St. Paul tells us to dedicate ourselves to thankfulness. When St. Paul uses the verb, “dedicate,” he seems to be calling for a consistent attitude of giving thanks on our part. Not explicit in his statement, but an essential part of giving thanks, means that we should direct our thanks to someone, beginning with God. Often people say, “I feel so thankful.” But, thanksgiving is not a feeling we simply have; rather, it is an acknowledgment of our indebtedness to God. The Eucharist is the supreme act of thanksgiving since we join our gratitude to that of Christ as we thank the Father with him. Looking at the Liturgy of the Eucharist with an eye for thanksgiving might make us more aware of what we are doing. At the end of the first Scripture readings, we say, “Thanks be to God.” Why thanks? It is because we have just heard the living Word of God. God is present in his Word. We faithfully accept it, thanking God for being present and speaking to us. The Word is “living,” not just a throwback to another time. Turning to the Gloria, when we recite or sing it, we give thanks to God. When the bread and wine are offered at the Preparation of the Gifts, the priest says, “Blessed are you, Lord God” and the people say, “Blessed be God forever.” The Jews understood this word “blessed” as meaning to give thanks. Bread, in that instance, means that we give thanks for all we have. Acting out our thanks, the prayer continues by acknowledging that the bread has been made with our human hands. We have used the talent that God gave us and we are grateful. Work symbolizes, here in this priestly prayer, using our hands. We do the work we have to do. At the Preface, before the Consecration, we are again invited to give thanks to the Lord our God. We respond that to give thanks and praise is right and just. Thus, our giving thanks should not be limited to “Turkey Day” once a year, but as an accustomed relationship with God.
Filed under: Awalt Papers |
Blogger Priest 
Dear Fr Joe,
I know you are incredibly busy and that there’s a sort of ‘hysteresis’ in this type of machinery, but still on this, for me, very difficult topic of thankfulness and the whole understanding of creation, which if one rejects the Adam and Eve myth, then there has to be a more plausible alternative.
My cat, a very well fed and cared for moggie has just brought in a dead robin. This beautiful little bird, scarcely a few months old and yet to fulfil its role as an adult was killed by my cat for what some might call sport, others, instinct. What ever it was it reduced me to tears. Its parents would have built a nest and hatched and fed their little brood of fledglings and trusted them to the four winds of this earth only to have a well fed cat snatch away this little miracle and I was presented with it broken and yet still warm body, perfect in all its magnificent creation. I wept.
We learn much of an artist by looking at his pictures, we can learn much from a writer by reading his work. So too can we discern a little of the Creator by the performance of His creation. God made my cat and He also made the robin. It was in His plan that the cat should kill the robin, and now a sparrow is added to the list. What sort of God is this and how can I be thankful?
If Adam and Eve and the whole ‘fall’ thing is a myth then what is the most probable truth. For me probably God created everything and engineered evolution such that a humanoid formed and God enlightened it and gave it a soul. Sadly this developing human got mixed up in his understanding of his role and his God and thought killing animals and splashing blood everywhere was pleasing to his Creator.
To try to show man where he was going wrong God became one of us and taught that we should love one another and that His blood should put an end to the awful bloodshed of worthless sacrifices of both animals and humans.
So there never was a ‘fall’. There never was a ‘punishment’, there never was a banishment, only a continual development of humanity, still trying to understand its Creator.
I doubt that my ideals are original and they probably constitute some long past heresy, but, just as the panda, a meat eating bear, has evolved to stop killing smaller animals for its sustenance and now eats only grasses, so too, possibly, does all of God’s creation move towards a more beautiful ideal.
You see, I have to try to understand this ‘mind of God’ and make it personal. If God is static as it were then he is a very cruel god who revels in the dog eat dog rules that he created, but if He is an evolved and yet evolving God then it makes it easier for me to see His plan and thus become just that little bit thankful.
