The Essential Point of Gratitude

I have been part of a "Gratitude Community" in the blogging world, and the woman who began this growing circle is a beautiful woman whose experience of chronicling her gratitude has literally changed her life. I love being a part of this and reading her details and the way she sees behind them to the ultimate realities.

I have noticed something in my own experiences, however. This ability to see and distinguish a gift, this ability to feel gratitude and the blessing of knowing Who to thank for the gifts... these things are not complete. I always feel there is something missing, and I can actually feel mildly frustrated at times when I see the most beautiful sunset -- and feel an ache inside at the same time. To sit on a beach in fall and breathe that tangy air and see everything and everyone glowing around me, and still feel... this small lack. What is it? What else could one possibly long for in a moment like that? And isn't it ungrateful?

This week I read a sermon that C.S. Lewis gave in 1942. It is not obscure, but I had not read it in its entirety before. Some of it was familiar -- but all of it hit me right between the eyes. I felt illuminated and freed and so blessed by his words. It is too long to copy entirely, but here is just a part of what tweaked my vision like a new pair of glasses:

"I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret that we cannot hide but cannot tell, though we desire to do both...

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would have turned out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not IN them, it only came THROUGH them, and what came through them was longing.

These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire, but if they are taken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am, but remember your fairy tales: spells are for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness that has been laid upon us...

We usually notice... just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses its celestial light... what Keats describes as 'the journey homeward to the habitual self.' You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can. 'Nobody marks us.'

...It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard.

By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last...

We can all be left utterly and absolutely outside -- repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache...

At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind, and still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes - through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God's creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy...

The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.

Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him, is, of course, the essential point..."


And so I think I have a new appreciation for Ann's life-changing efforts at marking these daily things. They are not an end in themselves, to make one FEEL better, more at peace, more accepting or loving or satisfied. To the contrary, the effort itself may often bring about that "old ache" that reminds us again and again that we are only pilgrims here, on a long, hard journey homeward. And it is that journey that is, of course, the essential point...

So we learn to breathe with the ache instead of resisting it. In doing so, we may find ourselves to be made not less, as we often fear... but more of what we were intended to be. In this case, at least, it is living with our lack that will ultimately make us whole.