Thanksgiving

I wanted to take this time on Thanksgiving to reflect on the effects of gratitude and the consequences of human ingratitude.  Throughout the volumes Jesus cries over human ingratitude and how horrendous it is to him.

"...Ingratitude was the sharpest thorn that pierced my heart, from my conception up to the last moment of my life.  Look at my little heart - it is wounded, and pours out blood.  What pain!  What torture I feel!  My daughter, do not be ungrateful to Me.  Ingratitude is the hardest pain for your Jesus; it is to close the door in my face, leaving Me numb with cold."

Vol. 1

 

Here he not only speaks about how it wounds him but also how it keeps him from giving.

 

"...The second mortal wound of my Heart is ingratitude. With ingratitude, the creature closes my Heart; even more, she herself turns the key with double locks; and my Heart swells because It wants to pour graces and love, and It cannot, because the creature has closed It, and has put on It the seal with her ingratitude. And I become delirious, I agonize, without hope that this wound may be healed, because ingratitude keeps embittering it more and more, giving Me mortal pain."

Vol. 12, January 27, 1919

 

Ingratitude keeps us from receiving the gifts Gods wants to make us, and worse it changes goods into chastisements.

 

"...since We are not known, We are forced by their ingratitude not to tell them even a word, and to keep repressed inside Our womb the goods which We had to give them. And seeing our poor children dissimilar from us, only because they don't know us, is a suffering for us. Even if We gave to them, it would happen as the Gospel says: don't give pearls to the pigs, because they don't know what they are, and they would cover them with mud and trample on them."

Vol. 36, July 6, 1938

 

"Poor man, who does not recognize us, either in the veils which hide us within him, or in the veils of each created thing; he just keeps running away from our life and from the scope for which he was created; so, many times, when we cannot tolerate his ingratitude, the very goods contained in our veils are turned into chastisement for him."

Vol. 36,  December 8, 1938

 

The effects of gratitude however are spoken of as acting as the key to all of God's treasures.

 

"...be grateful for the graces I am giving you, because gratitude is the key to be able to open as one pleases the treasures that God contains."

Vol. 4, September 4, 1901

 

"Let your memory be the bell that rings continuously within you, and reminds you of what I have done and suffered for you, and of how many graces I have given to your soul, so as to thank Me and be grateful to Me, since gratitude is the key that opens the divine treasures."
Vol. 5, June 6, 1903

 

So gratitude is the key to God's continued giving to us.  He further explains gratitude's role as a guardian.

 

"...knowledge is the sight to the soul, that makes the desire and the love arise and hence the gratitude toward me that I so very want to give, and with jealousy [souls] guard my treasure deposited in them and in the circumstances they make use of my Life for guide, of my works in order to confirm their works, of my sufferings for support of their sufferings and my tears in order to wash them if they are stained, and oh, how content I am that they make use of me and of my works in order to help themselves!"

Vol. 30, December 21, 1931

 

Without gratitude we do not appreciate and therefore guard that which is given to us.  We, as it says in the gospel, would be swine trampling pearls.  How important it is to pay attention to the gifts God gives us every day but especially on this Thanksgiving Day.  Lets be sure to give God the refreshment of our gratitude for ourselves, our country and all of humanity to appease his wounded heart.