our own imagination and strength of will.
I think God is inviting you and me to interpret this November as a month-long reminder of the inherent connection between our love and gratitude for all the saints whom we have loved and lost and one day will rejoin, and the thankfulness that we have felt for them and for all the blessings of our lives; and thus of the deeper connection between our own on-going sainthood and its expression in our thankfulness to God who meets us in every great beginning, at every wonderful end, and in all the ordinary sacred moments in between.
God’s Peace. Jim +
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