on gratitude and suffering

what to do with a month of thanks when the world is breaking apart

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Earlier this week I had a conversation with a Jesuit priest in preparation for an upcoming episode of the podcast I work on professionally, “AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast.” Our topic was gratitude.

It’s an apt topic for this month of Thanksgiving. It’s also a foundational spiritual discipline for practitioners of Ignatian spirituality.

Look no further than the examen prayer. This prayer, devised by Ignatius of Loyola himself, is a simple, powerful tool. You begin in gratitude—thanks for the stuff of this day—and then you proceed in the company of the Spirit to review all the details of your past 24 hours: the good, the challenging, and the opportunities now recognized in which to try again. In the end, you resolve in the Spirit to keep going, to keep striving to discover that unique path in life to which God is calling you.

So, that Jesuit and I talked about gratitude and Thanksgiving and the examen prayer. And, because he’s something of an expert on the examen, we explored the multitude of approaches that someone can take to this prayer.

It becomes rote if you pray it the same way again and again, my guest said. Even Ignatius gave different versions. The key is to make it fresh and vibrant and relevant to your life. That’s where you find God.

My guest paused, noted that perhaps we’re at the cusp of something, a movement of sorts, where the examen is concerned. This 500-year-old prayer still has poignancy today. Nowhere is that so abundantly clear than in the array of examen riffs and reinterpretations that appear throughout the Ignatian family. (You can find a bunch on our site, Jesuits.org.) There are examens for racism and civic life and ecology. There are daily examens and examens to be done after a global pandemic and ones that invites us to accompany refugees. There are some that look at stories and others that look at social media.

“And yet, we still begin in gratitude?” I asked. “It seems almost offensive to begin in gratitude when we’re talking about things like racism and the destruction of the environment and folks being forced from their homes.”

My guest nodded. That’s a really important point, he said. And it’s not easy. But when we begin with the problem, we so easily get stuck. We spiral in hopelessness. The darkness presses in. Ignatius would call that the false spirit.

When we begin in gratitude, our imaginations expand, he continued. We realize the giftedness of our lives, the good gifts God desires to give us. And we begin to discern how we might put those gifts—small though they might be—at the service of solving these big, global issues of environmental and social injustice.

“Amen to that,” I said.

So, for me, as I begin this month of Thanksgiving, as I look out at a world torn asunder by war and hate and violence and suffering, I will still choose to start in gratitude. I have to. Because I want to be able to help solve these problem, ease this pain.

And so, we begin in thanksgiving. Not because we naively look past the problems of our day. We begin in thanksgiving because we have to believe we have what this moment needs. We are enough meet this moment.

We believe in a God who is a giver of good gifts. And that same God believes in us, that we have the wherewithal to use them.

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