Monday, November 19, 2012

Thanksgiving Reflection


November 2012

(I wish to begin by apologizing for the mixed metaphors, and other errors of formal writing.  I was moved to mix metaphors to engage other linguistic features and to enliven the imagination through dissonance and minor chords.)

Giving thanks can be a powerful and life-giving discipline.

Giving thanks is an activity so different than taking or consuming.  It is an action so akin to generosity.  Yet, it reflects on what has been had, enjoy, etc.  More importantly, it points to a relationship.  Giving thanks is a participation in relationship.  A thank you note moves the relationship forward from the blessing remembered toward an encounter to be cherished.

Giving thanks names our best experience of poverty.  A poverty of self-reliance is the experience of thou who givest thanks.  Our thanksgiving is our nod to our need for the other.  The other of our community that raised us, educated us, employed us, encouraged us.  The other of our God who created, saved, and sustains us.  Giving thanks denies our boot straps a hand up.  As much as naming the very reality of our existence in a web of relationships, giving thanks labels the possibility pregnant in the push and pull of each strand of the web that embraces our lives.  

Giving thanks lifts up the one expressing abundance.  Those who bless us are sharing their own experience of abundance.  Loving others is always an experience of the abundance of love that grows as it is given away.  Giving thanks is a naming of the angels in our lives.  

Giving thanks to God on a daily basis is life giving.  On a daily basis we assume a position of poverty that has the potential to create in us a vulnerability to the transformative and renewing love of God.  Giving thanks is our soul prostrate before our creator.  More than a position of rest and respect, our prostrate soul is focused upon the source of eternal life.  Our thankful praise of God is our claim that God’s abundance ultimately drives away the worries of scarcity.  As truly as Jesus was raised from the dead, so does the abundance of God’s love overcome the fear created by scarcity.

More than a season for turkey and twinkies, though that would be tasty, Thanksgiving is a discipline that is powerful and life-giving!