The Opposite of Faith is Ingratitude-Conversation with a Questioning Friend
/This time, in addition to our written blog, we’re also doing a video version, and the subject for this particular edition is: “The Opposite of Faith is Ingratitude.”
I was struck in this post-Thanksgiving season by the story of the ten lepers that yelled out to Jesus one day, and said, “Please help us!”
And in His response to them, He basically told them to go to the authorities to check out that they were going to be healthy, and on the way to that meeting, they all discovered that they suddenly were in full health. But only one of the ten broke away from the pack and was overwhelmed with gratitude to God and expressed himself as he journeyed back to the One who had provided his health. So, he arrives at Jesus and falls [at] His feet and offers great thanks. And Jesus is amazed that only one has returned. He said, “Where are the other nine?” And at the end of the conversation with the fellow, He says to him,” Your faith has made you well.”
Now, all ten were physically well - but this guy had a particular kind of wellness that really was the result of gratitude, and his ability to be overwhelmed by the gift of something that he hadn’t created himself, but he just had.
And it struck me that in our culture, we are so overly provided for on so many levels, that it is so easy to just assume that everything is our own creation. And we forget that gratitude to God is one of the foremost demonstrations of our faith. And the sense of entitlement, and the sort of disgruntlement that is going on in our culture is the result often of an inability to be able to be grateful.
“There seems to be an ongoing, pervasive… growth of negativity in our world - in us. Why is it that we don’t associate gratefulness with faith?”
I think for me, it just happened to be a confluence of things - because then, as I listened to that story, I was reminded of Jesus’ conversation at a Pharisee’s house, and He was having lunch, and a woman who had a terrible reputation wanders in and starts anointing Him with ointment, and fragrances, and washing His feet with her hair, and doing this very sensuous kind of expression of love and affection to Him. And the people look around with: “What in the world? Do you not know who this woman is?” And instead of responding to that immediately, He says to the Pharisee (whose name was Simon): “Simon, there was a man who was owed debts by two different people. One guy owed him 50 bucks and the other guy owed him 500 bucks. And because neither of them had the money to pay him back, he forgave them both. So - who was most grateful?” And [Simon] said, “The one who was forgiven the most.” And then He [Jesus] says, “Well, those who have been forgiven much, love much.”
And then He goes on to speak to the woman, and He says, “Your faith has made you whole.” And it wasn’t that she was forgiven because she did the gratitude thing - she somehow intuitively knew she was already forgiven, and so she was just overwhelmingly grateful - and it was like her gratitude had made her well.
And I think one of the things that has happened in our society is that we really do believe that we are entitled to a certain level of service, comfort, no problems - and if there is a problem, somebody should fix it for us. And so, we lose our capacity for wonder at even the smallest of things. A lot of times we say: Well, okay, you are overwhelmed by a sunset, or some great natural phenomenon - and that’s wonderful - but I think recapturing a sense of wonder at the fact that I am alive - at the fact that I believe that there is a God who loves me, that I am forgiven…
There is a prayer from a book by George McLeod - a collection of his prayers (the founder of the Iona Community) and it’s called “… of the Dance.” He writes:
Indeed it is right
What else can we do?
- Any time, any place -
Than feel uplifted and warmed
In our whole being, Father God.
What else can we do
Than feel grateful?
For we remember you, O Christ,
The Great Reality -
The Sun behind all suns -
You left Your royal throne,
Left the realm of Light
To enter our common paths
And grope for us in our darkness -
Just for us: common, sly, and prickly as we are -
To lift us, and soothe us, and make us clean.
