Two skills we typically try and teach little children are to share, and to say thank you. As I gain experience in life I have come to see, more and more. just how important these skills are. They aren’t just tools for interpersonal relations. Well lived, they become habits of the mind that shape our personality.
I bring this up because a few days ago I was in a dialogue with a person who was very angry with God. Not for anything done to him, mind you. He was just angry with the suffering in the world, and his conclusion was that God was unjust. Anger is a natural reaction to injustice, even if that injustice is only perceived and not real, so I could sympathize with what he was experiencing, particularly since I had been there too when I was younger. I hoped, in our dialogue, to help him get a wider perspective.
Alas, the conversation went nowhere. As I thought about it, I realised that part of the reason we weren’t hearing each other was because we were coming from very different perspectives. At one point I asked him, “What, for you, is better? To have an imperfect existence, or to not exist at all?”
He couldn’t answer. More than that, he didn’t want to answer. Because, after all, if an imperfect existence is better than none at all, and if we owe our existence to God, then we are faced with two options: be thankful to God for what we have, or be resentful for what we don’t.
There’s a name for feeling resentful when we feel we are owed something and actually aren’t. It’s called “entitlement”. An article on WebMD defines it like this: The entitlement mentality is defined as a sense of deservingness or being owed a favor when little or nothing has been done to deserve special treatment. It’s the “you owe me” attitude.
It’s a profound existential starting point. If our existence comes from God, there is nothing that we could have done to “earn” that existence in the first place, because we didn’t yet exist! Our existence starts as pure gift, and any sense of deservingness is therefore, by definition, entitlement. In this case, not entitlement as a sign of poor mental health, but entitlement as a kind of spiritual disease.
My Christian faith teaches me that starting with gratitude is a key part of a healthy spirituality and, if the WebMD article is to believed, it is good for mental health too. Jesus talked quite a bit about having gratitude for what we have, rather than jealousy or envy regarding what we don’t in comparison with others. Heck, the key religious ceremony he left us in the Last Supper is called the Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving”. In other words, starting with gratitude is an essential Christian ideal.
I once was chatting with an old friend of mine who had become increasingly bitter in life. At one point in our conversation, as I challenged him with this, he said to me, “If life isn’t perfect then God is at fault, because life should be perfect.” I replied that only God can be infinitely perfect, and the rest of us, as created beings, can only get a finite share in his perfection. He answered, “Then God is at fault for creating us at all.”
I was so sad. He wasn’t saying he’d rather not exist. He was simply saying he’d rather be resentful for what he didn’t have than grateful for what he did. Jealousy of God for His infinite perfection was a recipe for eternal entitlement. I realised my poor friend already had a footstep in Hell.
I sometimes worry that, if our society loses its sense of God and sees its sense of entitlement rise, we will slowly becomes less spontaneously grateful to each other. We’ll be less generous, less patient, less ready to serve, and less forgiving. We’ll even be less industrious, because why strive for success if others should just “owe” us what we “deserve”?
For me, as I get older, I see my own need for an “attitude of gratitude” more and more. I am so blessed, and even in my struggles I try and find that blessing. I don’t always succeed, but I’ve never known the effort to be a waste of time. It’s part of what helps me see life as a grand adventure, and helps me open my heart to Heaven, even here on Earth.
May all our Catholic churches be schools of gratitude. God bless all of you!
Not so sure its entirely ont-ils fellows mind but rather total désappointement in God as was presented to him and not a personal God but rather à Universal God. Such as it was in my youth. Contrary i might add as is presented today...
Very well said.