Gratitude

ON THE WAY to Jerusalem Jesus was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as be entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us." When he saw them he said to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests." And as they went they were cleansed.

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus, "Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" And he said to him, "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well. " - Luke 17:11-19

TWELVE YEARS AGO, on an October afternoon, I was on a bus heading from Lewiston, Maine, where I went to college, to Boston, where I was going to catch a plane to Pennsylvania to my grandfather's funeral. The scripture from Luke brings that day to my memory.

I remember very sharply the feelings of grief and loss I was experiencing; my grandfather's death was the first major loss in my life. I was feeling very alone, which wasn't difficult, because there were only three other people on that bus. And I was feeling very sorry for myself on that long, three-hour bus ride.

The bus stopped about an hour outside of Boston, and a woman got on - a woman I will never forget. She was in her 70s, and she had a shock of bright, white hair, on top of which sat a red, knit stocking cap. She looked around the bus and saw 38 empty seats, then came right over to where I was sitting and sat next to me. She plopped herself down and said, "Praise God - what a beautiful day!"

Well, it was objectively true that it was a beautiful day. It was one of those New England kind of days that everybody calls "crisp," when the sky is very blue and the air is a little bit chilly, the sun is bright and the leaves in the trees are starting to turn beautiful colors. But I was rather resentful of the fact that she was enjoying the beauty of the day and I felt unable to. So I smiled rather weakly at her.

After a few moments, she looked right at me and said, "So, what's wrong with you?" And I decided I would tell her exactly what was wrong with me, and certainly she would be overflowing with sympathy for my plight. So I explained to her that I was on my way to a funeral, and I was feeling a great deal of loss.

She seemed to show absolutely no sympathy. Finally, after a few minutes, she said, "Well, tell me about your grandfather."

I was very glad for the opportunity, because I figured that if I could prove to her that this wasn't just a run-of-the-mill grandfather but my favorite-person-on-earth grandfather, then indeed she would understand why it was that I was so discouraged. So I started to talk to her about him - about the long walks we used to take and how he more than anyone else in my life had instilled in me a sense of love and appreciation for creation. Especially for sunsets, because that's very often when we took our walks.

I talked for quite a while about what a wonderful person my grandfather had been, and after a few moments she looked at me and said, "How good of God to have given such a grandfather to you!"

I was very touched by her response. And I think that simply encountering her on that bus transformed me and changed my attitude as to how I went home to deal with the funeral and the grieving that my family was going through.

I thought of her as I read this gospel lesson. It's about healing, to be sure, and it's about faith; but most of all it's about gratitude.

Mrs. Sarah Libby, the dear old woman on the bus, is someone who taught me a great deal about gratitude. I took her name and address before she got off the bus, and I visited her several times a year during the time that I was in college. I did a lot of traveling between Maine and my home in Pennsylvania, so I frequently passed through Boston.

I always enjoyed those visits. She lived in a very small, dark room in a rooming house in the middle of Boston, with a view of Fenway Park. She was an incorrigible Red Sox fan.

I used to love to sit in her room on one of her dairy crates - the only furniture she had besides a bed. There she taught me what it meant to be thankful.

I remember very.well one winter day when I had taken a few of my college friends to visit her; I was very anxious to share this friend with those friends. She marched us into a drugstore that was down the street from where she lived. We bought some ice cream, and she said to the young pharmacist whom she saw quite frequently, "These are some fine Christian girls; you could learn a lot from them."

It was very clear to me that Mrs. Libby's whole goal in life was to convert the world to Christ. And I think that if she had lived long enough, she probably would have done it. Because more than anything she possessed that power of conversion that rests in a life that is filled with praise and joy. And that made everyone who came into contact with her ask what her secret was, and it gave her the opportunity to talk about her Lord and how much she loved Christ and how much God loved her.

THE GOSPEL PASSAGE IS about gratitude. Here's the scene: Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, and he came near to a village and encountered a group of people who were afflicted with leprosy. The laws of that day said that lepers were not allowed to have contact with "normal" society. And so they had to shout to Jesus from a distance. They called out, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us."

