“At a certain age our lives simplify and we need have only three phrases left in our spiritual vocabulary: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” –Morris West
Gratitude is the ultimate virtue, undergirding everything else, even love. It is synonymous with holiness.
Gratitude not only defines sanctity; it also defines maturity. We are mature to the degree that we are grateful. But what brings us there? What makes for a deeper human maturity? I would like to suggest ten major demands that reside inside both human and Christian maturity:
- Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy: Maturity invites us to see, understand, and accept this complexity with empathy.
- Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred rather than give them back in kind: Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will retransmit.
- Let suffering soften rather than harden our souls: Suffering and humiliation find us all, in full measure, but how we respond to them, with forgiveness or bitterness, will determine the level of our maturity and the color of our person.
- Forgive: In the end there is only one condition for entering heaven (and living inside human community), namely, forgiveness.
- Live in gratitude: To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.
- Bless more and curse less: The capacity to praise more than to criticize defines maturity.
- Live in an ever-greater transparency and honesty: We are as sick as our sickest secret, but we are also as healthy as we are honest.
- Pray both affectively and liturgically: We are mature to the degree that we open our own helplessness and invite in God’s strength, and to the degree that we pray with others that the whole world will do the same thing.
- Become ever-wider in your embrace: We are mature only when we are compassionate as God is compassionate, namely, when our sun too shines on those we like and those we do not.
- Stand where you stand and let God protect you: We can only do our best, whatever our place in life, wherever we stand, whatever our limits, whatever our shortcoming, and trust that this is enough, that if we die at our post, honest, doing our duty, God will do the rest.
God is a prodigiously-loving, fully-understanding, completely-empathic parent. We are mature and free of false anxiety to the degree that we grasp that and trust that truth. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Major Imperatives Within Mature Discipleship”]
