A few days ago, when I turned 22, I found myself looking back on my 18th birthday. I was agonizing over my college decision—or lack thereof—while I sat in the dean’s office at my high school. I had only days left to decide between two places. When the dean offered to give me his opinion, I was eager to hear it, so we sat in silence as he thought things through. Finally, he said, “I think Boston.” I remember exactly how he said Boston, and four years later, I have to smile as I recall that moment—so much good followed a single word. My mind was made up right then, and that sense of certainty was one of the best gifts I ever received.
Most people these days would pay a good price for some certainty. Many have lost loved ones, jobs, or even just the sustaining company of their family and friends. Many people, too, have lost their ideas of what they thought their lives would look like. Everywhere we look, there are unresolved questions.
I’m sure we can all think of a problem for which we would like a no-nonsense, one-word answer—some issue for which we would love to hear a no, or a yes, or a do this, or a don’t do that. Even if we can’t have all of our questions resolved, just to have someone settle one big uncertainty would take a weight off our shoulders.
Questions, though, are good places to think about gratitude and to build trust—at least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself. Not long ago, I mentioned a prayer I recently came to love: Charles de Foucauld’s Prayer of Abandonment. When everything was normal and the future looked rather predictable, Foucauld’s lines were easy to repeat. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Easy, sweet ideas when you’re pretty sure you know what “whatever” will hold—harder, almost impossible when “whatever” has started to include things you never expected. Whatever you may do…?
How can you promise to be ready for what you can’t expect? How can you vow to accept and love what you wouldn’t will for yourself? And perhaps most of all, how can you be thankful not only for what you have in spite of misfortunes, but also for the misfortunes themselves?
In other words—as a small example—can I be thankful to be writing this article on my bedroom floor, hundreds of miles from that scrappy, well-loved little office where our staff does its editing? It’s easy to be grateful for my friends; that was never an issue. What I need to learn is to somehow be grateful for the fact that I’m not with them, listening to them banter late into the night as we go to press, watching them celebrate successes and laugh over silly mistakes. It’s much harder to be thankful in the absence, as I’m sure all of us are finding these days. It’s hard to be grateful for uncertainty, to say, “Thank you for…” when we don’t know what comes at the end of the sentence.
I wish I could publish something like “The 5 Easy Steps to Self-Abandonment,” but I would feel like a bit of a fraud writing that; truthfully, I still wish things were different. At the same time, if the best we can do some days is to say thank you and feel like frauds while we say it, that’s not a bad personal best. It seems like the only way to get better.
Though this two-word answer isn’t the one I may have wanted to learn today (I wanted a “clearer” response like the dean gave me when I was 18) there are few more concrete, more factual answers than this one. This is a response that encompasses every other, and would have encompassed whatever the dean had said that day, no matter whether he told me Boston or Minneapolis or the moon. Ironically, the response we need to relearn is whatever—as long as we allow for that crucial addendum that lets God in: whatever you may do.
I hope during these days, that answer becomes enough for all of us, no matter what other responses we’re waiting for. So much can come from a single word, one often unexpected and rarely understood in full. As my time as a BC student comes to a close, I’m filled with admiration for the power of the decisive words that have brought me many more good things than I knew how to ask for. I hope to learn to be as grateful for the other words I hear going forward, and I hope you, too, hear good things. And whatever you may do—I hope it’s done with gratitude.
- Whatever You May Do - May 7, 2020
- Stashed Classics: The Scarlet and the Black - May 7, 2020
- Pilgrim’s Progress: Virtual Mass - April 1, 2020