The Third Path: Tracks of Fellow Struggler, Part 3

I call this one “the road of gratitude,” and interestingly enough, it is basic to the story of Abraham and Isaac that serves as our text. Years ago, when I first started taking the Bible seriously, this whole episode used to bother me a good deal. What kind of jealous God is it, I wondered, who demands even a man’s child as a sign of devotion? As I moved more deeply into the biblical revelation, however, I came to realize that the point at issue in this event was not that at all. What God was trying to teach Abraham here and throughout his whole experience was the basic understanding that life is gift – pure, simple, sheer gift – and that we here on earth are to relate to it accordingly.

The promise that came originally to Abraham from God was literally “out of the blue.” Just as he had not been in on the creation of the world or his own birth, so Abraham had done nothing to earn the right of having a land of his own or descendents more numerous than the stars. Such a promise came as a pure gift from God. Abraham was called on to receive it, to participate in it fully and joyfully, to handle it with the open hands of gratitude.

And this, of course, was a picture of how man was meant to relate to existence itself. Life, too, is a gift, and it is to be received and participated in and handled with gratitude.

But right here is the problem. God was having to start all over again with Abraham because mankind had lost this view of life and instead had tried to earn life by the ardors of legalism, or to possess it totally as if it belonged to them alone. And all these mistaken relations served only to curdle life and make of it a crushing burden or a prison of anxiety.

The whole point in the Abraham saga lies in God’s effort to restore men to the right vision of life and a right relationship to it. Only when life is seen as a gift and received with the open hands of gratitude is it the joy that God meant for it to be. And these were the truths God was seeking to emphasize as he waited so long to send Isaac and then asked for him back. Did Abraham realize that all was gift, and not something to be earned or to be possessed, but received, participated in, held freely in gratefulness?

This is the most helpful perspective I have found in the last weeks. And of all the roads to travel, it offers the best promise of being a way out.

Here, in a nutshell, is what it means to understand something as a gift and to handle it with gratitude, a perspective biblical religion puts around all of life. And I am here to testify that this is the only way down from the Mountain of Loss. I do not mean to say that such a perspective makes things easy, for it does not. But at least it makes things bearable when I remember that Laura Lue was a gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift, even when it is taken away, is gratitude, then I am better able to try and thank God that I was ever given her in the first place.

Even though it is very hard, I am doing my best to learn this discipline now. Everywhere I turn I am surrounded by reminders of her – things we did together, things she said, things she loved. And in the presence of the reminders, I have two alternatives: dwelling on the fact that she has been taken away, I can dissolve in remorse that she is gone forever; or, focusing on the wonder that she was given to us at all, I can learn to be grateful that we shared life, even for an all-too-short ten years. Only three choices, and believe me, the only way out is the way of gratitude. The way or remorse does not alter the stark reality one whit and only makes matters worse. The way of gratitude does not alleviate the pain, but it somehow puts some light around the darkness and builds strength to begin to move on.

Now, having gone full circle, I come back to caution you not to look on me this morning as any authority on how to conquer grief. Rather, I need you to help me on down the way, and this is how: do not counsel me not to question, and do not attempt to give me any total answer. Neither one of those ways works for me. The greatest thing you can do is to remind me that life is a gift – every last particle of it, and that the way to handle a gift is to be grateful. You can really help me if you will never let me forget this fact, just as I hope maybe I may have helped this morning by reminding you of the same thing. As I see it now, there is only one way out of this darkness – the way of gratitude. Will you join me in trying to learn how to travel this way?