We cannot put into words,
But we try to say with our lips
What we do believe in our hearts -
That we really are so grateful
That You were born in poverty, and not privilege,
And you jostled with evil and with filth
And never got contaminated…
And the prayer goes on at some length; but I think there is core there that we forget: that there is a God who has reached out to us in Jesus. And I love the phrase, “common, sly, and prickly as we are…” Because it’s very easy for me to assume that I am superior to everybody else. That my righteousness is fine, and yours isn’t. And so much of our political discourse, so much of our discourse in our culture is: I am right; you are wrong. And that doesn’t get us anywhere, because the reality is I have a lot of things for which I have been forgiven, I have a lot that I still need to be forgiven for; I am sly and prickly - and the fact that somehow God loves me, and still somehow allows me maybe to do the odd good thing with my life - this should be a cause of wonderment, and inspire me to fall down and say that I am so grateful that that’s the case. And so, it becomes an issue of perspective, because I can’t love if all I am concerned about is my own comfort. And I can’t love if I think that I am entitled to hold on to everything. And so, if I have been forgiven much, or if I have been given much, then theoretically the gratitude that is faith would then be the motivator to charity, to social justice, to caring for others, to (you know) - trying to reduce my prickliness.
“What do you say to someone who we would look at…and go: ‘Holy crap! I would be as ungrateful as any… I would be doubting there IS a God if I had your life!’ What do you say to those people?”
I am basically speaking to myself at the moment. That gratitude is something that I’ve got to discover, and I have to cultivate. It isn’t for me to preach to somebody else. I have dealt with a number of very serious stories over the past few months of loss and grief and ongoing sorrow, and so it’s not like I’m not unaware of the fact that there is a dark world out there. It’s also true that in my experience of the Third World, I have been overwhelmed by the capacity for people who seem to have nothing to be able to be grateful for the smallest of things. I am much more easily unsettled by discomfort than somebody there. And so, in many ways, it is not for me to say to them, it is for them to say to me: “You need to learn gratitude for what you’ve got.” I can still remember a number of years ago, I think it was 1980, I was going to Zambia and Zimbabwe to do some youth training, and we had an election going on at the time, and John Crosby, the great Newfoundland orator, had come to Orangeville, my home town, tub-thumping for the Tories. And basically, he wandered up and down the stage, yelling and screaming about what a horrible country Canada was - we were all going to hell in a hand cart - and within 24 hours, I was on the streets of Lusaka standing outside a general store, where that particular day they had rubber boots and sugar, and the next day, they might have something else. And in the course of doing my training, I used a game, and I had brought some one-side-used paper. And I was going to use a game that we played where we put people’s names on a paper and they made a paper airplane, and then you threw it across the room, and whoever got it closest to the garbage can… you know it was some stupid, crowd-breaker sort of thing. And so, I do this - blithely unaware of what I am doing. When the game was over, everybody - without exception - went and got their paper airplane, unfolded it and flattened it and put it in their book, because paper was so precious - they were grateful to get a one-side-only piece of paper that I would have rolled up and thrown away. And so, my capacity for gratitude has been dulled by the fact that I am a baby-boomer born in the late 40’s when Canada was on a roll. So, life - the opportunities were unlimited for me. And what happens is - I begin to assume that this is supposed to be the way that it is. And anything that upsets my little applecart becomes very disconcerting. And so, for me, really working at cultivating gratitude is a spiritual discipline. And it becomes a demonstration: Do I really believe that there is a God Who is at work in the world, and that He gives generously to all? The sun shines on the good and the bad - so it’s not because I am good, or somebody else is bad - the sun shines on us all. The only difference is some people say, Thank You. And some people have the sense that that’s a gratitude-thing.
That is not to say that when horrible things happen - when deep illnesses, economic reversals, sexual abuse - all the things that we all see day after day: that suddenly you say to somebody, “Well, be grateful you’re alive” - but those people on their survival journey often are the people who teach you gratitude.
Talking about God and gratefulness - our brains go right towards ‘stuff’. But what about gratefulness in what God has done for us, when we’re doubting that there is a good and interactive God? How do you help that person to be grateful to God for something other than ‘stuff’?
