Being Grateful and not Worrying 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time A
Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80; Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21:33-43
Saint Paul in the second reading teaches: “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”
With these verses, Saint Paul teaches us how not to be anxious. His divinely inspired teachings are particularly important for today’s generation, which has been named “The Anxious Generation” by the author Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In large part due to the excessive use of screens – cell phones, tablets, and other similar devices – there has been an increase in “social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction”.[1]
According to Sean Parker, Facebook’s former president, and I quote, “the thought process behind building the social media giant was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” He continued, “That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever … It’s a social validation feedback loop … You’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology … [The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway.”[2]
Returning to Saint Paul, who is a saint because of his love for God and his love for us that desires what is best and holy for us, Saint Paul does not want us to be addicted and, consequently anxious, but at peace in the Lord and in holy love with God and with our brothers and sisters.
According to Saint Paul, the key to not being anxious is located in prayer, and a specific kind of prayer, which is prayer that contains “thanksgiving”. In other words, grateful prayer, which is what the celebration of Mass is all about, for the word Eucharist, in Greek, means thanksgiving, gratitude, and giving thanks.
The more we grow in the spirit of the Mass, which is a spirit of gratitude, the less we will be anxious because the less we will excessively desire the passing goods of this world, including what social media platforms such as Facebook at times intentionally tempt us with.
If, though, we do not feel grateful we should not force it but rather pray for the grace to be a little more grateful today, wisely counsels Father Spitzer:
we should not force ourselves to feel grateful for something that is not yet manifestly positive. Playing these mind games (pious as they may be) can wind up being the devil’s playground, because if I think I have to feel grateful and happy for being fired at work, my child being sick, getting Parkinson’s disease, or being admonished by my spouse, I might begin to believe that God is a bit of a sadist. It does not take much imagination to move from “Thank You so very much, Lord, for allowing me to be fired at work” to “This is ridiculous. . . and if this is what You really expect of me, forget it.” Thus, if you do not find something manifestly positive, then do not feel compelled to “be happy” and thank God for it—yet. Trust that God will eventually bring something positive out of it, but do not force yourself to have feelings of gratitude that you really don’t have.[3]
May God Bless You All – Father Peter
[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, 113.
[2] Erica Pandey, “Sean Parker: Facebook was designed to exploit human ‘vulnerability’,” axios.com, https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/sean-parker-facebook-was-designed-to-exploit-human-vulnerability-1513306782.
[3] Robert Spitzer, Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts (Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence Book 1, 270-271.