Certainly those people had had their fill of both pity and scorn. But they were needing something very different when they called out to Jesus. They were asking him to have mercy on them, which was a plea for him to heal them.

It was a rather interesting group of people, because we're told that at least one of them was a Samaritan. We're all aware of the kind of hatred that existed between the Jews and the Samaritans; but it seems that the common plight that this group of people shared made those prejudices unimportant. The affliction that they shared made their bonds very strong. They were learning a truth in the midst of their pain that other people seemed unable to see.

We know that the life of lepers was very miserable. Most of them had to hover outside of the city limits like this group, untouched and carrying what was considered the greatest stigma of that day.

So it was probably with both desperation and hope that they called out to Jesus. And Jesus responded to them, "Go and show yourselves to the priests."

It was an unusual response, because the lepers were strictly forbidden to make any contact with the rest of society. But Jesus was in fact asking them to have faith, to believe in their healing even before it had been accomplished. Jewish law required that after a healing the healed person was obligated to go and present himself or herself to the priest to receive a blessing back into the society. So Jesus was asking them to start the journey to the priest before their healing had taken place.

We know that they were people who had faith, because they began that journey. And as they walked, they believed, and they were healed, carrying with them Jesus' power which they had received from their encounter with him.

One of them came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And the one who came back was the Samaritan. Jesus had healed one of the enemies of the Jews, and we see a bit of foreshadowing that the gospel is meant for a broader hearing and acceptance than just among the Jews.

But Jesus immediately wanted to know where the other nine who had been healed were. Was only this foreigner responsible enough to return and give thanks for his healing? Why hadn't the others returned?

We will never know for certain why they didn't return. But it may be that they were simply overcome with joy; that they ran to see their families and friends, to see people and to do things they hadn't been able to do in a number of years. Swept up in this new freedom, maybe they simply forgot and their gratitude was overcome by their joy.

Or maybe they were too afraid to be thankful. As bad as their outcast status had been, it wasn't nearly as frightening as having to be responsible, whole citizens of whom much was expected. So maybe their gratitude was overcome by fear.

Or maybe some of them were even bitter about the healing. Instead of being thankful for what had been given, they were bitter about what had been lost for all of those years. Maybe they thought they should have been healed sooner. Or maybe their healed status made them ask all the more strongly, "Why me? Why does leprosy have to be, and why did it have to claim me?" So perhaps their freedom gave them new eyes to see not only what was ahead, but what had been missed for a long time. Perhaps their gratitude was overcome by bitterness.

Jesus' last words to the one who came back were, "Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well." He was pronouncing that the healing was now complete, and also that this man's faith was complete: Faith without gratitude is incomplete faith.

THE FIRST VERSE FROM THE 11th chapter of Hebrews is a favorite verse for us at Sojourners. It says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." It's a very good scripture for us; it's not surprising to me that it's one that we like a lot, because we're people who have so many hopes and visions of what could be.

But I'd like to invite us to look not at the things that are unseen, but the things that are seen. At what is. Sometimes in our grand visions I think we forget to see what's right here in our midst, to celebrate what we have. That's clearly one of the hazards of people and communities with a vocation to seek God's kingdom and work for justice - where it's easier to see what we haven't accomplished.

We seem to be people who are very big on intercession. We pray very easily about what's wrong and what we lack, what people whom we love lack, what's unhealed and what's unjust. And that's very good, because we are people who are sensitive to the world's needs and problems. Usually in our worship we have to cut off our intercessions and offer a prayer for all of the unspoken prayers that there wasn't time to offer.

There seems to be more awkwardness when it comes time for thanksgiving. I'm not denying that sometimes it flows readily and it's very rich, but it doesn't always flow easily.

One of the reasons may be that we have a fear of being accused of being naive, or out of touch with what's really happening. It's the old "How can we praise God for this beautiful day when there was an earthquake in El Salvador yesterday?" syndrome. We feel that if we're committed to justice, if we're committed to seeing an end to suffering, then we must be very serious about it. And heaven help us if we thank God for something as trivial as a nice day!

I think we struggle with the appropriate theology around praise. We wonder how much we can directly credit God for the good things that happen to us, whether it's a long-awaited job or a good place to live. We do pretty well with babies - maybe we see a more direct link there.

