The Challenge of Gratitude

There is something to this idea of thanking the evil in the world for providing us the opportunity to grow. This is particularly valid if one takes seriously the idea of reincarnation, of a self that continually experiences incarnation, comes to earth time and time again, so as to develop greater and greater capacities on a journey toward an archetype of being, a holiness or divinity. Though, even if one is agnostic, atheistic, anarchistic or completely lacking in any structure of belief or morality, it would seem to hold true that anything that challenges us forces us to grow if we decide to look it in the eye, to square up and take its punches. The capacity to love, though, stands to gain the most through such adversity. To wrestle with that which is different, perhaps even harmful, to grapple it to the ground in the ring of your consciousness, and, when you have it pinned, when the shoulders of its actions or beliefs or accusations are flat against the mat, you relent and ask, "Can you help me understand you?" and "What is it that ails you?" This is not an easy task and truly laughable to most human beings. But this seems to be an essential task in our times. We simply cannot survive very long in a state of anger or hate. And it's not a case of "loving the evil good" as the saying goes. The love and interest we cultivate for the most deplorable aspects of our culture must come without expectation. It simply must come because it is moral and good and our children, the humans who will populate this earth when we have gone--when the future of today has descended upon us--because the children are watching us. And they will imitate us even if they know deep in their timeless hearts that it is wrong. They will imitate us because they love us. They love us with all our fallibility, with all the mistakes we are constantly making, with the neglect and cursing, and absence and violence. They love us though much of what we do can be seen as evil. "Lest you become like children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." The future is written in the faces of those children and the present is defined by our actions, our humility, forgiveness and gratitude.