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Thanksgiving Day
Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to celebrate this wonderful Thanksgiving Day Mass with you. It’s one I look forward to each year and it’s one that never fails to move me and touch my heart. And this year, to be honest, I look at a little differently from past years. It’s probably because of the surgery I had recently. It wasn’t really that big a deal but it was big enough to slow me down and get me to thinking. So maybe it was a big deal! At any rate, over the past couple of weeks I have found myself becoming more aware of things I have often taken for granted, things that are part of my days but so much a part of them that they can go unnoticed, unappreciated. During my days of recovery I have found myself becoming consciously thankful for them. Let me name just a few. I’ve become thankful for something as simple as the first gray light of dawn each morning. A welcome sight, especially after a long night when sleep was fitful at best and the darkness seemed to drag on and on. I never spent much time thinking about what daybreak means and what a sign of hope it is. I hope I don’t forget that anytime soon. And I’ve become more thankful, too, for the precious gift of life itself: my own, and others’. One afternoon last week I celebrated the funeral of one of our old Cathedral saints; then later that same day, I was over at Swedish Medical Center to see a beautiful baby girl born the day before. I held her in my arms while her parents rhapsodized about the miracle of life. And they were so right: what an incredible gift life is -- at its beginning, at its end, and at all its amazing manifestations in-between. And, then, at a more practical level, I’ve become thankful for mobility – even the reduced mobility I had to deal with for a couple of weeks! To have legs that take me places, however slowly, is a pretty wonderful gift – one I’ve always taken completely for granted, but maybe won’t so much in the future. And I’ve become more thankful than ever for friends who have surrounded me with kindness and hovered around me like guardian angels. Friends who have brought meals, sent cards and flowers, made me laugh, dropped everything to take me places, put up with my less than scintillating spirits, offered me the encouraging word. I’ve also become more aware of and thankful for the
people in my life and in the life of our parish, including some of you who have
to deal with all kinds of serious limitations and disabilities-- far more
serious than any I’ve had to deal with: people with chronic and even terminal
illnesses, people who daily deal with growing diminishment without hope of any
real improvement. And I’ve become quite thankful for quiet time – something I don’t normally have a lot of. I’ve always believed – and taught – that God can best be heard in the quiet but it has taken some enforced down-time for me to appreciate this more fully. During some fairly long evenings with no appointments or meetings, and no one around, and no place to go, I managed to dispense with the television and other interruptions long enough to hear the still, small voice of God. What a blessing that has been! And I feel I have become more thankful than ever for my faith. There’s something indescribably wonderful about this Catholic faith of ours, this faith that gives us eyes to see God in all things; this faith that makes Christ as real for us as our own flesh, or the flesh and blood of a brother or sister; this faith that doesn’t just imagine God, or worship God, but actually meets God in the most surprising and sometimes most messy of places. Lately, I’ve been finding God not only in Word and in Sacrament but in hospital corridors and doctors’ waiting rooms, in clumsy boots and post-op pains, in diminished energy, delayed plans and postponed projects, in get well cards and meals on wheels, in a child’s hug or a parishioner’s smile. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That flesh takes many different forms – and each one is an epiphany. And, lastly, I’ve become more thankful than ever for this community of faith we call St. James Cathedral. How blessed I am to be your pastor! If I stop to think of it any length of time, it’s a pretty scary thing to be a pastor. Wonderful, but scary. But I find comfort in words the great St. Augustine spoke to his people long ago in one of his homilies: “Believe me, brothers and sisters, if what I am for you frightens me, what I am with you reassures me. For you I am the pastor; but with you I am a Christian.” Today, my dear friends, Thanksgiving Day, it’s the “with you” part that I give thanks for. With you I am a Christian, a fellow pilgrim, a follower of Jesus Christ: weak, flawed, fallible, but graced beyond measure and gifted beyond merit. So are we all. So are we all! So, friends, on this wonderful national day for giving thanks, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give God thanks and praise!” Father Michael G. Ryan |
