PRESENCE AND GRATITUDE
June 7, 2010
Yours
is the gift that is still gain
when everything is a loss,
and the life that flows
through the caverns of death.
~ R. Tagore
The conflicting tendencies toward resentment and gratitude are
often at war with each other in the human heart. Even when the
mind knows it should be grateful, resentful feelings tug and
pull away from rational response. Blind urges conspire and
tempt one to trust in power rather than presence to remedy and
heal the aching soul. For millennia the developed spiritual
systems of humanity have understood the dynamics at play within
this psychological-spiritual polarity. Resentment is a
corrosive attitude which threatens our well-being, destroys
reason and diminishes our capacity for enjoyment. Gratitude is
more like an inborn readiness to receive with open hands what is
given in one’s reality. Resentment, the interloper,
refuses; gratitude accepts.
Gratitude arises from the
place of spirit within us that recognizes ultimate connection
and care. It is the true face of what the spiritual traditions
call the transcendent self, or the true self. In a magnificent
poem tracing the contours of self-transformation, Rabindranath
Tagore decries a former attitude of taking and ceaseless
expectation before the Lord:
Time after time I came to your gate
with raised hands, asking for more and yet
more.
You gave and gave . . .
. . . your gifts grew immense,
hiding you, and the ceaseless expectation
wore my heart out.
The awakening of gratitude in the human soul entails a new way
of seeing: Tagore gradually sees through the gifts to
the Giver of gifts, the invisible Presence lying behind all of
the manifestations of care and provision. The discovery that we
are mysteriously accounted for and provided for leads to a very
different disposition in Tagore:
Take, oh take – has now become my cry.
. . . hold my hands, raise me from
the still-gathering heap of your gifts
into the bare infinity
of your uncrowded presence.
This sense of “more” is essential
in the spiritual life. Even if the soul is not being eaten away
by resentful musings, there remains the common experience of a
devitalized, “tranquilized” existence. Between the two poles of
resentment and gratitude lies the vast and “lukewarm” landscape
of everyday taken-for-grantedness. In the taken-for-granted
attitude, one is involved in life, but the engagement lacks
depth. One does not see beyond the habitual routines and
pleasures of life. Blinded by complacent assurances that life
is precisely as it should be, the “more” goes missing, yet is
not missed. The wonder and revelation of presence celebrated in
Psalm 19, for example, does not appear to the tranquilized
spirit:
The sky unfolds the story of your presence;
the firmament tells of the work of your
hands.
Day after day overflows with speech;
night after night breathes out knowledge .
“There is no word or phrase/in which the voice of your creation
is not heard,” the psalmist continues. But what we are meant to
hear and the value that increases immeasurably by appreciation
remain absurdly absent when the spirit in us has gone to sleep.
Thornton Wilder wisely observed that “We can only be said to be
alive when our hearts are conscious of their treasures.” Even
the youngest child who as yet is incapable of expressing in
words the joy it feels when the primary caregiver is present,
experiences presence positively. The seeds of gratitude have
been sown by human presence, and they are already beginning to
grow.
About the child’s natural open-ended sense of time, Hans Urs
von Balthasar wrote in Unless You Become Like This Little
Child:
A child knows that God can find him/her at every
moment because every moment opens up for him/her and shows him/her
the very ground of time: as if it reposed on eternity itself. God’s
“I am who am” also means: My being is such that I shall always be
present in every moment of becoming.
We live in time. Our being, unlike God’s, is temporal. How we
live out the utterly gratuitous gift of time reveals the state
of our receptivity toward this gift at any point in time. In
forgetfulness of the essential childlike quality of our inner
being, the resentful attitude betrays our misbegotten
frustration with this gift and a corresponding lack of trust in
the Giver. In its complacency and failure of imagination, the
tranquilized spirit cannot see gift, does not recognize what is
uniquely offered, will not “awaken” from the commonplace. Only
the grateful heart intuits that its time is a treasure so
magnificent and precious that repentance – soul response – is
unavoidable: time spent as anything other than as a child of
God, cared for and loved by God, is wasted, lost time.
The Psalms of David were long thought to be the outpourings
of spirit of King David – the poet-singer-leader who
humbly-sorrowfully-joyfully danced before the Lord. The kingdom
of God, he knew in his bones, was there – immediate and
always available to him. All he had to do was to turn to God.
The turning was both offering and acceptance, a bitter-sweet
rendering of everything about his life and the grateful
reception of abiding presence.
Song of David
On that cool evening
I forgot myself
and danced before the Lord
danced my heart out, knowing
He was there
in every part of me
filling the vast emptiness
I had created in myself
by forgetfulness, willful passion
one false move after another.
Naked inside and out,
I turned
Remembering
my desire for God
how much I was loved
Yielding to such love
I was lifted up
light of mind, heart and limbs
my being leapt
dancing with the Almighty
My words leapt too
words waiting to be
released by grace
drawing tears
so that I virtually melted
rejoicing in songs
transforming me
lover and beloved:
David.
