by f. Themistocles Mourtzanos
Ungratefulness is a life attitude of many people.
Based on their gifts, the power of money, the ability to handle others, some people exploit the love or weakness that others show to them in order to satisfy their interests and aspirations, without feeling that they have to acknowledge those who offer and benefit them.
As if they are entitled to everything, they even forget to say “thank you.”
Ungratefulness is linked to human will. This is especially seen in the children of our time.
Whatever their parents provide them, they will always find an opportunity to demand more.
When parents refuse to satisfy a desire among the many they fulfill, then complaint easily comes to children’s lips and the children have already convinced themselves that their parents are wrong and do not understand their needs.
Similar is the behavior of those who have power in their hands.
Unsatisfied, despite the fact that their wishes are fulfilled by their subordinates, although they do not deserve it in many occasions, they are imposing more and more burdens on those who serve them, whithout considering that their “people” have limits and need a “thank you”, an acknowledgment, instead of disregard.
But power makes its owners blindly oriented towards the fulfillment of their will and they obviously think that those who depend on them will work as “slaves.”
There is ungratefulness in love too. When someone admires himself or herself and the other seeks anxiously to cover his/her loneliness or to be recoginzed, then love easily loses its meaning.
The relationship turns into dependency and usually the stronger shatters the dignity of the weak, deceives him/her, makes him/her “dependent” and leads him/her to tolerate bad behaviors.
But since the weaks feel the need to get hold of the powerful ones, they also tolerate ungratefulness, sometimes by naming their inability to change their lives as “patience.”
The Church shows us the way of the Cross in life and human relationships. It points out that people refused to accept the benefits of God and crucified Him. The Cross means sacrifice and forgiveness, a path that passes through repentance, as expressed in the resignation from the will.
An expression of this resignation is gratitude. Saying “thank you” to those who love, but also to those who, through their wickedness and ungratefulness, give the opportunity to be humiliated. Cross is the absence of vengeance, but also a critique of ungratefulness in the prospect of truth.
Christ accepted the thief’s repentance and silenced the challenges. The people, however, who was sarcastic towards Him, seeing the earthquake that followed, and the pain of the earth, “started beating themselves”. Many of them were baptized Christians after the Pentecost, showing that they understood how ungrateful they had been.
The Cross as truth, but also as sacrifice and humility, can become a marker in human relationships.
Not to stop loving the ungrateful ones, but to show them that self-centeredness does not benefit anyone.
Within the simplicity of “thank you” and by acknowledging that it is not beneficial to satisfy all our desires, but only those related to the Gospel, we can finally find the measure we lack.
