Let Your Lives Overflow with Thanksgiving by Bernadette Gibson
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and this year I have pondered the nourishment we have received in gratitude for this Community. I look around this church and am grateful for the presence we offer one another. The great thing is that we come to celebrate the Eucharist today not because we are supposed to...but because we want to. There are no rules saying any of us has to be here this morning. We all have other things to do - trips to make, turkeys to stuff, and tables to set. But today is a day of opportunity. It’s an opportunity to think back on what we have been given...and to give something in return: Thanks. Actually, “thanks'' is too small a word. We are here to give gratitude.
Our celebration this day in the Eucharist is a call to return to the source of every gift, the God who gave Himself for us. It is the invitation to give thanks and be nourished as a family together. We are truly a blessed people. We are here to honor, with grateful hearts, what God has done for us.
Very often, in our prayer lives, we spend so much time on our knees, asking for things. The scripture tells us to ask and we shall receive, to knock and the door will be opened. So we ask, and we knock. In Luke’s gospel today, 10 people are cured by Jesus of leprosy. Only one comes back to say thank you. Tellingly, the person who comes back is a Samaritan. He isn’t Jewish. But neither was St. Luke. Luke is the only one of the evangelists who was not a Jew. And his gospel was written for those, like himself, who were the outsiders, the foreigners. Christ’s message, Luke tells us, is meant for everyone. But in the gospel story, not everyone comes back. Implicit in this episode is the idea that something is missing. Giving thanks is a vital and necessary part of our relationship with God. And that is because thankfulness, we discover, is a measure of faith. A measure of our dependence on God, and of our own humility.
Most of us know someone who is having a difficult time this Thanksgiving. The woman who is spending her first holiday as a widow. The father who lost his job and is worried about where he will find Christmas gifts for his children. Those friends and neighbors who are hurting or alone. Let’s offer a prayer of solidarity with them and send our gratitude for their persistence in Hope.
Sometimes thankfulness can be hard to express. My grandmother was wonderful at “thank-you” notes. I remember often receiving a note from her just thanking me for my company. The virtue of gratitude is the ability to express our thankful appreciation in word or deed, to the person whose words or actions have benefited us in some way. Fundamentally, cultivating the spirit of gratitude requires us to develop humility. We need to understand that everything that we have and everything that we are is a gift.
My husband Gary has been on a cancer journey for the last six months. Your love for us has been all-consuming. We felt your unconditional presence and we felt lavished upon. We were sung over and held as God’s beloved children and we could not be more grateful for this community of believers holding us firm to our faith and our healing.
Today, I invite you to be grateful this day for your own goodness. Make this very day a kind of prayer. Beginning here, and now. Every beat of your heart affirms an unmistakable mystery: God has given us life. Extravagant, wonderful, painful, tumultuous, challenging life.
Let’s strive to remind ourselves of God’s blessings, wherever we find them, however, they come to us. And to give thanks for them, every day, in every moment. Learning to Love is learning to Live. We are called to be a People of Thanksgiving. We are called to love and we as Old Saint Patrick’s staff are so grateful to be in the presence of you as Eucharistic people. Happy Thanksgiving!
Bernadette Gibson is the Director of Pastoral Care at Old Saint Patrick’s Church
Reflection Narrated By Kate Anderson