Misdirected Gratitude

By Roshel

How odd it would be, he thought to himself, if someone had invited him over a meal, and then, while departing, instead of thanking the host, he began to profusely thank the dining table, the plate and the spoon and fork he had used, the chair that he had sat on, and the mouth-watering soup, the delicious pie and the yummy dessert that he had eaten! That wouldn’t just be odd, it would be silly—and very bad manners too!

Now, of course he hadn’t ever heard of anyone who had done such a thing. But of late some of the people he knew were indeed beginning to behave quite as strange. He thought of his aunt, who, the other day, had forwarded him a message on WhatsApp that listed a dozen or so ‘Things to Thank’, which included the sun (for giving us heat and light), the moon (for its beauty), the forests (for breathing out oxygen and consuming carbon dioxide), the seasons (for bringing variety into our lives), and planet Earth itself (for affording human beings a physical location during their stay here). “Let us offer our heartfelt gratitude to the entire universe, that has provided us all of these things and everything else that we need to survive and thrive,” the message piously concluded.

He glanced through the message and hurriedly junked it. How silly it seemed to him! While all the many things enumerated in the message were indispensable for human life to flourish, and, therefore, one ought to be thankful for them, it was to their Maker, rather than they themselves, that we needed to express our gratitude to, he reasoned. Why thank the gifts and not the Giver of the gifts?

Thanking the sun for the vital role it played in our life but forgetting or refusing to thank the Maker of the sun—the One Who made the sun possible and Who kept it going—was akin to thanking a present that we had received from a friend rather than thanking our friend himself. That would be really weird, wouldn’t it?

It had now become quite commonplace in some circles that claimed to be ‘spiritual’ in some newfangled sense, he reflected, for people to sing paeans to the universe and thank it for ‘its many bountiful blessings’. But this did not resonate with him at all. For him, it signified a reluctance, and perhaps even a refusal, to thank—or even to acknowledge—the Maker of the universe, the Author of the universe and all that it contained. He couldn’t think of a more tragic case of misdirected gratitude.