A Deep Bow Gratitude as the root of a common religious language. by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Sacrifice itself is the prototype of all rites of passage.

[Cont. from page 2] ... When we look at the great rites of passage which belong to humanity’s oldest religious heritage, the religious significance of gratitude becomes clear to us. In recent years anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion have made much of these “rites de passage,” rites celebrating birth and death and the other great hours of passage through the human life. Sacrifice in one form or another belongs to the core of these rites. And this is understandable, for sacrifice itself is the prototype of all rites of passage.

The moment we take a closer look at the basic features common to the various forms of sacrificial rites, we are struck by the perfect parallel between the structure of gratitude as a gesture of the human heart and the inner structure of sacrifice. In both cases a passage takes place. In both cases the gesture rises from the joyful recognition of a gift received, culminates in an acknowledgement of the receiver’s dependence on the giver, and finds its accomplishment in an external expression of thanks which unites giver and receiver, be it in the form of a conventional handshake of gratitude, or in a sacrificial meal.

Think, for example, of the sacrifice of first fruits, almost certainly the most ancient sacrificial rite. Even where we find it in its simplest and most primitive form the rite clearly displays the pattern we discovered. Let us take, for example, the Chenchu, a tribe in Southern India, belonging to one of the most ancient cultural strata not only of India but of the whole world. What happens when a Chenchu returning from a food gathering expedition in the jungle casts a choice morsel of food into the bush and accompanies this sacrifice with a prayer to the deity worshipped as mistress of the jungle and of all its products? “Our mother,” he says, “by your kindness we have found. Without it we receive nothing. We offer you many thanks.”

The expression of gratitude makes the original joy over a favor received rise to a higher level.

Thousands of similar rites have been observed among the most primitive peoples. But this example (recorded by Christoph von Fuerer Haimendorf, who did field work among the Chenchu) stands out for its crystal clear structure. Each sentence of the simple prayer accompanying this offering corresponds, in fact, to one of our three phases of gratitude. “Our mother, by your kindness we have found”: the recognition of a favor received; “without it we receive nothing”: the acknowledgement of dependence; and “we offer you many thanks”: the expression of gratitude which makes the original joy over the favor received rise to a higher level.

And what the prayer expresses under three aspects, the rite expresses in one gesture: The hunter who offers a piece of his quarry to the deity expresses thereby that he appreciates the goodness of the gift received, and that through the symbolic sharing of the gift he somehow enters into communion with the giver.

So striking, in fact, is the correspondence between social gestures of gratitude and religious gestures of sacrifice that one might tend to mistake the food offerings of the Chenchu and similar examples for a mere transposition of social conventions into a religious key. However, there is no simple dependence of the one on the other. Both are rooted in the depth of the heart, but they expand in two different directions.

Our religious awareness comes to itself through the very gesture of our sacrificial rites, just as our awareness of human solidarity comes to itself when one person expresses thanks to another.

We look at life and see that it comes to us from a Source far beyond our reach. We look at life and see that it is good – good for us; and from the firm ground of these two intellectual insights the heart dares to leap to a third insight which surpasses mere reasoning: the insight that all good comes to us as a free gift from the Source of Life. This leap of faith surpasses the grouping of the intellect, because it is a gesture of the whole person, very much like the trust I put in a friend.

Now, the moment I recognize life as a gift, and myself as recipient, my dependence is brought home to me, and this confronts me with a decision: Just as in the social sphere I can refuse to acknowledge, and lock myself up in the loneliness of pride, so in the religious dimension I can adopt a stance of proud independence towards the very Source of Life. And the temptation is strong to close my eyes to the ridiculousness of this posture. For dependence in the religious context implies more than the give and take of human interdependence; it implies obedience to a Being grater than I. And my petty pride finds it hard to swallow this.

(It is here, incidentally, that the violence of many sacrificial rites has its root. We cannot do justice to this aspect now, but we may note in passing that violent sacrificial rites are meaningful as an expression of that violence which we must do to ourselves before our hearts, enslaved by self-will, can enter into the freedom of loving obedience.) The person who kills an animal in sacrifice expresses by this rite his or her own readiness to die to everything that separates us from the goal of this rite of passage. Since the goal is union between the human and the divine, a union of wills must precede it; the human will must become obedient. But the death of self-will is only the negative aspect of obedience; its positive aspect is our birth to true life and joy. Upon the immolation follows the joy of the sacrificial banquet.

We should not overstress submission when we speak of obedience. Of much greater importance is the positive aspect: alertness for the secret signs pointing the way towards true joy. (I call them secret signs because they are intimately personal hints, in moments when we are most truly ourselves.) “We, unlike birds of passage, are not informed,” says Rilke in his Duino Elegies. Our passage is not predetermined by instinct. All we are given are inklings like that stirring of gratitude in our hearts and the freedom to follow these inklings.

We belong together in a deep solidarity which the heart discerns. We belong together, because together we are obligated to a reality which transcends us.

To the extent to which we have forfeited this freedom, detachment is necessary. Obedience is our alertness, our disponibilite , our readiness to follow the homing impulse of the heart in its upward flight. Detachment liberates the wings of our heart so that we can rise to the grateful enjoyment of life in all its fullness. We must open our hand and let loose what we hold before we can receive the new gifts which every moment offers us. Detachment and obedience are merely means; the goal is joy.

