"Ah! if we have reason to pity God, if we may dare so to speak with St. Alphonsus, because men sin against His loving Majesty, still more reason have we to do so when we see how scanty and how cold are the thanksgivings offered up to Him. Nothing is so odious among men as ingratitude; yet it is the daily and hourly portion of Almighty God. There is no telling what He has done for men; there is no exhausting the mines of His abundant mercy implied by each one of his titles, Creator, King, Redeemer, Father, Shepherd. He loves to be thanked, because all He wants of us is love, and that He should please to want it is itself an infinite act of love. He had chosen to put His glory upon our gratitude; and yet we will not give it Him! What is worst of all, this affront does not come, like open sin, from those who are His enemies, and in whose conversion His compassion can gain such glory among men; but it comes from His own people, from those who frequent the sacraments and make a profession of piety, from those whom He is daily loading with the especial and intimate gifts of His Holy Spirit. Many of us are shocked with sin and sacrilege; we go sad and downcast in the days of the world's carnival; scandal makes us smart; heresy is positive suffering, a pungent bitterness, like smoke in our eyes. It is well. Yet we too go on refusing God His glory by our neglect of thanksgiving. We could glorify Him so chiefly and yet it hardly comes into our thoughts. Can we then be said to love Him truly and really?
What have we to do, how often shall I say it? To love God, and to get Him glory. God forbid we should so much as dream that we had anything else to do. Let us go then about the world seeking these neglected pearls of our heavenly Father's glory, and offering them to Him. How is it that we have the heart to wish to do anything but this? Some of His servants have even desired not to die, that they might stay on earth to glorify Him by more suffering. Such wishes are not for us; but they may do us good, for they help to show us how little love we have. And I must think that to find this out is everything. I can believe that men are deceived, and think they love God when they do not love Him, or that they wish to love Him and do not know how. But can anyone know how little he loves God, and how easily he can love Him more, and yet not wish to do so? Jesus died to prevent the possibility of this; and can He have died in vain?
In the Life of the Blessed Battista Varani, a Franciscan, we read that our dear Lord once said to her, "If you were never to sin again, and if you alone were to do more penances than all the Blessed in heaven have ever done, and if you were to shed as many tears as would fill all the seas, and suffer as many pains as you are capable of suffering, all that would not be enough to thank Me for the very least blessing I have ever bestowed upon you."
[...] But it is now time to ask ourselves the important question, what has been our own practice hitherto with regard to the duty of thanksgiving in general? What is our habitual feeling about God's numberless blessings to us? How long a time have we ever spent in summing up God's blessings to us, even when we have been in retreat? St. Ignatius wisely tells us to commence our examination of conscience every day with counting up the mercies of God and thanking Him for them. Have we so much as kept faithfully to this little practice? Many of us have regular times in the day for different spiritual duties; have we any time specially set apart for thanksgiving? Many of us, again, keep in our prayer-books a little note of the things and persons to pray for; have we any similar memento of the blessings for which we desire daily to thank our heavenly Father? How often have we besieged the Throne of grace for weeks and weeks with Paters, Aves, Misereres, Memorares, rosaries, communions, and even penances, for something we desired; and when at last our dear Lord condescended to our importunity, what proportion did our thanksgiving bear to our supplication? How long did it last? In what did it consist? With what fervour and increase of love was it accompanied? Was it a single Te Deum, a hurried Deo gratias, and we took with an ungraceful eagerness what God held out to us, almost as if it was our wages, and then, beyond a general vague feeling of gratitude, thought nothing more about it? Alas! I fear we have all great need to take shame to ourselves in this respect. So far from having an abiding spirit of thanksgiving, or a keen life-long recollection of God's mercies, and a loving regularity in the worship and sacrifice of thanksgiving, we go on letting the Holy Spirit Himself touch our hearts with an intimate sense of our obligations to God and our dependence upon Him, waiting till He does do so, and then feebly responding to His call; so that we let Him, as it were, ask for our thanks, rather than pay them with a free heart, and out of an abounding love. We should be quick enough to see the wretchedness of all this, if a fellow-creature did it to ourselves. But answer these questions honestly to your guardian angels, and then say if you think I exaggerated when I said that the disproportion of thanksgiving to prayer was one of the wonders of the world, and one of its saddest wonders too.
And what is the cause of all this? I do not care if I write it again and again, till you are weary of reading it, if only that would insure your remembering it. It comes from your perverse refusal to look at God as your Father. Independent of open sin, there is scarcely a misery which does not come from these hard, dry, churlish views of God. That is the root of the evil. You must lay the axe there, if you really desire to be other than you are. No schemes for self-improvement will stand in the stead of it. You may meditate and examine your conscience and tell your beads, and little enough will come of it, as you have so often found already. Oh how wonderfully people can be regular in making their daily meditation, and yet it never melts into them! Not a passion is subdued, not an unloveliness smoothed away! They have the custom of prayer, without the gift of it. You may do penances, and they will rather harden your heart in a delusion of vain-glorious humility, than melt into simple genuine love. The very sacraments will work only like machines out of order. Whether it is stunted growth in the spiritual life which you deplore, or the absence of all sensible devotion, or incapacity to make or keep generous resolutions, or teasing relapses unto unworthy imperfections, or want of reverence in prayer, or lack of sweetness with others, in almost every case the mischief may be traced up to an unaffectionate view of God. You must get clear of this. You must cultivate a filial feeling toward Him. You must pray to the Holy Spirit for His gift of piety, whose special office it is to produce this feeling. Your most prominent idea of God must be, as Him "of whom all paternity is named in heaven and on earth." You must remember that the Spirit of Jesus is the one true Spirit; and that He is the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father! You will never be right until your view of God as your Father swallows up all your other views of Him, or at least till they are brought into harmonious subordination to that view, which is the sweet soul of the Gospel, and the life of our Blessed Saviour's teaching. A man could not do better than devote his whole life to be the apostle of this one idea, the compassionate Paternity of God."
Excerpt taken from "All for Jesus - The Easy Ways of Divine Love", Chapter 7
Fr. Faber gives practical help on the varied types of blessings for thanksgiving on p.247
