Thanksgiving Day 2016

+Thanksgiving Day. A once a year holiday in the secular world. Too bad for them.
Once a year?….pshaw….
We have Thanksgiving every single week…and not just any ol’ordinary Thanksgiving, it’s a GREAT Thanksgiving. Go ahead, take a look on page __ of the bulletin. The Great Thanksgiving is the communion portion of our service---when we, a holy people share holy food.
Each and every week we gather around the dining table of our Lord to offer thanks for all that we have and all that we are. Everything. Our blessings and our burdens. Our hopes and our fears. Our happiness and our worries.
The Great Thanksgiving of our Lord doesn’t seek only the good. The Great Thanksgiving of our Lord requests---longs for---everything we have. And all that we are.
We are called each and every week to place it all –our joys and our triumphs, our sorrows and our losses---on this altar. The whole kit and caboodle. Doing that is an act of true and thorough and full thankfulness.
In a few moments we’ll recite A Litany of Thanksgiving I have used for several years. I like this litany because in it we offer thanks for the good as well as the challenges of life. None of us want to be challenged, but we are and frankly, we usually learn a tremendous amount from these challenges. We learn how strong we are, we learn who we can count on, and who we cannot. We learn our limits, we learn our abilities. We learn. We grow.
There’s an old saying among horse people that says:
“Don’t forget to thank the difficult horses that made your life hell, without them you wouldn’t be as good of rider as you are today.”
I don’t know about you, but I know that every challenge I have faced in life has made me a better human being, a better partner, a better daughter, a better sister, a better parent, a better friend, a better priest. So I intend, as we pray this litany, to thank the “difficult horses” of my life, because they have, indeed, made me a better rider.
So ,my friends, pray it fervently, honestly and whole-heartedly.
Because you see, God wants it all—every last bit of it. So please, PLEASE give it all to God. Even those things too difficult to express, those things too painful to utter—offer them to God—for when we do that we become better riders, we become better Christians, we become better people. +