"Gratitude." The word has a faintly old fashioned ring to it. Quaint relic from the past. Or at least an endangered species, threatened by the encroaching mindset of entitlement. Culturally, this sense of entitlement is reflected in how litigiously trigger-happy we've become: Whatever misfortune I experience, I can always find someone to sue. The recent news that a person is suing McDonald's because of their weight problem is an example of entitlement run amuck.

Richard Rohr in Hope Against the Darkness puts the problem this way: " ' so much more suffering comes into the world because of people taking offense than from people giving offense.' We've created a highly offendable people who think they deserve an awful lot-and even have a right to it."

A life stance of entitlement sets us up to live in an emotional atmosphere of anger and resentment. We are vulnerable each day to those little and big slights to our ego. We enter these ego woundings in the Big Book of Bitterness and demand compensation.

There is a way out of this prison, an antidote to the infection and addictiveness of entitlement. It is the practice of gratitude. We all know what gratitude feels like from those times when we've narrowly escaped harm or danger: the tumor is benign, the tests come back negative, we emerge from a serious car accident with only minor injuries. At the moment the danger passes there is a surge of relief and gratitude. Suddenly what remains-simply being alive-is a treasure. Which of us in contemplating the unimaginable loss and suffering experienced by people close to the September 11 tragedy doesn't instinctively feel this sense of gratitude that we and our loved ones were spared.

Though these kinds of occurrences give us a glimpse of the healing power of gratitude, they are not enough to transform a sense of entitlement into an attitude of gratitude. What's required is a lifestyle, or more precisely, a "mindstyle" change. A conscious decision to practice gratitude by seeing with new eyes: to notice what's going right, not just what's going wrong; to be aware of the simple gifts embedded in everyday living; to search for meaning in the painful and distasteful happenings of our lives.

Certainly this doesn't mean putting on rose-colored glasses or being in denial about the reality of evil and suffering. It simply means being grateful for the privilege of tasting life in all its sweetness and bitterness, its joys and sorrows.

Whereas entitlement begins and ends with the self and its concerns, the practice of gratitude leads outward from the self to other people and the world and ultimately to the mystery of creation and the miracle of grace.

And so it seems that this choice between entitlement and gratitude is similar to the choice posed by Albert Einstein when he said: "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."