Thanksgiving 2014

Thanksgiving 2014

Gratitude releases grace.

God’s grace pours forth into the universe and our species unconditionally. Not every person chooses to receive that grace. Not every person who chooses to receive grace actually expresses grace.

Grace is God’s favor, God’s delight and God’s divine presence in our lives.

Giving thanks helps realign our attitudes and actions to the real presence of God.  That real presence is personal and impersonal. The impersonal aspect of God is the very structure of cause and effect that holds the universe together. Did you ever think to give thanks for gravity, light, matter and energy? Did you ever think to give thanks for the sun, the air, the water, the land? Creation is a finely balanced web of inter relationships that makes life possible. It also reveals the pattern of God for those who have the humility to perceive the pattern.

God the Father designed our species to be dependent on Him and interdependent on each other. As the poet priest John Donne wrote: no man is an island. The One God manifests as three co-eternal persons in an active dynamic personal and creative expression of love. We are made in the image of that One God in Three persons. We are designed for relationships. Are you thankful for family, friends and neighbors? Are you thankful for the rich diversity God has created in humanity?

God the Father sent God the Son to become a human being by the power of God the Holy Spirit in union with Holy Mother Mary. Are you thankful for this amazing gift of divine love? Are you thankful Jesus comes to us in the context of a family?

 There is much we could criticize about our world and the history of our species. At least for one day consider the blessings interwoven into the tapestry of Creation. Consider the grace. Life on this planet and in our nation is not perfectly bad. Neither is it perfectly good. It is both.

The Bride of Christ invites us all to live and move and have our being in this world of duality, of the “both/and” from the place of grace. In that grace we can give thanks for so much. In that grace we can hold the blessing, become the blessing and share the blessing with others.