“Let us give thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” (Col 1:12)
Thanksgiving is an essential part of the Christian life and we should always be able to find a reason for thanksgiving. Only a grateful heart will be able to truly be joyful. St Paul in his letter to the Colossians invites us to give thanks to the Father for he has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. This short verse is loaded with much food for thought. What is St Paul inviting us to be grateful for?
I think that we should start off by being grateful because we can be grateful. Some of the unhappiest people on our earth are those who are not contented and so are unable to be grateful for what they already possess. I thus believe that the ability to be grateful is already a great grace we should not take for granted. Gratitude is presupposed by humility, for it invites us to acknowledge that we are not able to be independent and so have to embrace the “poverty” of dependence in our lives. Only in the poverty of our lives are we able to discover that everything is a gift and so can we become grateful. So there is cause for gratitude in being grateful.
St Paul mentions that the Father has qualified us. At the heart of our poverty, we also come to realise our inadequacies, imperfections and sinfulness and thus realise that we are in no way entitled to anything from God, let alone the gift of Himself we come to receive in Christ. Our qualification which comes as a pure gift of the Lord is at the heart of our spirit of thanksgiving for without knowing Christ, we would have never come to know how blessed we are by the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This qualification that is made visible in the sacrifice of Calvary is the seedbed of our Faith and invites us into receiving our share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
What is this inheritance that St Paul speaks about? Surely, this gift surpasses any gift of silver and gold that we find here on earth. This heavenly inheritance that St Paul is reminding us off is precisely that we are “saints in light”. Our vocation to sainthood is fundamentally our call to receive the gift of God himself and to share in the divine life Christ has come to initiate us into. To be a saint is to dwell in God and to be immersed in Him and this is what it means to be a saint – that we should be in heaven and we have come to know that heaven is not so much a place as it is a person – heaven is to be in the Father through his Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. When we are able to live in God, we have truly come into the Light who is Christ himself. When we are in the Light, the darkness has no more power over us and we live in the liberation of the Light.
We have much cause to give thanks for truly, this would be the disposition of anyone who has truly come to be a saint in the light of Christ. Amidst the darkness of each of our lives, we are invited to allow the light of Christ to shine again. There is no darkness in the whole universe or in the depths of our hearts that the light of Christ is not able to penetrate but the only barrier to the entry of this light into the darkness of our world or our soul is our will. I would like to invite you to make an act of your will this day to unlock the door of your world or your soul to the penetrating light of Christ who shall truly liberate you from your misery and give you a cause to “give thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light”.
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Stay tuned for the next post by Br Peter Anthoney on 27th Feb 2011.
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