Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Interfaith Thanksgiving Meditation

Thanksgiving is more universal in humanity than in the ways it has become celebrated within my faith tradition, so I begin outside of any tradition and contemplate the natural place of Thankgiving within human experience.  Thanksgiving is the celebration of the completion of exchanges of human reciprocity.  Someone has a need, someone addresses and fulfills the need and thanksgiving celebrates the completion of a human contract.  To be thankful is to be those who have needed others.  To be thankful is a perpetual calling to use one's gifts to give other people the occasions to be thankful.  To be thanked is the esteem of being useful to and appreciated by another person.  To be thankful is to appreciate the timeliness of someone in the provision of a needed gift.

Thanksgiving is important gift that human beings have to give  to God who has everything but who draws from us this gift.  Thanksgiving is valuable because it comes from an exercise of our freedom.  Thanksgiving comes from the sense of satisfaction and enjoyment when a need is met.  God supplies the human need for the sense of the holy and transcendent.

The weekly Sunday ritual in our church is called Holy Eucharist, also call Holy Communion and The Mass.  Eucharist is from the Greek language and it literally means Thanksgiving.  So for us, Thanksgiving is not a once a year secular holiday, it is the essence for why we gather as people of faith.

In our Eucharist, we acknowledge that all things have come from the plenitude of God.  We have the privilege to recognize this and thanksgiving is how we offer back to God what is already God's.  And in so doing we believe that in this event of covenant between God and us, God meets us with the promise of the continued divine presence in our lives.  We observe this renewal rite by making our selves intentionally present to God and believing that God, in turn, renews the divine presence with us.  Eucharist is a liturgy of the Thanksgiving exchange between God and us.

In Thanksgiving, we are invited to both the general theory of thanksgiving and the individual articulated events of thanksgiving.  From the cloister of our familiar communities we may profess the general thanksgiving beliefs of our particular religion but in practice we can become like the proverbial Charlie Brown:  "I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."

I am thankful for God; it's those Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, Atheist neighbors I am not thankful for.  Remember we validate general thanksgiving by particular practice of thanksgiving to real and particular people.

We are called to live beyond the religious ritual of confessing that we are thankful for God; we are called to be individually and particularly thankful for the many, many different people who are brought into our lives each day.  Thanksgiving as specific and particular appreciation of actual people is how we make our prayers of thanksgiving valid in our every day lives.  We are called to be thankful in new ways for new people beyond our own familiar communities.  We honor the American tradition tonight by expressing our thanksgiving for one another in this diverse gathering of people of faith.

Let us turn to each other and say: Thank you for being here.  Thank you for being who you are.  This world and my life has need of you.

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