If we would understand moral sacrifice in this positive way we would also understand ritual sacrifice which is its expression. Neither of the two is that grim thing into which it is sometimes distorted. The pattern of both is the passage of thanksgiving. The accomplishment of both is the joy of our union with that which transcends us. This is expressed in the sacrificial banquet in which the rite of sacrifice culminates. This joyful meal presupposes the acceptance of our thanksgiving by the divinity. It is the embrace which unites the one who gave the gift and the one who gives thanks for it.

(Let us remember, by the way, that in the religious context, God is always the giver: Humans are the thanks-givers. Only in the far less original context of magic can this relation deteriorate to some sort of commercial transaction or even to our effort to extort favors from super-human powers. But magic and ritualism are dead-end roads of the heart; they do not concern us here.)

What does concern us is the fact that our own experience of gratitude is closely related to a universal religious phenomenon, to sacrifice, which lies at the very root of religion. And once we have grasped the root we can find access to religion in all its aspects. The whole history of religion can, in fact, be understood as the working out in all its implications of that sacrificial gesture which we ourselves experience as often as gratitude rises in our hearts.

The whole cosmos is being renewed moment by moment through sacrifice: brought back to its source through thanksgiving, and received anew as gift in all its primordial freshness.

Jewish religion, for example, begins with the implicit conviction that we would not be human unless we offered sacrifice, and leads up to the explicit awareness that “only one who brings himself or herself as sacrifice deserves to be called human.” (Rabbi Israel of Rizin; died 1850) We have a perfect parallel in Hinduism where an early Vedic text sees humanity as “the one animal capable of bringing sacrifice,” (Satapata Brahmanah VII, 5, 2, 23) and the development culminates in a passage from the Chandogya Upanishad (III, 16, 1): “Verily, a person is a sacrifice.” Does not our own experience show us that a human person finds his or her own integrity only in the sacrificial gesture of thanksgiving?

And even to the “thou shalt love” (which is in one form or another the mature fruit of every religion) does our experience of gratitude give us access. But just as the root repelled us at first by its apparent crudeness, so this fruit of religion makes us draw back from the contradiction it seems to contain. How can love be commanded? How can there be an obligation to love? Love is not love at all unless it is gratuitous. What we experience in the context of gratitude provides us with a clue: a favor we do to another remains a favor, remains gratuitous, even though our heart tells us that we ought to do it, that we ought to be generous, ought to pardon. And why? Because we belong together in a deep solidarity which the heart discerns. We belong together, because together we are obligated to a reality which transcends us.

Christ’s word comes to mind: “If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go. First make peace with your brother, then come and offer your gift.” (Mt. 5: 24) This is in perfect conformity with the tradition of Israel’s prophets who insisted that true sacrifice is thanksgiving, that true immolation is obedience, that the true meaning of the sacrificial meal is mercy, “ hesed ,” the covenant, love, which binds men to one another by binding them as one community to God.

What is rejected is empty ritualism, not ritual. Thanksgiving mercy, obedience are not to replace ritual, but to give it its full meaning. Indeed, our whole life is to become a sacred ritual of thanksgiving, the whole universe a sacrifice. When the prophet Zachariah says that “on that day” (the day of the Messiah) “every pot and pan in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them,” the implication is that there is nothing on earth that cannot become a vessel filled with our gratitude and lifted up to God.

It is this universal “Eucharistia,” this comic celebration of a thanksgiving sacrifice which forms the heart of the Christian message. And even to those of us who are not Christians the experience of gratitude gives at least a speculative access to the Christian belief that the spiral of thanksgiving is the dynamic pattern of all reality, that within the absolute oneness of the triune God there is room for an eternal exchange of giving and thanksgiving, a spiral of joy. Within the one and undivided Godhead, the Father gives himself to the Son, and the Son gives himself in thanksgiving to the Father. And the Gift of Love eternally exchanged between Father and Son is himself, personal and divine, the Holy Spirit of Thanksgiving.

Creation and redemption are simply an overflow of this divine “perichorese,” this inner-trinitarian dance, an overflow into what of itself is nothingness. God the Son becomes the Son of Man in obedience to the Father, so as to unite through his sacrifice in merciful love all men with one another and with God, leading them back in the Spirit of Thanksgiving to that eternal embrace in which “God will be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15: 28) “Whatever exists, exists through sacrifice.” (Sat. Brah. XI, 2, 3, 6) The whole cosmos is being renewed moment by moment through sacrifice: brought back to its source through thanksgiving, and received anew as gift in all its primordial freshness. But this universal sacrifice is possible only because the one God, himself, is Giver, Thanksgiver, and Gift.

To those among us who have entered into this mystery through faith it need not be explained; to others, it cannot be explained. But to the extent to which we have given room in our hearts to gratitude, we all have a share in this reality, by whatever name we may call it. (It is a reality which we shall never fully take hold of. All that matters is that we let it take hold of us.) All that matters is that we enter into that passage of gratitude and sacrifice, the passage which leads us to integrity within ourselves, to concord with one another and to union with the very Source of Life. For “… this is all that matters: that we can bow, take a deep bow. Just that, Just that.”

Reprinted from:
Main Currents in Modern Thought
(May-June 1967, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp.129-132)