Reflection on Gratitude Amidst Suffering

The Need of the Elder Son to Please

Nouwen’s personal experience of the elder son is something I relate to as well.  In his writing, he hopes to be able to “offer some hope to people caught in the resentment that is the bitter fruit of their need to please”.  In my life, this has always been the one thing that I feel bounded by – the responsibilities and expectations of what I need to do for the family – to the point where it becomes an unhealthy bitterness in how I see and live my life.

Nouwen offers an imperative approach to make this return possible: we must not only recognize that we are lost but also be prepared to be found and brought home.

Through Trust and Gratitude

How? Nouwen writes that “although we are incapable of liberating ourselves from our frozen anger,  we can allow ourselves to be found by God and healed by his love through the concrete and daily practice of trust and gratitude”. Without trust, I cannot let myself be found by the Father because I do not have the inner conviction that He wants me home. It is a process to strip away the lies and the doubts of self-worthlessness, of less loveable, of not being important. “By telling myself that I am not important enough to be found, I amplify my self-complaint until I have become totally deaf to the voice calling for me.”

It requires a real discipline to think, speak and act with the conviction that I am being sought and will be found no matter how strong the dark voices is telling me otherwise. As Nouwen says, “at some point, I must totally disown my self-rejecting voice and claim the truth that God does indeed want to embrace me”.

As I am writing this, Michael Schulte’s Let It Go is playing and one line in the chorus sings;
“Follow my stride,
I can take you home”

Prevailing Through It
This part is important because perseverance is needed is this were to succeed, if I were to build a practice of trust and gratitude. Nouwen says that “this trust has to be even deeper than the sense of lostness. Living in the radical trust will open the way for God to realize my deepest desire.”

He explains that resentment and gratitude cannot coexist because:

• Resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. It always manifests itself in envy.
• Gratitude goes beyond the mine and thine and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift.

Discipline of Gratitude

It involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is choosing gratitude instead of a complaint. It is choosing to be grateful even amidst criticism, even when the heart responds in bitterness.

Though because we have freewill, there is always the choice between resentment and gratitude. It’s not easy and it requires real effort but with each time that I choose gratitude over resentment, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, and a little less self-conscious. Nouwen explains that “every gift I acknowledge reveals another and another until, finally, even the most normal, obvious, and seemingly mundane event or encounter proves to be filled with grace”. 

This is definitely the goal this Lent and moving forward as well. I have been told many times that I am an ungrateful child and it’s tough for me to find the blessings in my everyday life. “Acts of gratitude make one grateful because step by step, they reveal that all is grace.”

“Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.” – Estonian proverb