6th June, 2011

GORDON PREECE

Novelist Dostoevsky dubbed our species the ‘ungrateful biped’. Theologian Karl Barth agreed: "radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude – ingratitude for God’s grace and goodness. God ‘is the source and stream and sea of everything good, of all light and life and joy. Grace and gratitude belong together like  heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice (evokes) an echo. Gratitude is meant to follow grace like thunder lightning’. "

CHARGED WITH THE GRANDUER OF GOD: Lake Lucerne and Mt PIlatus, Switzerland. PICTURE: © Michael Faes(www.istockphoto.com)

Two Biblical passages agree. Luke 17: 11-19 tells of the 10 lepers, whom Jesus heals, but nine never give him a second thought. Ingratitude is a disease uglier, more demeaning and deadly than leprosy. Only one returned to thank him - a Samaritan; perhaps his outcast status helped him not take grace for granted. Of him, Jesus said "your faith has made you whole" - the others were only half healed – their healing would dry up, incomplete, because these ingrates didn’t return thanks to the source, of all life and joy.

A second Biblical perspective on ingratitude is from Romans 1: 21 - even though human beings knew intellectually that God was Creator, they suppressed that knowledge so it didn’t flow back to God in a rising tide of thankful worship. They worshipped the creature not the Creator. They refused to think thankfully. Surely here lies the root of our ecological problems. We’re destroying our ecology because we have no doxology. We fail to see, says Hopkins, that "the earth is charged with the grandeur of God". We consume the earth without satisfaction because advertising sets up an ad-versarial relationship between us and creation. It deliberately makes us discontented with what we have because it’s not quite as good as what we could have.

Yet, there is hope. In A Color Purple, black singer Shug Avery is walking with long suffering and abused Celie through a field populated by dancing purple flowers. "How do you think God feels", Shug says, "when He creates some purple flowers and people just walk past without noticing. I think it makes him real mad". "What’s he do about it?", says Celie. "He just goes and makes some more", answers Shug. The prodigal God just goes and creates some more.

How can we cultivate an attitude of gratitude? By seeing and smelling the flowers. And perhaps, says GK Chesteron, by extending the practice of grace: "You say grace before meals, allright. But I say grace before the play and opera, and grace before the concert and pantomime, before opening a book, and...before swimming and...walking, playing, dancing, and grace before putting pen in ink." That’s what it means with Paul ‘to give thanks in everything’, to practice gracious living, to be the grateful biped.

Gordon Preece is director of Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity & Society.

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