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Gratitude keeps our society human
Excerpts from article by
Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
http://www.catholicregister.org/content/view/2224
TORONTO - Margaret
Visser is much too civilized to tell about the
incident which sparked her new book, The Gift of
Thanks: The Roots, Persistence and Paradoxical
Meanings of a Social Ritual.
Catholic Register Editor’s note: In A Gift of Thanks,
Margaret Visser tells us how gratitude might change
our approach to a very practical problem. Gratitude
could save the environment. In fact, it’s the only
thing that will, according to this excerpt from her
book.
Gratitude, replacing selfishness, greed and disregard,
will in my opinion have to be called upon to help us
surmount the ecological crisis that now threatens our
very existence. Fears of disaster and the laws we make
to protect the environment will certainly be necessary
as both pressure to act and restraint from further
abuse. But fear and the law will not be enough. What
is required is nothing less than a conversion: a
turning-around of our ideas, a change of heart, an
agreement to see things from a new point of view. Fear
can cause rather than avert abuses, and there are
infinite numbers of ways to get away with selfish
convenience or greed if people care only for their own
personal interests.
We saw earlier how gratitude is necessary for the
functioning of a healthy society, precisely because it
reaches into areas of life that the law can neither
control nor inspire. As Charles Taylor reminds us,
“High standards need strong sources.” One such source
is our knowledge of what it is like to be grateful. We
have to retrieve now and bring back into the light
something that gratitude entails: respect for what is
there, love for it (for itself and not for what we can
gouge out of it). Grateful people make good use of the
gifts they have been given, out of respect for the
giver. To be ecologically aware we shall need to be
thankful for what we so continually and lavishly
receive, and feel the need to “give back” and restore
the Earth’s ravaged bounty. It is an attitude to
nature that our most “primitive” forebears intensely
understood. We should also remember that we inherited
a rich and beautiful Earth, which it is “only fair” to
hand on to our children.
Read complete article at:
http://www.catholicregister.org/content/view/2224
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Excerpts from address of His Holiness Benedict XVI
to France on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of
the Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary At Lourdes
(September 12 - 15, 2008)
MEETING WITH REPRESENTATIVES
FROM THE WORLD OF CULTURE
Collège des Bernardins, Paris
Friday, 12 September 2008
I would like to speak with you this evening of the
origins of western theology and the roots of European
culture. I began by recalling that the place in which
we are gathered is in a certain way emblematic. It is
in fact a placed tied to monastic culture, insofar as
young monks came to live here in order to learn to
understand their vocation more deeply and to be more
faithful to their mission. We are in a place that is
associated with the culture of monasticism. Does this
still have something to say to us today, or are we
merely encountering the world of the past? In order to
answer this question, we must consider for a moment
the nature of Western monasticism itself. What was it
about? From the perspective of monasticism’s
historical influence, we could say that, amid the
great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of
peoples and the emerging new political configurations,
the monasteries were the places where the treasures of
ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a
new culture slowly took shape out of the old. But how
did it happen? What motivated men to come together to
these places? What did they want? How did they live?
First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted
straight away that it was not their intention to
create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from
the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their
goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the
times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted
to do the essential – to make an effort to find what
was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They
were searching for God. They wanted to go from the
inessential to the essential, to the only truly
important and reliable thing there is. It is sometimes
said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But
this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as
if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or
to their own death, but in an existential sense: they
were seeking the definitive behind the provisional.
Quaerere Deum: because they were Christians, this was
not an expedition into a trackless wilderness, a
search leading them into total darkness. God himself
had provided signposts, indeed he had marked out a
path which was theirs to find and to follow. This path
was his word, which had been disclosed to men in the
books of the sacred Scriptures. Thus, by inner
necessity, the search for God demands a culture of the
word or – as Jean Leclercq put it: eschatology and
grammar are intimately connected with one another in
Western monasticism (cf. L’amour des lettres et le
désir de Dieu). The longing for God, the désir de Dieu,
includes amour des lettres, love of the word,
exploration of all its dimensions. Because in the
biblical word God comes towards us and we towards him,
we must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to
understand it in its construction and in the manner of
its expression. Thus it is through the search for God
that the secular sciences take on their importance,
sciences which show us the path towards language.
Because the search for God required the culture of the
word, it was appropriate that the monastery should
have a library, pointing out pathways to the word. It
was also appropriate to have a school, in which these
pathways could be opened up. Benedict calls the
monastery a dominici servitii schola. The monastery
serves eruditio, the formation and education of man –
a formation whose ultimate aim is that man should
learn how to serve God. But it also includes the
formation of reason – education – through which man
learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word
itself.
Yet in order to have a full vision of the culture of
the word, which essentially pertains to the search for
God, we must take a further step. The Word which opens
the path of that search, and is to be identified with
this path, is a shared word. True, it pierces every
individual to the heart (cf. Acts 2:37). Gregory the
Great describes this a sharp stabbing pain, which
tears open our sleeping soul and awakens us, making us
attentive to the essential reality, to God (cf.
Leclercq, p. 35). But in the process, it also makes us
attentive to one another. The word does not lead to a
purely individual path of mystical immersion, but to
the pilgrim fellowship of faith. And so this word must
not only be pondered, but also correctly read. As in
the rabbinic schools, so too with the monks, reading
by the individual is at the same time a corporate
activity. “But if legere and lectio are used without
an explanatory note, then they designate for the most
part an activity which, like singing and writing,
engages the whole body and the whole spirit”, says
Jean Leclercq on the subject (ibid., 21).
And once again, a further step is needed. We ourselves
are brought into conversation with God by the word of
God. The God who speaks in the Bible teaches us how to
speak with him ourselves. Particularly in the book of
Psalms, he gives us the words with which we can
address him, with which we can bring our life, with
all its highpoints and lowpoints, into conversation
with him, so that life itself thereby becomes a
movement towards him. The psalms also contain frequent
instructions about how they should be sung and
accompanied by instruments. For prayer that issues
from the word of God, speech is not enough: music is
required. Two chants from the Christian liturgy come
from biblical texts in which they are placed on the
lips of angels: the Gloria, which is sung by the
angels at the birth of Jesus, and the Sanctus, which
according to Isaiah 6 is the cry of the seraphim who
stand directly before God. Christian worship is
therefore an invitation to sing with the angels, and
thus to lead the word to its highest destination. Once
again, Jean Leclercq says on this subject: “The monks
had to find melodies which translate into music the
acceptance by redeemed man of the mysteries that he
celebrates. The few surviving capitula from Cluny thus
show the Christological symbols of the individual
modes” (cf. ibid. p. 229).
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