A Window into a Parent's Life and The Problem With Gratitude

This blog post consists of two parts: The first part is a window and snippet into the life of a parent . The second part is a philosophical contemplation on the idea of gratitude. 

This morning, as I was driving my son to school, I managed to have a discussion with him about a question of spiritual matter. In such moments, I feel my life finding its zenith in terms of significance. It is as if, all my accumulated experiences in life, many of which difficult and painful, takes on a different shine under the light of parental love. Some sort of a transmutation occurs, and one’s own life experience, now food for the youthful soul, changes into spiritual treasures of immense worth. One feels his soul elevate and his purpose in life coming into clearer focus…

This morning, the spiritual discussion went as follows. My son told me that he had a mix feelings of love and hate for his teacher, and he did not know what to do about it. I asked him why, and he told me it was because his teacher punishes him physically. I told him, it was not wrong for him to think that his teacher was doing something wrong, but that perhaps he has to find way to free himself from the hate. He asked me how, and I told him that he could take aim and vanquish the spirit of hate with the positron cannon gun of forgiveness, a reference to his favorite Japanese anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion. Taking the metaphor further, I told him that he had to charge the cannon first with the spirit of humility. That he first has to see that he was in desperate need of forgiveness himself. He asked me how was it possible for him to see that he needed forgiveness, and I told him to pray to God to reveal his sins to him. I also told him that in life, most of wait for others to ask for forgiveness before firing the gun of forgiveness, but there was no need for that, one can squeeze the trigger long before that.

As we were finishing up the discussion, an insight occurred to me… I told my son, just as we were pulling up to the school that besides the positron cannon gun of forgiveness, there was another super weapon he has at his disposal, that he can use in his spiritual battles at school. He got intrigued and ask what was it? I told him that it was a most super powerful ‘quark gluon’ rifle, but that I could only reveal the details tomorrow, teasing him a bit to bait his interest.

“What is this rifle dad?”, he took the bait, he needed to have the answer now.

“It’s the quark-gluon rifle of gratitude, or in simpler words, the rifle of saying thank you, we’ll talk more about it tomorrow”, I replied in a tone which suggest that I am someone with special insights into the mysteries and secrets of spiritual life adding a bit of dramatic effect to end the conversation in a cliffhanger.

However, after my son alighted and waved goodbye to me, doubt started to pop into my mind. I started to feel vaguely uneasy and felt a certain lack of clarity with myself, a spiritual impotence if you will. Why is this simple phrase ‘thank you’ a spiritual weapon of immense power? Can I clarify it for myself further? I felt that I may have mentioned the word to my son because I have encountered it many times in my reading of the Church Father and also in the past within self-help literatures, but have little Christian experience with the word. At office, I decided that I would write something about gratitude, in order to gain clarity for myself.   

So here’s the second part of blog, an investigation into gratitude. Gratitude, why did the idea rings hollow and sounded banal in in my soul today? Unable to generate any stirrings in the heart nor bring calm or joy to it. Perhaps today, the grace of God is lacking in me and that I am stuck in a worldly way seeing things. A way of seeing that belongs to the past, a past without God or hope.

So what is this past way of seeing gratitude? Let us investigate…

In the past, I was steeped in all things self-help, and used to practice something called gratitude journaling whereby everyday I would write down things for which I am grateful for. This practice while able to generate some positivity within myself initially, ultimately withered into nothingness within a few short months. Like the barren fig in the Gospel, the practice looked good from afar but was unable to bear true fruits. So what was the gist of what I wrote down in the past? Why did it petered out? In reviewing my past journal, I see that there are things which I wrote down that are perhaps things that I’ll still write down today

• Being blessed with a family

 There were also things which I perhaps won’t write down today that are worldly in nature:

•  Silicon Valley: For the abundance of technological innovation that made the world what it is today

So given that there are things which I should be grateful for even now, why did my practice stopped? As I reviewed the things I wrote, an answer came to my mind. It was because I didn’t know to whom was I ultimately being grateful to and what exactly was it that I am grateful about. The whole exercise, I recall now, felt rather muddled up in my soul, and if I tried to force clarity upon myself, it starts to become contrived and dead.

For example, was I being grateful to the random manifestations of an uncaring universe when I wrote down that I was grateful to have a family? Was I being grateful to my own self (what a spiritual burden that is). Was I being grateful to my wife who did me a turn of favor by marrying me? (I could insist myself to say so, it would faintly be true, but would also ring hollow somehow…) Besides, am I really grateful to have a family? All things in the world seemed to be a mix of good and bad, everything seemed to be corrupted by the touch and stench of death. Sure, a family gives us joy, but it also gives us sorrow and even if we have the best family we could ever hope for, wouldn’t they die one day? Can I unequivocally say I am grateful. No, not really at the time, my soul knew it was dealing with something counterfeit. So what was it I was being grateful for, I guess I didn’t really know at the time, or knew it dimly.

So what is the remedy here? 

