Day: October 13, 2024

“There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save only this stranger”

Thanksgiving is a strong reminder of our identity with God. Somehow pumpkins and zucchini, apples and gourds, wheat and grapes, remind us of our being spiritual creatures who are precisely not defined by the things of this world. But neither are we in flight from the world. Harvest Thanksgiving honours the whole created order as spiritually given. Somehow all the elements of our natural, social, and political lives are gathered up into the primacy of our spiritual relationship with God in God and to God. Theology is all about the prepositions! Everything is gathered into thanksgiving.

The Fall is the season of gathering, the season of thanksgiving. And yet, it is the time of nature’s slow and graceful dying. Here in the Maritimes, it is a glorious death and spectacularly so this year. The bright and gentle array of the Fall colours in the clear, soft brightness of the October air will give way to the sombre greyness of November in the dying of the year. The paint brush of God’s palette has never seemed more vivid and intense than this year, it seems to me. And yet, we are in the midst of death and life.

But the Fall is more than the annual cycle of nature’s death and hoped-for rising and our reflections must be more than that awareness of the cycles of death and rebirth. No. The Fall is the season of spiritual harvest. It is really all about the idea of gathering, of everything each in its special creaturely distinction and character being gathered to God in whom and with whom and by whom each and everything has its truth and being.

There is the harvest festival, if you will, of all Angels in The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels at the end of September. It celebrates the community of spiritual and intellectual beings of which we, too, are a part. And in the passing of this month, what do we come to except the great harvest festivals of spiritual life in The Feast of All Saints’ and in the sombre Solemnity of All Souls’? Yet in between, juxtaposed, as it were, between the Angels and the Saints, is our thanksgiving in the land, the festival of Harvest Thanksgiving. But this, too, is profoundly spiritual.

They are all communal events. They are all the celebrations of the different moments of our spiritual lives in the Company of All Angels and the Communion of All Saints even in and through the grave of the common death of All Souls. They are the celebrations of our spiritual identity with God and in God and for God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His death and resurrection is the greater death and resurrection into which we have been privileged to enter. At the heart of his sacrifice is thanksgiving. The thanksgiving of the Son to the Father is offered on the Cross in the midst of our death and dying, in the midst of the greater desolations of sin and sorrow.

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