About thanks

You can often hear the words: I do good to a person, but I get ingratitude from him. A strange contradiction: after all, what has been done in anticipation of gratitude is no longer good, but self-interest. Christ said: "When one hand gives alms, let the other not know about it." A person must forget about the good he has done to another; it must disappear from his memory, like letters written on water. With this he will put his treasure in a safe cache.

Usually, people can not calm down, worry and talk about how much good they have done and have not received anything in return, as if they were deceived. A similar mistake is made by those people who accept the gift not as a sign of Christian love, but consider themselves obliged to repay or work for it, as if enslaved by someone else's good. They intensely think what to do or give in return, fearing to seem ungrateful and thereby humiliate themselves. They begin to give their benefactor special signs of attention, looking for an opportunity to offer their services, that is, to pay him as soon as possible. Often they force themselves to forge, pretend, and curse their conscience, that is, to pay with their souls, as a bargaining chip.

Then, instead of love, a person has an internal slave dependence, which can cause secret, deaf irritation to the one who has rendered help and alms: after all, the debtor cannot love his lender. At the same time, a psychological paradox sometimes occurs: in order to get rid of the addiction that a person himself has imposed on himself, he goes into conflict with those who have done him good. Therefore, there is such a strange phenomenon in the world: they repay for good with evil, as if they are taking revenge for it. And this is to blame for the false attitude, the false sense of gratitude, as a debt that must be worked out in order to remove the chain from the neck.

Archimandrite Raphael (Karelin)