“Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?” (Luke 17.17)
Ingratitude has an ugly face and no amount of makeup can turn it pretty. I remember an attorney friend telling me a story about the ugly face of ingratitude that he had seen. He explained to me that he had served as the executor for a man’s estate. As such, he was in charge of distributing the man’s assets to the beneficiaries. This man had no children, but he did have a number of nieces and nephews. The attorney said that soon after the man’s death he began to get calls and letters from these next-of-kin asking him when they would be receiving their checks for their share of the inheritance.
A sadness came over the attorney’s face as he spoke of these calls. He explained to the callers and letter-writers that it took a while to settle an estate, but that their checks would be coming soon. Shortly thereafter, he issued checks to these ten or twelve nieces or nephews. The amount of the checks was not small. The attorney looked at me, his eyes searching mine, and he said, “And you know what? Afterwards, not a single one of them told me thank you for the check.” He paused and gave me time to consider his words. Then he said, “And some of those checks were for $20,000. And not one of them said thanks.”
That attorney had come face to face with ingratitude and he saw all its ugliness–a face pockmarked with selfishness and self-absorption, with thoughtlessness and moral blindness. It was a face that left an ugly impression. Shakespeare was right when he spoke of ingratitude in his play, “King Lear,” as he described it in these words, “Ingratitude–thou marbled-hearted fiend,/ More hideous, when thou show’st thee in a child/ Than the sea-monster.”
The Jewish Rabbi named Yeshua bar Yossef shared the same sentiments about ingratitude. Perhaps it wounded him in a special way because he was a generous soul, always giving to others, whether it was food or drink, clothing or compassion. The evangelist named Luke tells us of one such time when the Rabbi was on his way to Jerusalem, traveling from Galilee through Samaria. He entered one of the small villages on the way, where he was met by ten lepers, men who were shunned because of their sickness.
Since the men were prohibited from coming close to other people for fear of contagion, they shouted to the Rabbi, “Have pity on us!” The Rabbi saw them, approached, and told them to present themselves to the priest, which was the Mosaic requirement for those who wished to prove they no longer carried the disease. The men went away. But one of them, “realizing he had been healed, returned, glorifying God in a loud voice.” He fell at the feet of the Rabbi and thanked him.
Seeing the solitary man in front of him, the Teacher asked, “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” His questions remain unanswered to this very day, reminding us that the questions can and must be answered only by us. Where are the other nine? Are we perhaps one of them?
Gratitude should not be all that difficult, and yet it is. Why? The simplest answer is our willful blindness. We choose not to see the many things we have received and instead we choose to see the things we don’t have. It is selective vision. Or we could say gratitude is like having a lazy eye that shuts out the magnitude of gifts that have come to us. No one said it better than the writer who explained it in this way, “An ungrateful man is like a hog under a tree eating acorns, but never looking up to see where they come from.”
Gratitude, I think, requires training. Just as we must teach a child to say “thank you,” or else they do not, so we have to teach ourselves to see the gifts before us and to express gratitude for them. Orthodox Jews also understand that training is necessary to learn gratitude. For this reason, they insist that a person find 100 blessings in each day given to them. This practice trains our eye not to overlook any good thing that comes to us.
If that approach doesn’t work for us, then I suggest what I call “Gratitude Boot Camp.” As we know, boot camps are places of intensive training over a short period of time for recruits to the military. A “Gratitude Boot Camp” achieves the same training–not in combat techniques but in gratitude awareness–in an intensive setting where we learn to be grateful. Some examples include volunteering at a children’s hospital or a VA hospital or a drug rehabilitation clinic, or visiting a retirement home on a regular basis, or working in a food kitchen that serves the poor and the needy, or offering to teach reading to children in a poor school district. Of course there are other such places. These “boot camps” have a way of training our eyes to recognize the many blessings we have that we too often take for granted.
I heard a psychologist give a lecture in which she shared the story of a young man who was attending one of the Ivy League colleges. One night he went to a party and got drunk. As he walked across campus to get back to his dorm, he saw the miniature trolley car that ran during the day. He jumped on top and somehow grabbed onto the two electrical cables that powered the car. He was electrocuted and fell to the ground.
A friend called 911 and he was rushed to a nearby hospital. His life was saved, but both his legs and one arm had to be amputated. That is where the story would have ended for most people, but not for this young man. After months of painful rehabilitation, he returned to classes. He graduated and he applied to medical school. He completed medical school and became a doctor.
Now he practices medicine in San Francisco, where his practice consists primarily of soldiers who have been victims of roadside bombings and IED’s. He says that when he comes into the patient’s room, that person understands immediately that he knows what they are feeling. And because of that shared experience, he is able to help them where others may be less able.
The doctor was asked once if–given the choice–he would go back and undo that horrible accident that resulted in the loss of his legs and one arm. He answered–without pause–that he would not change anything. As he explained, without the accident he would have gone on with his life and taken everything for granted. He said that the accident opened his eyes and changed the course of his life. Because of it he became a doctor and now he helps other young men and women with similar injuries to find a way to live. He said he was grateful for that night.
That man, it is safe to say, taught himself to open his eyes and to see good in his life where others would not see it. He learned to say thank you when another person in those circumstances might have found nothing worthy of thanks. He was the one out of the ten who returned, glorifying God and thanking him. So, gratitude–I like to think–comes from eyes that see our story maybe didn’t go the way we wanted it to go, but are able to see that our story still has more than enough good stuff in it.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 