In life while the going is good, you tend to take things for granted and may forget to thank God for the countless bounties He has bestowed on you. Your new house, your promotion at work, the new car you recently purchased, all these blessings you attribute to your personal abilities and achievements – “I worked hard in the sweltering heat of the Arabian deserts and with the money I saved I could purchase a 5 BHK apartment in one of the posh Metropolitan localities. I am promoted to a higher rank in the office because of my hard work and intelligent decision making. I purchased a new high-end SUV because the bank was convinced about my ability to repay the loan promptly…, Too many “I”s and not even a single “Thou”… It is usual to behave thanklessly when life’s going well.
Let us put it in another way- we can put on a persona and just say “thank you God; but that thank you God comes from your lips and not from your heart. We can afford to be thankless when the tide is in our favour and we are charging “full speed ahead” with every sail set. But remember, He who charted your course, can take the wind out of your sails in a jiffy.
One of my elder sister’s grandchildren and her parents, all from the USA came for a visit to meet her paternal grandparents, living in their ancestral home and as well as to have a glimpse of God’s own country for a few days. She is a cute 3 years old girl and she very much liked the pristine verdant surroundings. But much to her chagrin, the “wash rooms” in the old “Naalukettu”* were not to her satisfaction. Even though they were not very modern, they were clean and not at all smelly, but not aesthetically pleasing to our ‘ Kunju Madamma’* from the US. So she unobtrusively refrained from using the toilet facility.
Meanwhile the water content in her motion got slowly absorbed making faecal matter hard. Even after reaching her mother’s home in the nearby town, where the facilities happen to be more modern and the bathroom fixtures recently renovated for the children’s much anticipated triennial visit. But the little girl’s hardened motion refused to negotiate the anal sphincter, making her strained attempts painful. To make matters worse, she developed a painful linear injury called “fissure in ano’’ because of the hard faecal matter.The urge to pass motion was intense and attempts were very painful. So the situation turned out to be a “vicious circle.” The child was fretting, fuming, sweating and crying out of frustration as well as pain. Finally with a liberal application of local anesthetic gel, a lot of stool-softeners by mouth and a couple of laxative suppositories deployed high up through her rear end, the so called ‘faecolith’ negotiated the poor lass’s injured anal sphincter and she was‘ ’relieved’’.
After a lot of ‘cleaning up’ and a lavish foam gel bath the little beauty was once again happy and gay. But she was not seen anywhere for a while. A frantic search found her kneeling before the statue of Sacred Heart in the small family ‘prayer room’. With folded hands and closed eyes she was mumbling; “thank you Jesus, thank you dear Jesus, I passed motion my Jesus.”
How many of us care to thank Jesus after a morning’s satisfactory and effortless evacuations and ablutions?? It is only when the sea turns rough we turn to Jesus sleeping at the stern. It is only when we have difficulty in passing motion and pain or difficulty in urination do we realise the blessings we receive from our Lord every morning and at times several times during the day in the form of effortless and painless, I would even say pleasant emptying of our innards’ accumulated wastes.
We are taught to say “grace” before meals and not so regularly after food; “ Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts…” is it not then just and proper to say ‘thank you Jesus’ for maintaining our bowel and bladder functions normal? “Nothing that enters one from outside can make that person unclean; It is what comes out from within that makes him unclean” (Mk 7:15). Even if we are to understand that citation purely in the literal sense, my thoughts are in the following tracts – In Genesis 1:31 it is written “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. So, there can not be any thing that is the result of the handiwork of God and produced in accordance with God’s plan, be unclean. It may not be fit for human consumption but is worthy of praise. So we should be thankful to Him, stand up in the wash room for at least a moment before we open the door and move out, say “ Thank you Lord, it was really nice”.
Are you skeptical about the theological relevance of this discussion?? Ask anyone who has 3rd degree piles or chronic fissure in ano or an old man with an enlarged prostate who has been in the toilet for quite some time ,and you have been waiting outside – “Hello, are you OK?” You can hear him saying through clenched teeth and in a strained voice… ’’Kyrie eleison”… “it may take some more time”.
1* four blocks and a typical house built in this fashion would be divided into a north, south, east, and west block
2* humorous way to address a little girl who used to live in Western Culture