Week at a Glance, 14 – 20 October
Tuesday, October 15th
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
6:30-8:00pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room, Parish Hall
New Dark Age: Technology & the End of the Future (2018), by James Bridle, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Thursday, October 17th,, Eve of St. Luke
3:15pm Service at Windsor Elms
7:00pm Holy Communion
Friday, October 18th
6:00-9:00pm Pathfinders & Rangers – Parish Hall
Saturday, October 19th
9:00-11:00am Bell Tower Clean-up
Sunday, October 20th, Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
“It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord,/
and to sing praises unto thy Name, O thou Most High” (Psalm 92.1)
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is a special and wonderful celebration. It speaks to a deep-seated spiritual sensibility in our souls even in the confusions, uncertainties, and denials of all things religious and spiritual in our contemporary culture. Thanksgiving is fundamentally and essentially spiritual.
Thanksgiving embraces at once Harvest Thanksgiving and National Thanksgiving, our thanks for the bounty of the harvest (whether or not there has been one!) and for the rational and spiritual freedoms that we enjoy (however much we ignore them and however much they are in question and disarray) in our nation and country. Those ‘thanksgivings’ are raised into the great thanksgiving, the Eucharist of the Son to the Father, re-enacted, recalled, and re-presented in “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” in the service of the Holy Eucharist. We are fed with the bread of life, which is Jesus himself who has come down from heaven to give life to the world. That life is about our participation in the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father, the Great Thanksgiving.
The giving of thanks to God, the giving of thanks for what we have, and the giving of thanks with one another and sharing with one another speaks to the highest freedom and dignity of our humanity. We give articulate praise to God for the harvest, for the nation, for our communities, and for one another, but, above all, for God himself. “Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself” as John Donne prays. We are in George Herbert’s rich phrase, “the secretaries of thy praise”. Thanksgiving is a metanoia, our thinking after the things of God in creation, a return to the principle of being and knowing.
Fr. David Curry