Gratitude

 ...I thank you for our friends, for all the care workers and all the benefactors. Many of them live far away. But they are our friends and therefore always remain very near to us.” Pater Georg Sporschill

Last summer I was backpacking with 40 young adults and sleeping bags, a vacation that wasn’t exhausting for me, but rather gave me strength. I still haven’t gotten to know what a burnout is. The secret lies in the feeling of deep gratitude that lets me know that it isn’t my achievements everything depends on, but that it is God who bestows the outcome upon us and keeps surprising us. We Jesuits undertake a soul-searching exercise every day, as the founder of our congregation, Ignatius von Loyola, determined. The crucial part is how this so-called „exam“ begins and how it ends: with thanks for the received blessings and a Lord’s Prayer. We strive to teach our children nothing else but to never forget the magic word “thank you”, in Romanian mulÈ›umesc (derived from the Latin multum est: it is much), in dealing with each other. We teach the Lord’s Prayer as a basis for our worship in different languages and learn them by heart. Every day, thousands of children say these words in prayer for our friends, thus finding themselves secure in a world-wide community of generous people: „...I thank you for our friends, for the care workers and for the benefactors. Many of them live far away. But they are our friends and therefore always remain very near to us.”

Excerpted from the new CONCORDIA book “Whoever saves one life saves the whole world”. Available only directly at CONCORDIA, Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! JavaScript muss aktiviert werden, damit sie angezeigt werden kann.