Sometimes we wonder, if we praise God for a safe journey, for example, are we implying that people who suffer terrible tragedies somehow do not have the protection of God? Sometimes I think we actually talk ourselves into feeling guilty rather than feeling thankful for what we have. It's an understandable pitfall for people who are sensitive to oppression and other people's suffering and aware of how little other people in the world have. Or maybe it's just that we take a lot for granted.

We often tend to look at faith and talk about faith as endurance, with the belief - or at least the hope - that things will get better, and that we're helping. By now we have learned that for some people, and probably for a lot of people, things are not going to get better. And the irony is that those are the very people who seem most able to praise God.

People of faith who have very little materially often have lives profoundly marked by an attitude of praise. "Thank you, Lord, that I have seen another day" is a very common prayer in our neighborhood. There is a deep and heartfelt gratitude simply to be alive.

A FEW WEEKS AGO in our Monday night neighborhood Bible study, Naomi was sharing with us about a fire that burned down her apartment several years ago. She was severely burned in that fire and had to spend six months two different times in the hospital. She hovered for a while near death. She lost several fingers on both hands. And she said of that experience, "I just thank God that I can still play the piano."

Karl Gaspar was in prison in the Philippines for two years. During part of that time he was helping to organize a hunger strike among the prisoners. They were trying to get higher wages for the work they were allowed to do in the prison, which was a matter of survival since the prison system didn't provide food or services free. The hunger strike was going on at a time when the Philippine economy was going through major fluctuations and had an extremely high inflation rate.

I received a letter from Karl that talked about the result of the hunger strike. It said something like this: "The good news is that we now make $2 a day. The bad news is that $2 is now worth $1. But, we praise God for this victory."

I remember a mother in Nicaragua who spoke to me very shortly after a contra attack on her village. Both of her daughters had been raped and killed. Three sons and her husband had been mutilated. Only she and her infant son had survived that attack. And her response to the tremendous trauma that she had just gone through was, "I praise God that he preserved my son."

I'm not sure that I can even begin to fathom that kind of praise in the face of such immeasurable tragedy and loss.

I remember Yvonne Dilling, a U.S. church worker who spent two years with Salvadoran refugees in Honduras, telling me about the structure in the refugee camps. As soon as the refugees began to make a new camp, they set up three committees. There was the committee of education and the committee of construction. And there was the comite de alegria, the "committee of joy." Celebration was as basic to the life of the refugees as teaching their children to read or building a latrine.

One refugee woman once asked Yvonne why she was so serious all the time, why she walked around looking so burdened down. Yvonne talked - as I am sure any of us would have - about the tremendous suffering of the people, the grief that she felt every day, and her commitment to give all of herself to the struggle of the refugees. And this woman looked at her and just said, "You're not serious about our struggle. Only people who expect to go back to North America in a year work the way you do. You cannot be serious about the struggle unless you play and celebrate and do those things that make it possible to give a lifetime to it."

I am convinced that those people on whose behalf we often feel so much discouragement and guilt would be absolutely thrilled if we let loose once in a while and abandoned ourselves to some good old praise and joy. If we want to have our lives converted to the poor, then we need a very deep conversion to praise, and to joy, and to thanksgiving. We need to cultivate an "attitude of gratitude," if you will.

Our children know a lot about this, and maybe it's something we can learn from them. People who work with children, especially in the area of their spiritual development, have discovered that the prayers of children up to age 7 or 8 are almost exclusively prayers of thanksgiving.

But something happens to us when we reach adulthood. I suppose we tend to become more rational, maybe more guilt-ridden or cynical; more disturbed about what we don't have and what we don't accomplish rather than joyful about what we do have. I wonder how we can expect God to bless our efforts and hear our prayers if we are not truly thankful for what we have today.

The gospel tells us that faith and praise are intimately linked. And indeed the leper's healing wasn't complete until he returned to give thanks. Faith is not simply endurance with the hope that things will get better, but a celebration as well of what is. So let us praise God and give thanks.

Joyce Hollyday was a Sojourners associate editor when this article appeared.