How do we activate this quark gluon gun of gratitude that everyone says is important, and which I told my son will help him in his battles with the demons ? From a conceptual standpoint, it is perhaps not difficult to state the 'right' Christian answer. We are to be grateful to God, and for the following things He has done for us:

• The fact He created us high above all created thing
• His love for us as his children and His sacrifice on the cross for our salvation
• The spiritual gifts that He showers to those who are willing to receive them in faith and humility 

Yet, this conceptual scheme, while easy to state and comprehend, is hard to experience as a lived Truth and thus hard to believe in the reality of our being.  But believe we must, for the alternative is to have an empty life which is bereft of meaning, hope, which we can't be thankful for, not in the least. 

So what to do ?

Do we commit intellectual suicide here so this reality can become accessible to us ? How do we respond to Nietzsche's Super Atheist, the Ubermensch, which criticizes us, 'Stop with your delusions... Accept the harshness that life is arbitrary,  forge your meaning for yourself henceforth'  Do we defend ourselves by parading a host of logical arguments which prove the inconvertible fact that Christ in fact existed, was crucified and has risen? Some type of first principle arguments which we can link up proposition by proposition, into some sort of an intellectual chainmail that could withstand the heavy blows from the Spirit of Rationality. Somehow, the soul, when it can be honest to itself, quavers at the thought of such a defense, 

"This is a fools work, hopeless... A house of card, which shatters our belief and our peace at the first contact", it seem to say.

So what is the answer ? 

Our Good Lord and the Church Fathers, they teach us another way, a way rooted in the direct perception of Truth via the heart and not through the mind. “Blessed art those who are pure in heart, for they can see God”, says our Savior. Maybe we can only really possess this truth, this un-counterfeited gratitude if we are able to see God. To see Him after we have successfully purified and conquered the unruly impulses of the heart to chase after the empty things of this life, the vainglories, the fleeting and momentary sensual pleasure, the notion that we are our own true Gods. 

Personally, in the briefest of moments, when the concerns of worldly life recede a bit into the background a bit, I am able to see faintly that what the Holy Scriptures say is in fact true. These moments of clarity, they occur to me in the small mundane everyday happenings. For example, on Wednesday, I found myself experiencing a small measure of joy when I was able to look past my own impatience when queuing at the Auntie Anne’s stall at KLCC to become dimly aware of the humanity of the girl who was serving me behind the counter. It was as if my heart could ‘see’ faintly that the being standing in front of me was a creation of immense worth, worth more than perhaps the sum total of all things non-human in the entire universe, the stars, the supernovas etc..  It occur to me that being able to thank this being, it was not something trivial, but an act, if done properly, imbued with divine significance. 

If only now, my heart could put aside its sinful, prodigal ways, to see this fact clearer, more often, perhaps it would be able to peer beyond the veil of the vain pursuits of life, and see into the wonder and abundance of True Life, the one which God intended for us to experience. If we can see it, then we can be grateful, we can have non-counterfeit gratitude. 

Will stop now as I've been spending a bit too much time writing and editing this, may God bless you the reader.

 

P/S: I wrote the above post on Wednesday, and it prepared me for my follow-up conversation with my son on the following day. That morning, I shared with him an instructive version of the musings above. I told him that he needed to go through a 3-step activation process to use the full power of the quark gluon gun. I told him that most of us are given this gun, but without an instruction manual, and as a result, normally all we can muster is a weak spluttering of plasma. 

So, how to activate the gun ?

The first step, I told him, was to ‘see’ that his teacher was a significant creation of God, in fact the most significant creation of God besides other human beings. More worthwhile than all the stars, and the supernovas are like cosmic firecrackers going off to celebrate our existence, that we are in fact centers of the universe (borrowing from Solzhenitsyn). His response here was to tell me that he got a tingling sensation when he hears this and that he believe the worst thing one can do to another human is to not call him a human. (He struck upon the evils of de-humanization)

As for the second step, I started by telling him that human beings are significant because we can do something not of the universe, something beyond it, the creation of goodness. I told him that the second step consist of paying attention and trying to ‘see’ the goodness in others. A goodness that is not easy to see for it has been shattered by the fall and exist as fragmentary pieces mixed in with a slurry of bad things. To this, his responded that he get’s it and added that goodness (love) is not of the world because while there is a finite energy budget in the universe, there is no finite budget in the unive3rse when it comes to love. I felt this insights of his to be non-trivial, the way he juxtaposed physics and metaphysics, it strikes through to the heart of the matter. I told him that I would not have been able to think up such a succinct metaphor in all my life and thanked him for it.

Finally, as the last step, I told him that he needed to ‘see’ the sacrifice his teacher has to make in order to bring him this fragmentary goodness to him. He concurred with this and added his own final summary on the matter.

“These guns, while it appears we are firing at others, in fact we are firing at the demons inside of ourselves. Others are like a reflector for us”, he said.

Afterwards, an idea for a next discussion emerged between us. How can we help others to remove the slurry of badness and glue back again their fragmented goodness. We decided to pursue in another day. Before he alighted from the car, he said to me in a soft voice, “thank you dad..” Firing his gun of gratitude at me. It gave me a glimmer of hope that life is indeed something to be infinitely grateful for.