Thanksgiving Thoughts 2016

There's so much I enjoy about this holiday:  It's a quintessentially American holiday for us the people of the United States, continuing a tradition that shows what our nation is about, in having a day to remind us of giving thanks.  It also touches so richly upon the Roman Catholic tradition, the heart of which is the Mass, when we celebrate the Eucharist, which comes from a Greek term for Thanksgiving.  Attending Mass in the morning of Thanksgiving Day has become a cherished tradition for me.  (I think of how fitting it is that Thanksgiving Day falls annually on a Thursday, just like Maundy Thursday before Resurrection Sunday, when we celebrate Christ's Institution of the Eucharist.)

There's another Thanksgiving tradition I've come to embrace deeply:  Every year since 2010, on the Sunday evening preceding Thanksgiving Day, I've attended an Interfaith Thanksgiving Prayer Service sponsored by the Oak Park River-Forest Community of Congregations, an organization for the religious communities in the local area.  This year, I came full circle with the event, which was held at Oak Park Temple B'nai Abraham Zion Synagogue, the same place where it was held the first time I attended this service.

It's wonderful to join with neighbors who belong to different religious communities as we celebrate and give thanks for our blessings.  That principle was a theme that I sensed especially present throughout this year's prayer service:  Whatever our circumstances may be, they don't erase the ever present reality that we are blessed each day we have life, so that every day is a great day to give thanks.  Certainly the language of President Lincoln's Proclamation in 1863 establishing Thanksgiving Day as an annual holiday on the last Thursday of November speaks about the blessings the country was experiencing even in the midst of the heartache of war.

I'm glad to be reminded of that wonderful insight, even in the midst of present challenges I face in my life.  I know I am blessed because I am alive, and that God has made me alive in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. I am blessed because of the relationships that add so much to my life.  And on this American Holy Day, I am blessed to live in the United States of America, where we have freedoms that were won for us in great strife, and that give us the chance to be active participants shaping our society to be a force for good in this world.

I am blessed, and so I give thanks to God, for it is right and just to render it to the God Who is the source of all these blessings.