Psalm 62: “In you alone is my soul at rest. My help comes from you.”

How contagious is the spirit of a happy person! Yesterday I spent the day playing tour guide to a young friend, just out of college, about to be married, who has landed a very good job in an area that fascinates him and at a salary that surprises him. “I'm so happy right now,” he says, “I can't believe it. How did I deserve all this? I keep wondering if something will go wrong.” It takes me back to another young man, now married some twenty years, who said on the eve of his wedding: “It's so wonderful to have Kate's love. How could I ever deserve this?” We all so readily ask in disaster or disappointment, “Why me?” As the fellows quoted above make clear, there are, happily, those who say the same about good things. Why me? How did I ever deserve this?

It all highlights another way of dividing the human race into two categories. There are, one, those who look on everything as a gift, with gratitude. And there are those, two, who see the universe and God as owing them all they have and a lot more. In practice it amounts to looking at everything either with thanksgiving or with resentment. It is so easy to take disappointments, rejection, being passed over for a position, harm to one's self, someone else's advancement, just the inequalities of gifts, to take any of these as fuel for the fire of resentment.

The thread of references to thanksgiving in the Eucharist could be an antidote to all this if we'd allow ourselves to breathe the expansive atmosphere of the Mass prayers. E.g., “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give Him thanks and praise. Father, all powerful and ever-living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Psalm 27: “I believe I shall see the Lord’s goodness / in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord; be strong; / be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord!”

Reply to Fr. Don at: DTalafous@csbsju.edu

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