My 3-year-old granddaughter was on a beach weekend. When the ice cream wagon made its trek across the sand, her parents allowed her a treat. Later in the day, the family shared dinner with friends and the other mom brought — yep, more ice cream treats.
When Alice saw the box being offered, she couldn’t contain her glee.
“Another ice cream?” she laughed, “What a lucky kid I am!”
Sometimes 3-year-olds can teach you much. Alice seems to have been blessed — lucky, to use her word — with a gracious sense of joy and gratitude. That day, she reminded me that gratitude is the essential spiritual attitude, the vital prayer. Thanks, Alice.
Some days, it’s hard to think about how blessed I am. There’s been sickness in my family, and a dear friend has moved out of her home to be cared for in what appears to be a final illness. Another good friend lost her husband days ago after a hard struggle. I’ve gone from the years of saying goodbye to parents, aunts and uncles, to the sobering time of seeing contemporaries leave.
I know I’m not alone in letting the relentless heat in many parts of our country affect my spirits as well. And the onset of what is forecast to be a catastrophic hurricane season makes me wonder why so few are listening to Pope Francis’ pleas for a new attitude toward our environment. Where are the climate voters?
And speaking of politics, no one can escape the chaos of our present moment.
But a litany of our woes does nothing to solve them or address them in a positive way. It helps my perspective to pick up a history book and see how our forebears faced seemingly insurmountable problems. We live in perilous times, perhaps, but every time has its perils.
Recently, I watched a documentary about Nicholas Winton, who helped organize eight “Kindertransports,” which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain in 1938. When everyone in Prague was bracing for the Nazi invasion, Winton and other brave people found homes in Britain willing to accept these children, fought the immigration authorities and managed to get children onto trains bound for Holland and then on ships to Britain as their grief-stricken parents said goodbye.
It was literally life and death for these children, whose parents nearly all died in the Holocaust. Those saved children represent a tiny percentage of those ultimately killed, but to each of them, and their thousands of descendants, it meant the world.
Winton’s story made me think of something Fred Rogers, the great children’s television personality, said. When he was little and saw scary things, his mom told him, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Realizing there are always good people working to help our world inspires gratitude and always lifts my spirit. But more than that, it inspires me to ask, how can I help? How can I be part of the solution?
If we find ourselves burdened by the worries of the world or the fears of tomorrow, we need to remember that our spirituality calls us to gratitude in the present moment. We are asked to find, as St. Ignatius taught, God in all things. God, I know, is with the helpers, and I want to be with them.
And gratitude is the first and essential prayer.
If we focus on the beauty given us in one more precious day of life, and know that we can be a helper to someone, we might find ourselves proclaiming joyfully, “What a lucky kid I am!”
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