2Kgs 5, 14-17 / 2Tim 2, 8-13 / Lk 17, 11-19
Today’s gospel about the lepers is about
gratitude. And gratitude always involves
a recognition of some goodness. We are
thankful for something we see as good.
Of the ten lepers who were healed, only one moves on to gratitude. And Jesus tells us what enabled him to make
that move was his faith. “Your faith has
saved you,” he says. Only this leper was
saved – meaning only he experienced God’s saving presence in the healing. And this man, we are told, was a
Samaritan. To Jews he was a religious
heretic – not one of God’s chosen people.
And he is the one who has faith, Jesus tells us. He is the one who recognizes God’s presence
in his life.
I’d
like to reflect with you on faith – on a faith that allows us to travel to
gratitude. I think we really need to
make that move to gratitude. Though
words like “thank you” come quickly to our lips – we are polite – I do think we
have real difficulty with having a faith that opens us up to a basic attitude
of gratitude toward life. The poet
Wendell Berry speaks of our having lost the sense for life’s daily evidence of
goodness and beauty. That evidence has
become smeared and blurred by what he calls our “dispraise of life”. Dispraise of life. We are missing life’s wonder, its daily
wonder.
I don’t think it’s any great mystery how and
why we dispraise life. We rarely take
the time to look at it – to really look at what is before us. And even less do we take the time and the
care to really look at what is within us.
Our busy embrace of life’s surface distracts us from life’s core. And our worry about how we look to the eyes
of others keeps us from having honest, true vision for looking more deeply into
ourselves and into life.
Time – taking time is the issue. Taking time to look – to be with life as it
is – as it unfolds around us. Taking
time to be with our own life – our own life as it deeply, truly is. Taking time to move beyond all the clichés
that pass for life-goals and signs of success in life.
We need a faith that allows us to travel
toward gratitude. Jesuits travel daily
toward gratitude by an act of faith we call the “Examen”. The Examen is a simple way of praying. It is counter-cultural because it does
require that we actually take the time to quietly be with our lives. Each day we review the day with this question
in mind: What do I have to be grateful
for? What good have I done? What good has been done to me? How have I loved? How have I been loved? In the light of that question, just let the
day unfold before you. And that’s
it. That’s the Examen.
If you stick with it, I assure you, you will
find your life qualitatively changed.
And the key word there is “find”.
I am talking about coming to experience your own lived life as
uncovering, as revealing a deeper beauty and goodness. If we but look, our lives will yield up their
deep-down goodness and beauty. And there
God will announce himself: I AM.
God will announce his saving presence to us in our own beauty and
goodness.
Let us make the move from dispraise to praise
of life. Let us take the time to travel
toward gratitude and witness the wonder of our own lives. Then we will know – and know for sure – it is
deeply true when we say to one another: “The Lord be with you.”
Fr. Pat Earl, SJ
