KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 6 October
Giving thanks
Luke’s story of the one who turned back giving thanks is the classical and quintessential thanksgiving story. In Canada, the Thanksgiving Weekend is associated with Harvest Thanksgiving as well as the forms of National Thanksgiving. With the first, we give thanks for the harvest and with the second, we give thanks for the spiritual and rational freedoms which properly belong to our lives as citizens. Both forms of thanksgiving point us to the radical nature of thanksgiving as something spiritual and intellectual. A check on the idea of taking things and one another for granted.
Thanksgiving is the counter to all of the forms of privilege and entitlement, to the idea that somehow we are owed things like life and pleasure. It is profoundly about giving not getting and only through a recognition of what the American theologian and novelist Marilynn Robinson wonderfully calls “the givenness of things.” Thanksgiving recognises the spiritual nature of the natural world and of human affairs. As such it opens us out to a larger understanding of our humanity universally considered regardless of the particular cultures from which we come. It is an interesting point. We can only arise to things universal through the particularities of our cultures and lives. Thanksgiving reminds us that we are embodied beings and embedded in certain cultures with their distinctive histories and characteristics.
Thanksgiving, like learning, cannot be forced. It can only come from within as a result of a recognition of things without which belong to life itself. In the theological understanding it is really about God as life and the source of all the forms of life in which we find ourselves.
I am reminded of St. Francis of Assissi’s lovely Canticle of the Sun (c. 1225), one of the earliest literary works written in Italian. It is a lovely hymn of “praise to God with all his creatures”, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air, Sister Water and Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth and even Sister Death. The canticle looks back to Genesis, to creation understood as distinguishing one thing from another, as well as echoing the ancient Greek ‘physicists’, like Empedocles who saw nature in terms of a combination of complementary material elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire, for example. The canticle reminds us of the deep connection between the Creator and creation in ways that complement many of the indigenous cultures of Canada. There is a kind of intimacy and warmth to St. Francis’s Canticle of prayer and praise. It is humbling. “Praise and bless my Lord and give him thanks and serve him with great humility”, it concludes.
