Giving Thanks for Who God Makes Us
When I last went to confession, the confessor asked me about the role of gratitude in my life. His query brought a somewhat bemused (albeit slight) smile to my lips, as when I am in the confessor’s chair, I often find myself encouraging penitents to practice gratitude in a deliberate and active way in their lives. On this particular occasion (when I myself was the penitent), I shared that I try (with varying degrees of success, admittedly) to practice gratitude daily, reflecting on particular blessings that I have enjoyed throughout the course of a day. Then he offered a rather striking follow-up question: “does that gratitude extend to yourself?”
I will readily admit that I am a bit hesitant (to say the least) to address the Lord in prayer and say something like “Thank you, Lord, for making me who I am, with all my particular gifts and talents.” Even typing those words, I wonder if they may come across as haughty or pompous. And yet, the Scriptures teach us to be thankful for ourselves: “I praise you, because I am wonderfully made!” (Psalm 139:14). Mary boldly proclaims that “all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48, emphasis added). I suspect many of us might struggle to make such sentiments our own, perhaps because we worry that we might then all too easily cross into the territory of smug self-absorption. To be sure, we ought to be duly wary of falling prey to the spirit of arrogance. Still, is there a possibility that such caution becomes excessive, and we miss out on the opportunity of savoring the goodness of our existence and that fact that God saw fit to bring us into being?
Both the psalmist and Mary teach us that celebrating ourselves (to adapt a phrase from Walt Whitman) has a place in the spiritual life, and they teach us that the way to avoid sinful pride is not to downplay our own goodness but to recognize it and attribute it to its proper author: God. Neither the psalmist nor Mary are celebrating themselves simply to draw attention to themselves, let alone to court compliments or shore up insecure egos; rather, they wish to draw attention to the true source of all that is good in them, the Lord. They are not pointing to themselves in the hopes that someone will say simply “you are so magnificent.” But perhaps they are pointing to themselves in the hopes that someone will say “look at the magnificence God has produced in you.”
As we celebrate our national holiday of Thanksgiving this week, we have the opportunity to give thanks for the many blessings God has been pleased to bestow on us—including the blessing of being who we are! As we engage in these days of celebration (days which will also hopefully include some rest and recreation!), may our awareness of God’s unfathomable generosity continue to grow within us.
