Day: October 8, 2023

“One turned back … giving him thanks”

Austin Farrer once summed up the Gospel according to St. Mark in three sentences: “God gives you everything. Give everything back to God. You can’t.” Except, it must be said, by the grace of Christ in thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the highest form of prayer, a kind of adoration. Thanksgiving is really a kind of thoughtfulness, our thoughtfulness towards God and towards the unity of all things in God. It is the counter to the idea of entitlement and privilege, to our tendency to take everything for granted and to think that we are owed the things we want. Thanksgiving speaks to the highest dignity of our humanity.

The readings for Thanksgiving Day from Deuteronomy and Luke capture the quintessential features of thanksgiving as a kind of thoughtfulness. They are complemented by the readings for Harvest Thanksgiving from Isaiah about God’s Word going forth and returning not empty but with purpose and in joy and from the Bread of Life discourse in John’s Gospel about our sacramental participation in Christ. Thanksgiving in all senses is really about our participation in the motions of God’s Word and Will.

Deuteronomy’s wonderful litany about the good land flowing with the abundance of good things, “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” is grounded in the idea of “keeping the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him”; in short, honouring God. There is something quite wonderful about our being gathered to God in the gathering of the fruits of the harvest into the Church where even the lowly zucchini, squash, and pumpkins not to mention the little gourds proclaim the goodness of God.

The harvest gathering belongs to the greater gathering of prayer. It is intellectus, the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all good things do come. There is the danger of attending too much to the good things themselves and losing sight of the fact that they are all gifts, the gifts of God in creation of which we too are a part. Bread and wine, after all, are not simply natural creatures. They are the product of our working with God in the good order of his creation. But that belongs to our vocation as “nature’s high priest” (George Herbert). Thanksgiving brings out the deeper meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 about the created order and our place within it. In a way, it highlights the meaning of being made in the image of God and, in a complementary fashion, as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit; connected to God and to the whole order of created beings, from dust to angels.

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