From Thanksgiving to Repentance
Quotes taken from ‘The Engraving of Christ in Man’s Heart’, by Archimandrite Zacharias of Essex
Whoever gives himself over completely to thanksgiving discovers an awesome experience: God continuously reveals more and more of His gifts and benefits to him.
The spirit of thanksgiving is a strong spirit; whoever surrenders himself to it entirely is brought to great repentance because he acquires a fuller awareness that whatever he might do is not enough. He will never be able to thank such a God as He deserves. Thus, from thanksgiving, he is guided to repentance; and when his repentance becomes stronger, he is inspired to intensify his thanksgiving even more. He repents because he is unable to thank God worthily and reaches such a state that he gives thanks to God even for the air that he breathes.
Gratitude is a virtue which pleases God more than all the other virtues. In response to it, He provides us with all things which we are unable to reach or obtain on our own. God allots His gifts to us according to the measure of gratitude that we show Him. Only those gifts for which we have given thanks to God become truly ours.
In the writings attributed to Saint Anthony the Great we find the following text about thanksgiving: ‘When you go to your bed with gratitude, bringing to mind the benefits and the exceedingly bountiful providence of God, you rejoice, full of good thoughts, and the sleep of the body becomes vigilance of the soul and the closing of the eyes a real vision of God and your silence, bearing what is good, offers with discernment from the depths of the soul and with all its strength an elevated doxology to the God of All. For as long as there is no malice in the heart, the Lord is more well-pleased by gratitude than by any other precious sacrifice.’
Psychology teaches that man is driven by his subconscious. Yet, in the above extract, Saint Anthony tells us that whoever lives, wakes up and goes to sleep full of gratitude and thanksgiving for the all-merciful providence of God, enlightens his subconscious, finds that his sleep becomes vigilant, and sees his life as in a straight line. He is not disturbed by the superstitions of the past.