Grumbling Can Turn You Into Nothing

This week I attended a conference where Christine Pohl shared insights from her book Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us. The four main practices she describes -- gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality -- all have deformations that weaken a community's ability to thrive.

One of the corruptions of gratitude is grumbling. God's people have always struggled with this sin, perhaps most memorably in the desert between Egypt and the promised land. Remember when the people complained about not having meat to eat, so God sent so many quail that they were overwhelmed by the sheer mass of them? (See Numbers 11.)

Pohl used one of my favorite books to illustrate the spiritual danger of grumbling. In The Great Divorce (which is not about marriage), C.S. Lewis describes a woman who grumbled so much that she actually transformed into what she did -- she moved from being a grumbler to being the very essence of the sin itself -- a "grumble." This danger shows the negative side of what Pohl teaches: what we do makes us into different people. We can choose to do things that make us more like God, such as offering gratitude. Or we can choose to do things that make us whither away to nothing. Let me use Lewis' own words here (from pages 74-75). The questioner sees this miserable woman on a bus of people coming from hell. He asks the teacher about her condition.

Questioner: I am troubled, Sir, because that unhappy creature doesn't seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn't wicked: she's only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling, and one feels that a little kindness, and rest, and change would put her all right.

Teacher: The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman--even the least trace of one--still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there's one wee spark under all those ashes, we'll blow it till the whole pile is read an clear. But if there's nothing but ashes we'll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up. 

Lewis' view of hell is not embraced by all. But his larger point -- that grumbling can actually destroy our souls -- is an important warning against neglecting to be grateful. Let's be so thankful that our very souls turn into a "thanks."