by Leela Ramdeen, Chair of the Catholic Commission for Social Justice
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice. ~Meister Eckhart
Too often we pray to God for all sorts of things and when our prayers are answered, like the nine lepers in today’s Gospel (Luke 17:11-19), we forget to give Him thanks.
In today’s Gospel, it is a Samaritan, a person who is not a Jew, who returns to thank Jesus for healing him. All we have is “gift” from God for which we should be thankful.
We sing the hymn: “Give thanks with a grateful heart”, but are we just mouthing words? How do we show our thanks to God for His many gifts to us?
Many of you seen an e-mail being circulated at the moment. It tells of a Catholic man who is driving in a busy city looking for a parking space. After going around the block a couple of times he turns to God saying: “God, I’m going to be late for my meeting. If you find me a parking space, I promise I’ll go to Church every Sunday and I’ll stop drinking so much. Suddenly, he sees a space just in front of him.
As he pulls in and parks he says to God: “Never mind, God, I just found one.”
Pope Benedict XVI said in Malta (18.4.10): “In every area of our lives we need the help of God’s grace. With him, we can do all things: without him we can do nothing.”
Part of character building involves the inculcation in our children and adults of the virtue of “gratitude”. The writer, Michael Hickey, rightly states:
“Gratitude is the virtue of being thankful for a benefit received. It creates goodness through a state of thankfulness. In its etymology the word ‘gratitude’ came from the Latin word ‘gratus’ meaning “grace” and grace is the presence of God manifested in people through virtues.
“To be grateful is to be essentially graceful or grace-filled…The Roman philosopher Cicero called gratitude, ‘The mother of all virtues.’ Thomas Aquinas maintained that the virtue of gratitude was rooted in love and flowed as part of the Cardinal Virtue of Justice. The greater the debt that has been paid, the more that is due. The vice of ingratitude has its root in selfish pride. A prideful person is oftentimes an ungrateful person.”
At our recent seminar with Sir Ellis Clark, he reminded us of the importance of the following Preamble to our Constitution. We should be grateful that in writing it, he set out the basic principles upon which our nation is built. Those present felt it should be shared more widely. Read and share:
“Whereas the People of Trinidad and Tobago –
have affirmed that the Nation of Trinidad and Tobago is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, faith in fundamental human rights and freedoms, the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions, the dignity of the human person and the equal and inalienable rights with which all members of the human family are endowed by their creator;
respect the principles of social justice and therefore believe that the operation of the economic system should result in the material resources of the community being so distributed as to subserve the common good, that there should be adequate means of livelihood for all, that labour should not be exploited or forced by economic necessity to operate in inhumane conditions but that there should be opportunity for advancement on the basis of recognition of merit, ability and integrity;
have asserted their belief in a democratic society in which all persons may, to the extent of their capacity, play some part in the institutions of the national life and thus develop and maintain due respect for lawfully constituted authority;
recognise that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law;
desire that their Constitution should enshrine the above-mentioned principles and beliefs and make provision for ensuring the protection in Trinidad and Tobago of fundamental human rights and freedoms.”
