The group of readings today are kind of a happy coincidence with the day before our Thanksgiving celebration. Especially the first and third readings, have as their point the whole business of gratitude.

I do not think that there are many issues in human life that are as helpful as heuristic devices, that is, as a means of investigating ourselves, understanding the world, and certainly, understanding religion as gratitude. If you start pursuing that, that will take you to all kinds of wonderfully rich and terrifically important places.

The fundamental religious attitude, as has been pointed out by all kinds of people, is simply that of gratitude. Ultimately, the religious person is distinguishable from the irreligious person on the basis of that as their absolutely foundational human stance. Paul puts it very simply when he rhetorically asks the question: "What have you that you have not received. And if you have received it, why do you behave as if you have not?". And yet I do not think that there are many things in human life as difficult of honest achievement as a genuine and free sense of gratitude. And so, we raise the question: Why? Why is it so difficult to have gratitude, again, as one's absolutely foundational stance? Well, I think it would be useful to look at alternate foundational stances which I think are pretty pervasive in our society, and maybe this will enlighten things. I would like to suggest two. One is the sense of entitlement, again, as the absolutely basic thing...so deep that we are not even aware of its operation in our lives. The sense that, "I am owed this by life, by reality, by the world". As I have mentioned a number of times, one of the startling things that Robert Coles, the great Harvard child psychiatrist, discovered when he investigated the lives of very wealthy children, was that sense of entitlement was constant in their psychic make-up; and this sense had to be devised, it was not spontaneous. Parents had to create in their children the sense of entitlement: "This is mine by right of some sort". And it is self-evident that if that is where we stand in life, in a preconscious way, then gratitude is out of the question because it is silly and senseless.

The second foundational attitude that creates problems is what we might call the entrepreneurial mentality.

What is an entrepreneur? It is a French word, of course. It is somebody who invests with a view to cashing in on her or his investment. In other words, there is the understanding that this is my effort and this is what I deserve as a result of my effort. And I think that to a very large extent that this view of things comes with the territory of being born in North America: I do this and then this should happen. In fact, I can make claims on it happening. And if it does not happen, of course, then all kinds of serious problems arise in my way of dealing with other people, the world, and myself.

Where does this sense of entitlement and the entrepreneurial spirit come from? Let me make a proposal. I think that they both arise from a common source: a sense of deprivation; that somehow I have been cheated and victimized by life. Therefore, to live is to compensate for that sense by a counter-move; the sense of entitlement or, even more pervasively, the sense of the entrepreneurial approach to existence. If that is true, and I am not altogether sure by any means that it is true, then it raises extraordinarily large questions and uncovers huge problems. How do we crawl up from under that?

But who has not been cheated in their lives? Who has not suffered some sort of deprivation? This is what we call the doctrine of original sin: that everybody else is playing out their needs on me, and therefore, my reflex is simply to play out my needs on everybody else. And of course the upshot of all of this is that gratitude, as my fundamental response to life, becomes an impossibility, I think the sense of entitlement and the sense of an entrepreneurial view of life are rescuable if they are constructed on the basis of gratitude. Because the fact of being grateful as my fundamental attitude then drastically relativizes my sense of entitlement, radically relativizes my sense of being an entrepreneur in life so I do not make my ultimate claims against life on the basis of either that sense of entitlement or entrepreneurial effort.

Here is a footnote that occurred to me while I have been thinking about this. I was in Washington last week and I had the privilege of going to the Van Gogh exhibit. Everybody knows about Van Gogh's career: he shot himself at the age of thirty-seven, took three days to die, and sold one painting in his lifetime for eighty dollars. And yet, I do not think that anybody has sold a painting for more than the 53.9 million dollars U.S. that was paid for one of his paintings. That fact itself is intriguing. But then in this exhibit, which came from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, there was a painting called "The Reapers". It depicted a man in a wheat field. And I stood dumbfounded in front of this painting. It does what all art does, which is to give you a sense of the gratuity of existence. Beauty is gratuitous. And then later on I thought: Will someone pay sixty million dollars U.S. for that imcomparable vision? Can I translate that vision into sixty million dollars U.S.? I do not think so. I bring that up as simply one of the paradoxes of our lives.

So what do we do, however, if our fundamental experience of existence is that of having been cheated in some way, having been deprived? What can break through that? I do not think that we can do anything to break through that because it is bred in our bones. It is the deepest lines in our psyches traced by those experiences. And I think that the only thing that can alter it is grace - - the latin word itself means "gift" - - above all, the grace of faith whereby I say that I believe that my sense of deprivation, however deeply felt, is not the ultimate reality here. In other words, I do not see anything save the religious solution to the human quandary. This ‘solution’ is exactly, of course, what Jesus represented: this extraordinary human being who somehow went through life absolutely convinced that, "All is gift. All is grace". And the kind of freedom that he lived in his own life, the freedom that he enabled other people to have, is all a playing out of this fundamental sense that life is ultimately gift, more than anything else.