Imagine a married couple that has been together for many years.  By now they know each other well and their relationship has fallen into a pretty steady routine.  Perhaps their relationship has grown into a “no frills” relationship in which they no longer tell each other, “I love you”, because they feel that after many years the other person already knows that they are loved.  Perhaps they never take the time to say, “thank you”, anymore because they feel that the other person understands that they are grateful.  I can only imagine now that this is not a healthy, life-giving relationship and that these two people had learned to take each other for granted.  In a relationship such as this, there would bound to be some deep, long-standing resentments between them and that each of them might feel a profound loneliness and dissatisfaction in their relationship.  Expressions of love, praise and gratitude are essential to healthy, life-giving relationships and they meet a deep need within us to feel appreciated and valued. 

     A simple statement like, “I love you”, or, “thank you for your kindness”, can be very healing to us as human persons.  All of us have a wound of loneliness, a fear built of insecurities and a need to be reassured of our personal value and the value of the acts of service and kindness that we offer to others.  Good relationships are built upon these simple expressions of esteem.  When we affirm the value of another person in relationship then we are helping them to be at peace.

     In our personal relationship with God we also have a need to “count our blessings”, to express our gratitude and to experience the value of God as a loving and merciful Father.  Without these basic fundamentals we struggle to have a healthy, life-giving relationship with God and we could develop an attitude of anger and hostility.  In the gospel of Luke we hear about ten lepers that Jesus heals.  Only one of those lepers, who have all been healed, comes back to Jesus to offer him a word of praise and thanksgiving.  Jesus asks, “Where are the other nine?”  We are left wondering what happened with the other lepers along the way.  They were healed and must have realized that they had been given new life but they didn’t feel a need to offer thanksgiving to Jesus.  Perhaps they thought that their thanksgiving offering was not important.  Perhaps they thought, “We don’t have to give thanks to God because he already knows.  We can just say thank you to him in our own way.”  We can too easily presume upon God’s understanding.  Perhaps they thought that they were only getting what they were owed.  “Why did it take God so long to notice us and to answer our prayers?”  Perhaps they don’t thank God because they feel that he is just doing what he is supposed to be doing as God.

     Only one of the lepers in the gospel story received a complete healing.  He returned to say thank you.  That simple act of gratitude demonstrated his faith in God’s love and allowed him to spread that love and joy to others.  As John expresses gospel living in his letter to the Church:  “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.” (1Jn 4,16)  The other nine were probably still carrying the weight of their illness.  They had lived with anger and hostility for so long that it had become second-nature to them.  True freedom would be found when they could heal their interior wounds as well as the visible wounds on their skin.  For the Samaritan leper, faith becomes a path into a new life of joy and celebration.  Faith allowed him to see the nearness of God the Father and to know and believe in his love for him.

     We need to express thanksgiving to God for everything in our lives.  The highest sacrifice of praise that we could offer God is thanksgiving.  The Eucharist is an offering of thanksgiving.  We need to participate in the Eucharist so that we might grow in love with God the Father and Jesus.  There are those who feel that they don’t need to offer thanksgiving so they will absent themselves from the Eucharistic sacrifice.  They take the love of God for granted.  We will not know complete healing and new life until we have expressed our gratitude to the Father for his many gifts. 

     Our thanksgiving will not add anything to God’s greatness but will help us to grow in grace.  We need to thank God and acknowledge his goodness to us.  Through Jesus, God has healed us from the wounds of sin.  We need to complete our healing with an interior healing of the heart through a sincere offering of gratitude and thanksgiving.  A simple expression in prayer, “I love you Lord for all that you have done for me,” and, “thank you for your gift of new life,” would go a long way in building a new life of grace with our merciful Lord!