There is something frightening about gratitude. Does that seem like a strange statement? How could gratitude be a threat? How could it be frightening? 

That’s the question that got lodged in my head today as I was out for a walk. Passing all the startling new green that is leafing out from every direction here in Mississippi as spring is kicking off,  posed a challenge to the tired, gray thoughts that cloud my mind from time to time. Every tip of every branch is celebrating the return of newly grown joy. An irrepressible springing joy, that arrives just when you’d gotten used to things being skeletal and bone-cold. Oftentimes, right at the point when the chill has worked its way down and settled with a seeming permanence in our marrow, some newborn wind breathes into the nostrils of this slumbering world and wakes it again to the truth of an indomitable life, to hope, goodness, and beauty. 

This pattern is built into our world. It’s so common that it’s easy to write it off as a mere material happenstance, rather than a tale woven into things that endlessly bears witness to something ultimately true. A deeper magic, as Lewis says, that ever abides, untouchable, incorruptible, beyond the reach of decay. 

There is so much to be grateful for. But I do think that gratitude poses a threat to us, if we have gotten too comfortable with despair’s sad ability to soothe us. In my own experience, I’ve found myself getting so used to believing that goodness was out of reach, that, in despair, I wound up settling into sad substitutes for things like friendship, affection, joy, creativity. 

God has built into us strong and beautiful desires, desires for a life of deep abiding friendship, attachment, generative creativity, and joy. What happens when, for a thousand reasons, those things are torn from us and held out beyond our reach? Maybe someone wounded us deeply? A trespass that traumatized some good thing in us, so that we can no longer see or feel it as good at all, much less hope that the good God created it for could ever be restored. That’s positive wounding – meaning something terrible did happen to us. Then there is negative wounding – something good didn’t happen or was withheld. Maybe no one hugged us growing up, no one listened when you had a real need, or encouragement was withheld. Often sins of omission do as much damage as sins of commission. In other words, to be starved is just as deadly as being poisoned. 

Whatever the case, a lack of love can wear us down until we give up. Love and goodness are someone else’s fairy tale. Someone else’s fantasy. Maybe we’re not aware of the degree to which we’ve joined our hearts to hopelessness and adopted cynicism as the most reasonable position. Because, if we’re honest, if we’re in a position of such woundedness, then according to the evidence offered by our experience, cynicism is the most reasonable thing in the world. 

And here’s the kicker. Once we get to that point, and I’m speaking from my own heart, cynicism and despair actually do become soothing. They feel good. If you’ve lost hope in ever accessing real goodness, hope is no balm, it’s salt in the wound. Gratitude has to do with hope which has to do with holding on to a faith that says we’re not cut off from the goodness God dreams of for us. That’s why gratitude feels threatening, because it holds up to our sad eyes a picture of the good thing we no longer believe we can have. Cynicism says, “I know better than to believe that fantasy.” And that’s why cynicism is so soothing, so comforting. And why it’s so frighteningly easy to get very comfortable with. It protects us from gratitude, from hope. 

Things like gratitude, hope, faith, desire – these invite us to keep trying. They seem to taunt us with the possibility of good things, good things we’ve long since given up on. The Good News of Jesus’s love could feel like a cruel joke to us, if we’ve gone so far as to make peace with despair. The numbness is the only relief we believe we can have any realistic hope of attaining, and the call of Jesus to rise and follow him just makes us feel more exhausted than ever. We pull the sheets back over our heads.

Hopelessness is safer, more comfortable, soothingly familiar. It’s not good–of course we know that–but it kind of works, you know? Once you stop believing in steaks, you’ll settle for spam. It’s the best you can hope for, right? 

It’s been a long, slow journey for me, as the Lord has patiently coaxed a wounded dove out of the crevices and crags. It’s still going on, of course. Learning to hope again is not pleasant at first. Faith, in the beginning, is nowhere near as soothing as cynicism, despair, and faithlessness. Trust and gratitude feel like they’ll kill us. The desires God himself planted in our hearts become so entangled with shame and starvation that we just wish they’d go away entirely. But those desires are what make us human, and it seems that to remove them would do more damage and be a greater sin than to leave them unfulfilled or even wrongly filled. 

Jesus says that because of the increase of wickedness in the world, the love of many will grow cold. It’s an ongoing prayer of mine, that those places in my heart that have grown so cold would not shove away, in despair, the warmth Jesus is offering. That they would not freeze up. I pray that I would stop settling for the voice of a sad sarcasm that would offer to soothe a heart so easily resigned to loneliness and hurt. I pray that the temptation to a sleepy passive pseudo-rest would not pull the blanket over my eyes and keep me from seeing that face that smiles tenderly upon every one of us, inviting us to rise, pick up our mat and walk, knowing that the devastating power of our sins and sorrows has been fully embraced by Jesus. That we are carried in his arms, and where we’d believed ourselves hopelessly cursed, God himself persists in speaking blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace.

A Closing Prayer

Lord, whether it’s by something terrible done to us or by some good thing that was withheld from us, or even by our own failures, we’ve been hurt. Our hurts have gotten so loud and persistent that they crowd out your kindness. In fact, it feels scary to even give good things a chance, because they just remind us of what we’ve come to believe we can’t have. But you have made it very clear that you desire to be with us no matter where we are. You, Jesus, have pressed into every hurting place, bringing with you kindness and hope. You do not dismiss our hurt, you embrace it, even as you call us to bravely turn toward new goodness that you desire for us. Beautiful Lord, please keep up your gracious, persistent work in us; please continue to coax out from among the craggy crevices your frightened, wounded doves, mending the wings that we’ve learned to keep safely tucked away and flightless. Amen.