The opposite habit of thanksgiving is forgetfulness crowned with entitlement. The soul grows accustomed to abundance and ceases to experience it as gift. What once astonished now barely registers. What once called forth wonder is quietly reclassified as normal. In time, gifts are mistaken for guarantees, and mercy is misfiled as a right.
The table may be heavy with provisions, yet the eye is drawn instinctively to what is missing. Attention, once receptive, turns acquisitive. Even what is good is examined for its insufficiency. Every silver lining is searched for its cloud.
Ingratitude is, at heart, a cultivated blindness. Air is assumed. Bread is deserved. Love becomes a clause in an unspoken contract. Life itself is treated as a transaction, measured in outputs and returns rather than as a mystery into which one has been unexpectedly invited. The memory of dependence fades, and with it the sense of standing within a larger order not of one’s own making. The soul curves back upon itself and begins to measure every blessing against imagined alternatives—lives not lived, futures not chosen, standards that endlessly recede.
Under such conditions, wonder grows thin. Silence no longer feels full, but empty—something to be filled with noise, complaint, or distraction. The extraordinary is absorbed into the ordinary, not because it has diminished, but because the eyes that once looked upon it have lost their depth of vision. The three companions take up residence: boredom, envy, and hatred.
If gratitude is the art of holy noticing, ingratitude is the skill of holy neglect: a way of inhabiting the world that unlearns reverence. Day by day it rehearses dissatisfaction, until the gift of being alive no longer surprises, no longer calls forth thanks, and eventually comes to feel almost burdensome. It is not simply the absence of gratitude that marks this condition. It is the formation of a soul that has forgotten how to receive.
Maranatha,
Jordy