Well, I’m not sure it’s my job to help that person, necessarily. If they want to have a conversation about how I understand God, then I’m happy to have the conversation with people around those issues. And quite frequently I discover that people do have a sense that there is some undergirding meaning or purpose or outcome to life. That even somebody… I read a book recently that was essentially trying to debunk everything that I believed, and by the time it was done, essentially if you put the word ‘God’ in where he used the word ‘evolution’ or ‘the evolutionary cycle,’ you would actually have had the same thing. And so, he had a deep faith that there was some evolutionary process that was advancing us as a human race and was advancing creation. So, I think that sometimes we end up in arguments about a God who we can’t define, and so the issue now becomes: How do we actually view life? Do we think that there is some kind of outcome to it? I think the difference for me is that the God who has come into time in Jesus, says something very different than that we’ve got an absent god. I’m not a believer that God intervenes all the time just to help us with every little thing, or else Jesus and His friends wouldn’t have had the life they had: Jesus ended up on a cross. He was not saved from suffering because He had a higher purpose. His friends - as I have said to you before: He was not as kind to His friends as He was to the lepers. Because He healed the lepers, but His disciples ended up being arrested and in jail and executed and in exile, and all that sort of thing.
And so, it becomes - how do we grapple with the God who we believe in? I demonstrate my faith in that God if I’m grateful. I can make all kinds of claims, but I think the test of my faith - one of the tests of my faith - is do I love and care out of a sense of gratitude? Out of a sense that I have been given much, so therefore not just ‘much is required of me,’ but much gets inspired from me because I have been overwhelmingly loved. So in a sense, my job isn’t to try to convince somebody else of that, my first priority is to listen to the God I say I believe in, and in response to what I believe I have received, express gratitude through the way I live my life.
“There isn’t any sort of formulaic plan for this, but there are people out there that can be grateful for all that they have, but they feel a little dopey being grateful to… air. It’s hard to be grateful to something invisible.”
And that’s where, for me (and certainly those who know me well) - I spend a lot of time in the gospels with the person of Jesus. So, I explore His story. So, as we started this conversation today - it was triggered by my meditating on two stories from Jesus’ life. And as I watched Him interact with people, it then challenges me to think differently about my life. And so I find it hard to address the Father (even though that’s part of what we do in praying the Lord’s prayer, and Jesus invites us to share our fatherhood with Him, and saying ‘Our Father’) - but I do find that for me, the God that I can see revealed in Jesus Christ does help me understand the God that I can’t see. And I would say the other thing that I have discovered over my lifetime – in the epistles from John - at one point, he says, “How can you say you love the God you can’t see if you don’t love the people you do see?” I’ve turned that on its head in my own experience, and I say I can only really experience the love of the God I can’t see through the love I have received from people I can see. And so for me, a lot of my experience of life has been discovering that there are people who have all kinds of questions and doubts and fears, and they’re not sure what they’re doing - but when they look at the person of Jesus, they are drawn to Him, and in meditating on His life, looking at His stories, His interactions with people - it has a way of then shaping my conversations with Him and my conversations with other people. And so, it becomes my touchstone (to use a word) that allows me to test out what I’m thinking. And it challenges me. The other day - Jesus is chatting with some people about “Make sure your light is not in darkness,” and all that sort of thing, and I’m sitting there going: “Okay - Jesus, help me understand how I can actually experience light in my life. That there is light that demonstrates both the good and the bad - the things that You want to fix, the things that You need to help me with - and help me to experience that light.” And so, for me it’s an interactive thing with the story of Jesus that then allows me to feel that I’ve got a little bit of a connection point with this much larger, cosmic story. And that we do… You know, there’s a line in one of the prayers in my retreat guide from a Celtic liturgy that we use, and it talks about Jesus who entered time because words were not enough. And so - again, I was raised in a very propositionally-oriented culture: we are a very wordy world, and so for much of my life, my journey has been trying to discover the incarnational God who revealed Himself in Jesus, and continues to reveal Himself in people around me. And so, I believe that Jesus lives in skin and bone and He’s at the table when I’m sitting with people.
“I don’t want to be like the other schleps who got fixed, and they didn’t even say Thanks! But I’m still stuck as to how to practice - how to practice gratefulness. Just how to practice it!”
