Gratitude

Let us take God as a shopkeeper. He sells many things: love, joy, beauty, purity, grace and many, many other things. But in his shop there is one thing that is most expensive, and that is gratitude. When we go to God the shopkeeper, everything we can buy because it is quite cheap. But when we try to buy gratitude we are shocked when we hear the price. We don't have that much money. Why? Because to buy gratitude we have to become aspiration itself, dedication itself, devotion itself, surrender itself. Our life of aspiration, dedication, devotion and surrender will be our currency to buy gratitude from God's shop.

We are under the impression that gratitude is something we have which we are not giving to God; but we are mistaken. We can have nothing to give to God unless and until we have first gotten it from Him. Gratitude has to come from God directly. If God does not give us the sense, the feeling, the flower of gratitude within us, then we can never offer gratitude to Him.

We must cry to God for the power of gratitude. In the spiritual life, a moment of sincere gratitude to the Supreme is equal to an hour of most intense aspiration, concentration, meditation and contemplation. Gratitude has the mightiest power to win God, but we have to get it before we can give it.

We all use the word 'gratitude'. We try to make others feel what gratitude means, but we ourselves do not know, we ourselves have never felt it in the strict sense of the term. Everything else has been born in the earth-consciousness, but gratitude has yet to take birth. When divine gratitude takes birth in our human life, God-manifestation will not remain a far cry. When gratitude takes birth in human life, God's Reality will be able to manifest itself on earth.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Life-tree leaves, Agni Press, 1974
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ltl