Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
OLR, NOLA
I grew up in rural Mississippi with more or less tradition-minded
Baptist parents. My younger brother and I learned from Day One to say
“yessir/no sir,” “please,” “thank you,” “excuse me.”
Failure to express proper respect or gratitude earned a swift and
terrible rebuke. I still use “Mr.” and “Ms” when addressing
adults, and I cringe a little when people call me by my first name
w/o asking, or shorten it to “Phil.” It's all very old-fashioned,
I know, but there's something about the habits of good manners that
makes life easier. In the case of the healed leper, his deeply felt
sense of gratitude actually saves him! He discovers – probably to
his great surprise – that giving God thanks for his healing is not
only the polite thing to do but a way to salvation as well. For us,
the baptized, giving God thanks for His blessings is way to
persevere, a way to remain in Christ and thus end our earthly
pilgrimage reigning with him in the Kingdom. Is it possible that the
good manners many of us were taught as children is what remains of
this spiritual insight? Saying “thank you,” especially to God, is
a path to healing and salvation.
We
hear Paul say to Timothy: “If we have died with him we shall also
live with him; if we persevere we shall also reign with him.” That
persevering part is what most of us find difficult. Dying with him in
the waters of baptism was easy. Living with him has its challenges,
but we manage it with the sacraments. Persevering with him however is
on another level entirely. Persevering here means staying close to
Christ. Hanging on to him through the best and the worst. Living with
him whether we “feel” his presence or not. Perseverance is the
good habit of being tenacious in faith when every fiber of your being
is screaming at you: “Compromise! Just fit in! Surrender! This is
too hard!” Have you seen that video of a bull dog swinging himself
around a tree, teeth clamped on the end of a rope? The rope will
break, or the tree will fall before that dog lets go. That's
tenacity. That's perseverance. Now, I wouldn't trust my teeth to hang
on like a bull dog's. But I do trust that gratitude is the key to
staying close to Christ. The leper proves this. Christ teaches this.
And I can bear personal witness that giving God thanks for His
blessings is essential in our long trek to holiness.
As
a priest in an academic ministry, I don't have my own parish to run,
so I spend a lot of time going out to parishes to hear confessions,
give missions or talks, and basically just visiting with people over
all the archdiocese. Every time I go out, I hear a lot of anxiety
about the Church. I get confused questions about the faith. Angry
comments about the news coming out of Rome. Questions and doubts
about the future. Just generally an overwhelming sense that things
aren't well with the Body of Christ. Something is wrong, something is
upsetting the peace we've come to expect from following Christ. In
response, I have to sharply suppress my professorial instincts and
avoid giving a lecture on the history of the Church. No one wants to
hear how good we have it compared to, say, the Church in communist
China. Then I have to swallow the need to remind folks that the
“peace of Christ” comes with a promise of persecution. What I
usually end up saying is that difficult times require a bull dog's
tenacity. It might be too much to say that we're being tested. But –
we're being tested.
Not tested in the sense that God is deliberately trying to scare us
or trip us up. But tested in the sense that steel is tested under
pressure to measure its purity and strength. Our test is measuring
the purity and strength of our gratitude. If you will to endure with
Christ, you will be grateful to God for His blessings.
You
might ask here: why does God need our gratitude? The answer is: He
doesn't. Giving God thanks does nothing for God b/c He needs nothing
from us. Our desire to give Him thanks is itself a gift that benefits
us alone. In other words, we are doing ourselves a favor by returning
thanks for all that God gives us. Failing to give thanks breeds
entitlement – I am owed. And entitlement is the rich soil of pride.
If we nurture pride by failing in gratitude, we end up denying Christ
– the ultimate gift from God. We end up being among the nine lepers
who were healed but not saved. Ungrateful wretches living lives of
resentment and anger b/c they believe that God owes them a debt. As
followers of Christ, our best means of staying close to Christ is to
be a tenacious Christian bull dog, refusing to let go of gratitude.
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Beautiful lesson today, Father. The hardest is being grateful for the privilege of suffering a little while with Christ.
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