Gratitude can be dangerous.
When gratitude becomes one way to recognize one person or family as more blessed than another, it is dangerous.
Gratitude is not meant to open our eyes to how good we have it and how bad others have it. “At least we aren’t him,” Job’s friends said in the pitying look they exchanged. Gratitude is not eye-opening, but heart-opening. It is the moment our hearts open up to the hard truth that life, at times, can be too much for any of us. Gratitude recognizes that even a moment of peace is a gift from God.
Gratitude is meant to turn our attention away from ourselves to the hand of the giver, who gives not unjustly, but in hopes that all we have would involve a borderless we – a we that stretches and expands like the pantyhose that left all women itchy and irritated.
Gratitude is never dangerous as long as covers the bold and the meek, the haves and the have nots with the same sheer delight that somehow, somehow, a planet full of broken human beings keeps spinning.
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
Lisa Lewton 