The Power of Gratitude.

In ancient Lydia there lived an inspired weaver, Arachne, whose tapestries were so beautiful and lifelike that people came to see them from miles around. Arachne soon became as boastful as she was talented and let it be known she considered herself even more skilled than Athena herself. Athena got wind of this and showed up one day in the guise of an old woman. When Arachne repeated her claim Athena revealed herself and challenged the puffed up mortal to a contest.

Athena’s tapestry was a marvel but Arachne’s work was more miraculous still. Her compromising depictions of Zeus and Poseidon embarrassing themselves in their extra-marital shenanigins seemed quite alive. The goddess flew into a rage, ripped up Arachne’s work and magically turned her great pride into an equally inflated guilt so all consuming that Arachne despairs and kills herself. Athena realizes she’s over done it a bit and turns Arachne into a spider, forever after weaving her wondrous web.

The moral Ovid deduces is, ‘don’t think you are better than the gods’, though this seems like an interpretation mostly suited to ruling a pliant population. The fact is that Arachne won the competition. She was the better weaver. Her error was in failing to show gratitude to the gods for her gift which then leads to her mental imbalance, depression and suicide.

People mostly divvy up into those who believe in God and those who don’t. There are a few quibblers who feel they might have confused spiritual experience with indigestion but by far the most under represented are those who are in no doubt about God but still think that religion is a bad idea, mostly given the fact that international terrorism is rooted precisely in people having ‘special’ relationships with bad tempered deities.

Unfortunately, heinous acts against others for the temerity of being different are only the thin, visible, end of this wedge. Monotheism of any kind, including state sponsored atheism and the monotheism of consciousness it breeds, attacks its own people in greater though less obvious numbers.

One of the most insidious ways it does this is via the erosion of gratitude inevitable in any belief system rooted in the cosy entitlement which goes with being ‘chosen’.

The certainty of self this generates goes way beyond suddenly having great swathes of the planet pegged as second class citizens, children of lesser and laughable gods. It seems your neighbors at home haven’t quite got it right either. World Christian Encyclopedia (David A. Barrett; Oxford University Press, 1982) estimates almost 21,000 denominations of Christianity worldwide, each one convinced that some how they were the ones to get the details right.

Only those in my valley have any true knowledge of the world. It’s like claiming to be a gourmand without ever having strayed beyond the borders of your own allotment.

‘Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous’. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower

Back in the day, when there were a sensible number of gods, you might sacrifice at a different altar than your neighbor whilst feeling that you were still going about the same thing. Having a grumble at Hermes one day and offering Hera a gift the next allows life to be complex and contradictory. You are loved but not special and so when the gods show you their favor its cause for the kind of celebration and thankfullness that makes living worthwhile and puts your troubles behind you..

Arachne has to forgo this redemption for the arrogant conviction she is mistress of her own house. Even though she bests the goddess’ challenge, this cannot of itself give meaning to life. In fact she despairs entirely without the healing gratitude of valuing others and being given a gift that came free of conditions.

So, the belief that there is nothing new in the world and that you have a hotline to ultimate truth leads quickly to Promethean-like guilt and deadening attacks on the self.

Despite Arachne’s brilliance it all comes to nothing. The tapestry gets ripped up and her life destroyed, for want of a seemingly impossible ‘thankyou’.

Which makes you wonder about her relationship with her mother….

So I googled it, ‘Arachne’s mother was a common woman who is not named by Ovid’, which was disappointing for a moment, until you ask, ”how can specialness be renounced and symbiotic development take place with someone so marginalized as to be nameless?

The disenfranchisement of women ultimately leads, by torturous paths, to emotionally absent yet ravenous mothers who cannot help but incur destruction of creativity and loss of the will to live in their kids.

Arachne wonders why the fuck she should be grateful. For what? She’s had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps all her life and still managed to beat a goddess at her own game…

all of which is true..

Yet it is also true that adversity yields its own fruit. Perhaps Arachne’s great skill is not in spite of her past but because of it. Compelled to find the means to creatively transcend her suffering, she made tapestries of loss and injustice, symbolically weaving the threads of herself back together, making a great name for herself to compensate for a mother whose name none remember.

The naive spiritual doctrine of embracing good and eschewing evil is developmentally about four years old, when kids want to know who is the goody and who is the baddy in the movie you’re watching.

This does not mean masochistically inviting suffering into our lives. It nevertheless remains that adversity compels us to grow in ways that soft living may never produce. Who you have become is invariably by way of pain and adversity as well as nurture. If you look back on the toughest times in your life they are usually the ones in which you grew most.

Sometimes people say about therapy, ‘oh, what’s the point? You can’t change your past..’ which is true, though you can change your relationship with it which makes redemption and healing possible. This paradoxical process requires gratitude, not as a way of denying or minimizing suffering, but in so far as adversity breaks the kernel of our understanding, provides new frames of reference, questions values you might have swallowed whole, and throws you back on as yet unmanifest self.