Thanksgiving Day

Just a couple of quick thoughts this morning, first of all to wish all of you a very happy Thanksgiving. I suppose more than any other day, this really marks the opening of the holiday season. The anticipation of any number of pleasant experiences over the next month always seems to add a particularly joyful note to the celebration of Thanksgiving.

But there is always a kind of a two-edged feel, I think, to this time of the year. Along with the anticipation of good times to come, there is for most people I'd be willing to bet, a fair bit of time spent in looking back. It's probably true to say that as families and friends gather over the month or so to come, at least a part of each of those gatherings will be given over to telling stories of past holiday celebrations, maybe showing home movies, or just sitting and remembering.

And it is good to do that, really. It nourishes the soul, just as much as the turkey nourishes the body. A looking back to the past, as well as an anticipation of the future are well-joined, I think, on Thanksgiving Day. They both should spur us to gratitude. I think it is the city of Boston that has on its official seal a sort of motto that expresses very well that sort of duality in our thanksgiving. It reads, "As God has dealt with our fathers, so may He deal with us."

And certainly, God as dealt very generously with our fathers, and our mothers, and with us. Certainly we must be aware of the fact that we have abundant reason to be grateful. We enjoy a level of material comfort far beyond anything human beings have ever experienced before, far beyond what the majority of human beings experience today. And strange as it may sound, I think one of the real obstacles we face around here in living out the virtue of gratitude, is simply coming to realize more than intellectually, just how true that is. I always think at Thanksgiving time about a conversation I had some years back with a mother who was upset with her children because they seemed, she thought, to take so much for granted. She complained, almost, that in this area there is really no way to very forcefully impress ourselves and our children with the reality of how much we in fact have. Aside from an occasional flickering image on a TV newscast, we really don't see desperate poverty. We don't know what it feels like. In a sense, we have been deprived of the intensely evangelical witness of poverty. We don't hear the cries of the poor very clearly, they are too far away, in Ethiopia, or Calcutta, or some such. They are there, right enough, by the hundreds of millions. But at such a distance, it can all seem pretty unreal.

And that can tempt us to a real narrowness of vision. It can tempt us to think ourselves poor, when the roof leaks, or the furniture starts to look a little worn. Well, we're not poor, not by any stretch of the imagination. Every one of us today will be well fed and warm, and in the company of friends. Not because we have earned that, not because we deserve it, but simply because we are here. This is the life that has been given to us.

But even more important than material comfort, we enjoy an unprecedented freedom, an invitation to growth, an opportunity to make of ourselves, and the community whatever we want them to be. An opportunity to contribute to that process the best that we have to offer, and the opportunity to draw from it the satisfactions of accomplishment, of companionship, and of purposeful movement. Those opportunities are great gifts. And they are indeed gifts. We didn't create them, we simply enjoy them.

And God has dealt with our ancestors, and with us, with a goodness that goes far beyond the satisfactions of the moment. God's gifts of grace, His Incarnation, which we will celebrate one month from now, have so transformed our lives, that the possibility of infinite satisfaction, infinite joy has been opened up to us. He has surrounded us with a goodness that is so overwhelming that we simply cannot respond to it adequately on our own. So this morning here, beyond our personal, or community, or national celebration of gratitude, we join our response with that of the entire Eucharistic community, a community of thanks-givers, that is what the word "Eucharist" means. We identify ourselves at the Mass with the flawless and total response of Christ as He offers thanks for us. And that is a thanks that can, and should be offered with equal sincerity by those who enjoy the best, and by those who suffer the worst that the world has to offer now. We realize especially today that no matter what we may or may not enjoy right now, we each of us enjoy equally the gift of an infinite future, a future in which no satisfaction is beyond our reach.

So do have a good day. Anticipate the good things yet to come, and reflect on good things that have been. And do it all remembering that nothing really worth having is ever taken away. The best of God's gifts are infinite. And that calls for gratitude indeed.

Thanksgiving, November 28, 1985