So, it’s like practicing mindfulness. If it’s just mindfulness about myself, that’s one thing. If it’s mindfulness, or gratefulness, or gratitude for the presence and action of God, even in the darkest of places, then that’s a very different thing. And so the fact that I can be with people when they are struggling, and they ask me to be present to them - not to provide words, just to be present - when they are sorrowful, when they have an accumulation of sorrow in their life - that is a gift from God. That ultimately, we discover, I think, that the practice of gratitude is something that comes from practically spending a lot of time observing the life of Jesus. Because He spent a lot of time talking about “the one who is forgiven much, loves much.” And one of the challenges of the people that He was dealing with in His day was that they assumed they were right, and that they were on top of the world, and that they didn’t express gratitude to God. They were assured of the certainty of their faith. And so, He was trying to demonstrate to them over and over and over again that gratitude that comes from humility, that comes from understanding that we are provided for emotionally by a God who loves us. And it’s got nothing to do with our material goods; they in fact are things that get in the way of a sense of gratitude and a sense of wonder. It’s about life - it’s about love - it’s about relationships - it’s about justice: if I have been forgiven much, and I am grateful for that, that has to shape how I view those who are victims of injustice. It has to shape how I view those who are victims of abuse. And so, it becomes the fuel out of which the rest of your life is energized. And so, I can become very comfortable in myself and very self-indulgent, ultimately to my peril, and ultimately then not to be particularly useful to those who come across my path.
If one practices gratefulness, an attitude of gratitude towards God - not just being grateful, but being grateful towards God - will that help to suppress their doubt?
I am not so sure it will necessarily suppress doubt. You see, I’m not convinced that doubt is the opposite of faith. I think that doubt is demonstration that you take God seriously enough to question Him (or Her). And that somebody who has no doubts and has never thought about God - or who has no doubts and thinks they know all about God - are in the same boat. And so, I have lots of doubts. Lots of times in the year, I have moments where I just wonder what if this just, you know, it’s just been a waste of time… Because I was in a conversation with some guys at one point, and they were saying, “Oh, isn’t it lovely what you do!” and they were all part of a YPO group, and somebody had asked me to offer some of my thoughts to them. And they were saying, “Well, I don’t believe in your God-stuff, but you do help a lot of people.” And I said, “Look. If what I do… If Jesus Christ did not come and live and die and rise again from the dead, I have wasted my time. Because I could have been doing something completely different that would have been much more financially attractive to me! But the reality is, I also am trying to guide people into a lie. Everything that I do tries to guide people towards Jesus. Well, if it turns out that’s false, then I’ve thrown my life away.” Well, I obviously demonstrated over the last umpteen years that I believe in it because our family has - in a sense - we’ve benefitted richly. But we have made decisions that have been in some people’s minds, costly. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t have all kinds of questions. I’ve spent my life trying to expand my understanding of God - and so… I just believe that if we work with God in trying to understand, what are the grace notes? What are the kindnesses? Where is that sun? Where is that rain? Where is that hope? that we receive in little measures, day by day. And we find ways to be reminded that we are grateful: rather than just saying a grace at a table - stopping at the end of the meal, and standing up, and celebrating what we just had together at the table. Rather than just assuming that everything is supposed to be perfect - stop and celebrate the accumulation of years of love in a marriage, or some small kindness from a grandchild. And so, it’s cultivated. And then being able to turn around and say, “God - Thank You!” “Jesus - Thank You!” So, there is an object for our gratitude. There is someone to whom to offer thanks. And so, I think that’s part of the process.
My encouragement to us all is that in this culture of entitlement, of a desire never to have discomfort - if something goes wrong, to find somebody to create a solution; I would encourage us to take time (on a regular basis) to look at the life of Jesus - his conversations with people, rich and poor alike - and how patiently he worked with people. To look in our own lives, in our prickly, sly nature and see how we have been kindly dealt with by God - and find reasons to say, “Thank You.” And by accumulating gratitudes, I believe that we ultimately will say then, out of being loved much, I will then love much in return. Out of being forgiven much, I will then forgive others much. Jesus, in the Lord’s prayer, said “Forgive us our sins.” And I have lots I need forgiveness for. Which then motivates us to be forgiving of others - that’s how communities of reconciliation and restoration develop. So, let’s work together at developing a consciousness that gratitude is an expression of faith in the God who has come to us in Jesus.
You left Your royal throne,
Left the realm of Light
To enter our common paths
And grope for us in our darkness -
Just for us: common, sly, and prickly as we are -
To lift us, and soothe us, and make us clean.
Watch video of the “On Further reflection with Norm Allen” Podcast:
