Gracias a la Vida

Google Image

I would guess there are more maxims about gratitude than just about any other subject. Their sheer number must mean that people recognize the value of gratitude and long for it even though it may be among the hardest attitudes to maintain.

One of my favorite gratitude quotes is attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political writer and historian: “Gratitude is a habit of the heart.” You may have to work at it, but once habitual, gratitude stays with you, benefiting you and others.

Besides the adages, lots of artists, writers and musicians have dealt with the subject. Back in the 1970s, after I became familiar with Latin America and its causes, I was a big fan of a famous Argentinian singer named Mercedes Sosa. She sang “protest songs” and others which today may be considered naïve and sentimental. One of my favorites was written by Chilean Violeta Parra called “Gracias a la Vida.” Those of you familiar with Spanish know that means “Thanks to Life.” Here are the lyrics to the last verse of the song. You can see it and hear it performed at il.youtube.com/watch?v=AzFSzeyKspU.
 

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.

It has given me laughter and tears,
Allowing me to distinguish joy from pain,
The two elements that form my song….

As much as I like it, I’ve always had a feeling that something is missing. I like it because I recognize the profound feelings of gratitude it expresses, and can relate to that. But thanks to life? Isn’t that a word that sums up the span of our days? Does thanking “life” have any real meaning? Today, you often hear a similar phrase, "Thanks to the universe." Can you be grateful to "things" that are so vague and impersonal?

You can see where I’m going with this, and you may be tempted to ask, “Vague? Isn’t God the model of vague?”

Like the answers to most questions, it depends on how you look at it. Jim Hardy, a former priest with whom I worked years ago in Bolivia, eulogized at a recent funeral a mutual friend who worked with us in that country. Jim has some unique and moving insights, and I’ll be using many of them, with his permission, in upcoming blogs.



Google Image

Noting that the search for God “is for many, maybe most…a desperate mission,” Jim says, “good people, even after a long life, will confess that God remains for the most part hidden and at important moments inaccessible.” He then quotes from American author and poet Annie Dillard.

“We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”

The divine lives captive on the face of the obvious, but we’re oblivious to him/her? How can that be? Maybe because our image of God is childish. Not only do we not see him/her, we don’t feel him/her. Even though many of us were baptized, and many confirmed, in Christianity – which tries to focus our attention on the divine – we live like orphans, estranged from our father/mother.

To me, Dillard’s message is that God is everywhere, in everything and everyone. That’s not to endorse the old heresy called pantheism, one understanding of which was that God and the universe are identical. That’s not what I’m saying here. I believe that God is the universe but much more: the First Cause, the Prime Mover, the Ground of our Being – and through what we know from the New Testament – our loving father/mother to whom gratitude is possible.

If we’re oblivious to him/her, it could be that, like in the country song, we’re “looking for Love in all the wrong places.”

There’s an interesting passage in the Hebrew Bible that’s a narrative in which a prophet, at God’s command, is waiting for the Lord to pass by a cave. “A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord – but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake – but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire – but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.” It dawned on the prophet that God was the “tiny, whispering sound.”

Are we oblivious to what should be obvious? Is it possible that besides the “tiny, whispering sound” of those small things, God has tried in many ways to communicate with us for years? That we ignore signs and familiar people, like our parents and grandparents, that are evidence of God’s presence but to which we may not be open?

In a recent issue of America Magazine, musician and writer Bill McGarvey talks about a conversation he had with his friends, artist Archie Rand and Rabbi Dan Ain. “This is how he conceives of God,” he says of Rand, “as a place to direct our thankfulness. ‘Our gratitude needs an address.’ Then he laughs self-deprecatingly and says, ‘You realize this is an incredibly uncool conversation that no one outside of the three of us even cares about?’”

Gratitude platitudes are great, and gracias a la vida. But more to the point, gracias to the author of la vida.