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October - December, 2009

The Gratitude I Earn

Susan Dugan

Lately I have caught myself in the act of joining in long, self-indulgent, highly enjoyable conversations with other mothers on my daughter’s soccer team equally miffed about the antics of their likewise unappreciative, insensitive spawn. I have caught myself blaming associates for failing to recognize my talents and contributions, blaming those I live with for failing to thank me for the meals, the laundry, the rides, and the sympathy I so regularly and conditionally proffer.

I have caught myself in the act of offering and thereby receiving conditional gratitude, and in so doing, have severed myself from the only true gratitude that exists — gratitude for what I truly am, and for the gift of forgiveness that enables me to remember.

I went through a period, in my search to reclaim what seemed missing in my life, of embracing the practice of gratitude so popular in recent years — articulating a couple things I was grateful for every day in my morning meditation; encouraging my daughter before bed each night to give thanks for the kindnesses and delights she’d experienced that day, the kid on the playground that let her go first on the ringers. The happy accident of a Golden Lab puppy encountered on a walk in the park, the taste of the tropics evoked by her favorite coconut ice cream once again available at the corner parlor, the gift of grandparents and family friends who loved and supported her, our resilient green earth. The idea was that extending a heartfelt thank you was more than the right and polite thing to do; it could actually milk the universe of more prosperity, more success, more recognition, more understanding, more love. By counting our blessings we could invite even more into our life, while somehow minimizing the inevitable pain of a dualistic world.

The ultimate problem? Other kids have bad days, puppies die, ice cream melts, grandparents age and sicken and can no longer visit, friends move on; our resilient green earth grows weary in its orbit of our repeated assaults in the name of human progress. Little girls, who once thought you hung the moon, now blame you for every obstacle encountered in their otherwise meteoric rise toward independence. Parents who once walked on water now drown in a sea of heretofore unnoticed imperfections.

The ego thought system always wants to help us devise ways to coax more from our illusory environment. But there is never enough to replenish the metaphoric hole we carry in our metaphoric hearts — the result of what A Course in Miracles calls the “tiny mad idea” of running away from the one home we share, the one and only heart that still beats in us despite our persistent denial. However hard we try, we cannot coerce a world specifically designed by the ego to keep us seeking outside ourselves, but never (permanently) finding, into delivering the eternal happiness we forfeited when we believed we separated from God. We followed the ego into a projection of our guilt over that seeming rupture. Like the special love bargains we make in this world — contracts that stipulate what you must do to retain my love — our gratitude is equally conditional, based on our need for external approval and recognition for all we give. Based on a nagging sense of lack, nothing outside us can ever ultimately satisfy.

A Course in Miracles Workbook Lesson 197, “It can be but my gratitude I earn,” describes the manipulative role gratitude plays in the ego thought system:

“You make attempts at kindness and forgiveness. Yet you turn them to attack again, unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks. Your gifts must be received with honor, lest they be withdrawn. And so you think God’s gifts are loans at best; at worst, deceptions which would cheat you of defenses, to ensure that when He strikes He will not fail to kill.”

When we listen to the ego we believe that this world’s God, created by the ego in his image, is equally hooked on external appreciation, on the habit A Course in Miracles calls “giving to get,” a habit that at its core reflects the murderous thought of annihilating our source that drives the defense/attack cycle in which we seem hopelessly mired. The ego’s God is equally stingy with his love because what passes for love in this world is ephemeral at best, and never, ever enough.

“The gratitude I earn,” the unique definition of gratitude referred to in A Course in Miracles, is the true gratitude for the one love I am that — appearances to the contrary — embraces all the seeming fragments at war with themselves to prove themselves in a world that exists only in my split mind. The gratitude I earn is thankfulness for the one Love I am when I remember without self-judgment to forgive what I am not — the ego’s perceived need for specialness.

The gratitude I earn is my growing appreciation that no one or thing outside my mind could possibly jeopardize the peace I am, despite what the body’s eyes would have me believe. I earn that gratitude through the Course’s radical process of forgiveness. How? By catching myself in the act of feeling unappreciated by my child, my colleague, my spouse, my friend, recognizing that the problem perceived “out there” is merely another product of my ego-identified mind, and asking for help from my right mind to see things differently. 

“It does not matter if another thinks your gifts unworthy. In his mind there is a part that joins with yours in thanking you. It does not matter if your gifts seem lost and ineffectual. They are received where they are given.”

Through the consistent practice of forgiveness our one mind begins to heal. I am beginning to actually appreciate my own judgments, the red flags that remind me I have once again forfeited happiness by believing in an illusion of unfair treatment. But it is all in my mind and I can and must choose again. Recognizing my true identity in the person I want to blame for overlooking all I have given eventually teaches me to awaken from this nightmare of specialness and separation I have chosen over perfect unity. And so I offer thanks today for once again reclaiming my innocence — growing a little more conscious, a little bit closer to awakening — by changing my mind about you.

© 2009, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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