Did you ever stop to think what a wealthy country (even region of our country) you are blessed to live in?
Of the outpouring of community, health, rich food, social stability, and access to education that we have?
We all have troubles and crosses in daily life. We also enjoy innumerable blessings.
Could we find the strength to offer God a "sacrifice of praise" even if we had NONE of these blessings,
as many Catholics around the world do each day?
Join our Parish Community tonight at
7:00 pm for the Thanksgiving Eve Mass
Let's rejoice and THANK HIM!
And let's also set our hearts and our praise on the Lord, putting all things in the proper order,
to draw close to Him and learn how we should use these blessings as He wills.
Love and generosity always require sacrifice if they are to be truly good and enjoyed, having the power to change hearts and lives.
May His abundant blessings never fall on infertile ground.
"The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of them all."
(Proverbs 22:2)
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With many thanks to our awesome curator, Karen Celano, you can delve into a faith-related news article each Wednesday! Karen writes:
Thanksgiving Day is coming! In between your turkey and pumpkin pie, I invite you to take a moment to think about the historical and theological aspects of this national tradition, which has its roots in English Christianity but which is very different from what the Pilgrims of our national myth would have conceived.
In her article explaining the history of Thanksgiving, Eve LaPlante explains that the Calvinist ("Pilgrim") tradition of declaring days of thanksgiving emerged, in part, as a reactionary response to the Catholic tradition of a set calendar of feasts and fasts. Calvinists felt that the Catholic calendar, with its pre-established "holidays" or holy days, encouraged spiritual laziness and a lack of attentiveness to God's immediate presence in the world. Thus, to have Thanksgiving on a set and established day each year would, actually, be quite upsetting to the very anti-ritualistic Pilgrims, who saw their thanksgivings as spontaneous responses to what they perceived as acts of God on their behalf.
Our tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving on a fixed date every year began with Abraham Lincoln, who sought to cheer up a war-torn nation while also providing a vision of hope that the country could be reunited (as, supposedly, the Indians and the Pilgrims were). It has been argued that Lincoln's presidency inaugurated a new era in American "civil religion" (in other words, America's understanding of itself and its institutions in theological and religious terms), and Lincoln certainly was aware of the power of ritual, symbol, and myth to unite a culture and a people. What is also remarkable about Lincoln's proclamation is that it unites the concepts of thanksgiving and repentance: "while offering up the ascriptions justly due to [God] for such singular deliverances and blessings," he declares, Americans should also express "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience." This Thanksgiving, perhaps we should follow Lincoln's example, and unite our prayers of gratitude to prayers of repentance for our own sins and the sins of the world.
Catholics, of course, have long understood the importance of ritual, symbol and shared myth in creating unity, and they have also long understood the relationship between repentance and thanksgiving. For Catholics, every Mass we attend is a Thanksgiving feast, as the word "Eucharist" comes from the Greek for thanksgiving. Even more literally, the word eucharistia in Greek means good gift of grace. In her reflection on the relationship between the Mass and Thanksgiving, Marina McCoy speaks about the Mass as a cyclical giving of gifts: God gives to us, we return to God, God bestows upon us even more. The catch, however, is that we must be willing to give back to God what He gives to us - and to give it back "wholly and without reserve." Giving back to God can be very difficult and distressing, and it can even cause grief and despair - think of Abraham's sorrow when asked to sacrifice Isaac - but through Scripture and the Eucharist we know that in giving back to God we receive from God in abundance again, even if we can't immediately see how.
The idea of the Eucharist as a cycle of gift-giving puts me in mind of Jesus' parable of the talents, in which the Master bestows gold on his servants, praises them when they invest it wisely, and chastises them when they hide it in fear. Often I feel that in our narcissistic culture we interpret this parable as meaning that we should not be shy but rather let our "talents" shine forth. But I think there's actually a much deeper meaning here. If the gift of gold represents a blessing from God, then the Master is praising those who are willing to risk the gift, to labor and strive with the gift, and perhaps even to suffer for the sake of the gift. The Master condemns the one who clings to the gift, who is not willing to put it to use for fear of losing it. The message is that each of God's blessings - each of His gifts - is also a responsibility and a challenge, and when we give thanks to God for all that He has blessed us with, we must also be willing to return those blessings to God - we must be willing to give up the gifts if God asks us, and we must be willing to suffer and toil with and for the gifts He has given us.
The person who modeled this dynamic best was, of course, Christ Himself. The irony of the Eucharist is that it is an act of thanksgiving in the midst of great suffering: Christ is unjustly murdered, but His death becomes a thanksgiving gift to God for the sake of those who murdered Him. Alexander Schmemann, a Russian Orthodox priest and theologian who spent his life studying the Eucharist, understood the way in which great suffering can be a vessel to great joy through the Eucharist, and he lived out this understanding in his own life. Though he was dying of cancer, during the last liturgy he celebrated (which providentially happened to be on Thanksgiving Day), he delivered this humble and touching prayer of thanks, which expresses gratitude to God for suffering, which, he says, purifies us and turns our minds towards the 'one thing needed': the Kingdom of God. As we give thanks to God this year, let's also keep in mind those who are suffering, and let's try to pray for the grace to turn our own sorrows into "good gifts of grace": Eucharistic and thanksgiving gifts to God.
Finally, don't forget that this Friday(Dec. 6) is the Feast of Saint Nick! Taking time to learn about Saint Nicholas can be a wonderful way to help your children make the connection between Jesus' birthday, opening our hearts to Christ, giving gifts, and sharing
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