There is a little bit of Lucy in each one of us. Sometimes life weighs us down. It is easy to see the problems and struggles of life. It is easy to focus on the things that are wrong. But sometimes we need to be Snoopy. How often do we take time to recognize the blessings? How often are we so caught up in the beauty of the world that we just have to dance – or sing or laugh or whatever we do to express our joy?
This week we celebrate Thanksgiving. There are great rituals associated with this holiday. They involve eating so much that we fall asleep on the sofa while watching football. But let us not forget what this holiday is truly all about. This is our opportunity to give thanks to God for all His blessings. Giving thanks is not a way to appease God as though we were worried that He might get mad if we forgot Him. It is rather a way of accepting His gifts for what they are, signs of His love. By being grateful, we see His love in every moment of our lives. In that way, we take a cue from one of the Prefaces that we use for the Eucharistic Prayer for weekday masses: “For although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation.”
In my own prayer, I sometimes use a rather silly image to help me recognize how important gratitude is. I imagine trying to thank God for every gift we have received. I would start with each breath I take: “Thank you for that one, and for that one, and there’s another one.” And in the midst of it, I would begin to notice each beat of my heart. In fact, I would get so caught up in thanking God for those basic signs that I would never be able to move, and I would thus miss the opportunity to thank Him for every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine. The serious lesson I draw from that image is that we are so surrounded by God’s gifts that we cannot possibly thank Him sufficiently. But in trying to do so, we move from Lucy to Snoopy. We keep our difficulties in perspective to see that, above all and in spite of anything else we might face, God’s love and protection are with us.
For me, I will be celebrating Thanksgiving with my sister in Virginia. I will be gone this whole week, but please know that I will be keeping all St. Malachy parishioners in my prayers in a special way, for the opportunity to serve this parish is one of the gifts for which I am most grateful. So happy Thanksgiving, everybody. And if you take this holiday seriously, then be like Snoopy and dance until your feet hurt.
Father H
