Failure of Gratefulness

A week or so ago I was watching The Discovery Channel or some such cable station. The story was rather tangentially related to medical science, about a 7 year old child, known as the "Mermaid Girl". Her legs, well, really, there is only one, are fused. They cannot be separated because of an implication of her kidneys. She has dialysis. She can't, obviously, walk. When she was younger, and the medication that she takes had not yet caused enormous weight gain, she could use her upper body to drag herself along the ground. But now, she has to be carried or be in a wheelchair. She is smarter than the average 7 year old given the enormity of her short life's experience. Her mother wonders whether she did the wrong thing to allow her to be born.

Then this week I had the occasion to encounter in my work a most profoundly disabled person, a victim of a truly paralyzing palsy. It occurred to me that in all my life, I had never been that close to someone in that circumstance. And that close up, I experienced not merely empathy and sympathy, and some awe at the amazing functionality of the person, but a shame in the face of my perpetual failure to be grateful for the wholeness of my body, and my very being. That sense had only risen slightly in seeing someone on television with a medical condition of such savagery, likely because it was observed at a safe digital distance. But merely two or three feet from someone who lives unable to do the basics you and I take for granted without assistance and instrumentation, I left the room tense and a bit disoriented.

And, of course, promising to be grateful for my comparatively small problems. It put me in mind of a kind of Christian religious parable, I guess you would call it. A man prays to God that God give him a smaller cross to bear in his life. God responds. He talks to the man. He takes the cross from the man and points him to a room where there are crosses of many sizes from which he can pick to replace the one he has heretofore borne. The man goes into the room. The wooden crosses are of many different lengths, and widths and textures. He takes his time and finally finds the smallest one that he can. "This, this is the one that I can accept." He leaves the room. God says, "But that is the cross you came here carrying."

After my television and real life views of the life of others, I was momentarily certain that I appreciated the small cross that I bore in relation to a multitude of others in my community, in the world. Yes. The little annoyances of the work day, of traffic, of the wild wanderers of aisles in the supermarket, flashing lights from every form of electronic equipment begging for a response, my nearsightedness, my loneliness, my weight, my aches, my losses of family and friends, that litany of complaints that populate my dialogues and my writing and my thoughts, and have so populated them since I was old enough to say, "What about me?", surely now, I knew that I had been spared, for reasons having nothing to do with my goodness to be sure, up to here, and I should take and run with that present gift with smile and thank you to our, to my, Creator.

But as in all things touched by my human weakness, instead I was angry at not being given credibility by some colleague, about my perpetual indecision related to my goals and actions to which I attributed fault to the universe, about some free floating anxiety of my own internal orchestration. The cognitive dissonance of what I hoped I had learned against the reality that I had not learned anything at all--enraged me more. "Who ARE you?" I ask myself, not really wanting the answer. I know. Even Peter and Paul, saints, fell, and frequently. It is hubris to expect that I could even approach their recognition of sin. But could I not hold onto gratefulness for more than a day, and maybe this time, this time, have an aha moment that sent me in a progressive direction, not backward instead? Even as I write, I have several problems in typing something and the F-word flies forcefully from my apparently unrepetent lips. Why would I become enraged over something less than trivial?

It is impossible. I am impossible. There is only one solution. The things that are impossible with man, are possible with God. There is only prayer. "Lord, take my anger, and grant me your Grace to be grateful, always, for the gift of my life, the gift of my health, that you give me. Let me be grateful too, when you decide that it is no longer mine to have."