Thanksgiving

Time has been getting away from me!  How about you?  It is good to see Thanksgiving approach – a time when we “take the time” we need to honor all the good in our life and in our world.  I have learned that for me, gratitude is the essential virtue; and, in many ways, it determines my life.  When I take life for granted I am often filled with anxiety and the drudgery of routine living.  On the other hand, when I approach life with deep gratitude I find myself filled with joy, happiness and enduring peace.  How could one virtue transform me so much?   It somehow turns what I have into enough and even more.  And, for Americans on Thanksgiving Day, it turns a meal into a feast, a house into a home and even a stranger into a friend.

Perhaps it is our “remembering” to say thank you that is the key.  All of us hold memories of our family traditions on Thanksgiving Day or of that special time of celebration that awakened gratitude inside our hearts.  Gratitude is holding the memories but it is more.  It is the homage, within our heart, given to God and to others for their goodness to us.  Meister Eckhart tells us that “if the only prayer you said was “thank you”, that would be enough”—pray that prayer often!

Evelyn Underhill tells us that God is always present to us in the “Sacrament of the Present Moment” and it is there that we meet God often and with gratitude.  Sometime it is easier to be grateful for the divine action in our life but it is also important to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity that has nourished our lives moment by moment, and to take the time to simply say “thank you”.  I know I need to do this over and over again each day of my life.  God is so good! and she is revealed to me each day by all those I meet on the journey. 

From the staff of the Franciscan Spiritual Center, “thank you” for the many ways you reveal God to us.   These past few weeks we have been nourished by the Quaker community, by the Mercy of God Community, by the genius of Mickey McGrath’s portrayal of Dorothy Day, the painful sharing of our Human Trafficking seminar, by your participation in our Centering Prayer and Grieving and Loss workshops and by those who come simply for the quiet of retreat.  To all of you we say thank you!  We hold you in our heart!

This link is a gentle entry into gratitude:   Gratitude Link