I’m sitting in my shed, a light rain pattering on the tin roof. There is a candle made of beeswax, burning before a collection of icons and a crucifix. Above them, a window opens onto the yard where my chickens forage in the wet grass. To my left another window, made of a salvaged door, opens toward a green wall of sunchokes, just blooming with their yellow flowers, offering a late season feast for the bees.
Looking at these things, listening to the chip notes of cardinals, the soft rain upon the rooftop, smelling the earth, awakened by the water, I feel a sense of gratefulness. It is an important feeling, one I’ve been working to cultivate—not for all the benefits promised by the therapeutic industries, but because gratitude is a fundamental way of being human, of living into my creatureliness. “We live given lives in a given world,” Wendell Berry has written. It is the best description I know of our basic situation. And if it is true then it means that the way we should be, at our core, is grateful for those gifts.
Gratitude is the key to forgiveness. This is what Jesus teaches in our Gospel reading for this Sunday in response to Peter’s question: “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive?” To answer the question, Jesus, in his typical style, offers a parable, one that begins with an outrageous debt.