Yesterday, despite my terrible depression, I was able to get out in the drive and mend the electric window of my 21 year old car. It was a fiddle and awkward to get to. And it was my hard earned skills that enabled me to complete the very difficult and demanding tasks of stripping it all down, sealed motor included and free off the seized sintered bronze bearing, then put it all back together.
Last night, before I went to bed I thanked God that we both had done something worthwhile together and I also thanked Him for making me with this understanding of most things mechanical.
Perhaps this is just a small start.
With love,
Paul
Can I thank God for uncertainty? Not exactly, but I accept that I am where I am and I still believe no matter what. You are a little like Job’s comforters I feel, and I had a twinge when I read the two stories of loss of a child. And in that instance it’s pretty easy to reconcile that the young innocent is with their Heavenly Father. I have never been a father even though I’ve fostered three children to adulthood. One married a heroin addict who used to beat her senseless, she suffered serious brain damage and is disabled, one has made some bad choices in his life and is very ill, but the third, here at home with me is doing OK.
But how do you reconcile the fact that I lost my father through suicide and after he had contrived to cause my 14 year old sister have an abortion? That’s a tough nut to crack. The loss of a child is real tough, but the loss of a father, however mad he was, when the Church teaches that: “those who die in mortal sin will go to Hell for all eternity” How can I turn that around and be thankful?
Sure I take consolation from the fact that the Church also says that only God can judge, but it’s not something that I can be thankful for.
[Personal section deleted.]
And it’s tough dealing with rejection especially when it’s been a constant. From childhood, to courtship and engagement when my fiancee went off with a policewoman…some might say (as they did at the time thinking it would bring consolation) “You were lucky to find out she was lesbian before you married her!”, but when you love someone it hurts like hell. Job’s comforters again! And in more recent years, a divorce to deal with and enforced celibacy to endure.
I can feign thankfulness and say I can enjoy the whole of the bed now, that my headaches have remitted, that I am free to chose to do as I choose, but there’s no real comfort in that.
I, too, was a small sickly child, but in a boarding school at the merciless hands of some very hard and ruthless Irishmen, all wearing dog collars and long black dresses, smoking and drinking and bashing seven bales of [deleted] out of us………..you can deal with it in later life, but it can never be as if it never happened. The wounds do heal but the scars never go away.
So why should I be responsible for Adam’s sin of disobedience?
If he is real and a real man and I am a ‘son of Adam’ then why the hell should I carry the can for his arrogance and why should I be thankful for this whole can of worms.
And if Jesus opened the gates of Heaven by becoming a ransom for that sin, then why did the nuns tell me that it was I who crucified Him?
And why should I be thankful for that?
So I’m certainly not making a case for atheism, nor am I abandoning my Catholic Faith, but I am saying that it’s just too tough for this catholic to be honestly thankful and rejoice in joyous denial spurred on by some hormonal guitar basher in a corruption of what I was taught to be The Sacrifice of The Mass, when the reality of the awfulness of this life hits me squarely in the face every single day.
For some, like Roy Hobble, God Bless him, it seems that life could not be better and his blessings never cease, and I wish him all of that and more, but despite all my blessings, and I must have many if just to have survived all the [deleted], I really do struggle to be thankful, and I refuse to falsify the truth of my reality. Just as I refuse to accept any responsibility or accountability for Adam’s sin, and not only that, I refuse to believe that he even existed, at least until God shows me otherwise.
Dear Fr Joe,
Thank you for your kind and comprehensive reply….some of your past implorings sounded just like some of the psalms……mine too.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in God, I believe He became man, I believe He allowed Himself to be killed…………………
OK, I do understand that you had it tough when young, and I hope that you had a loving mother who might have comforted you. I, too, had trouble breathing and with stamina, only found out a few years ago after a second heart attack that my coronary arteries are reversed, so always as a child I too struggled to be like the others; our difference is that I was beaten by the Irish Christian Brothers for being ‘slow’ and 50 years later it was found out that I had a defective heart. My mother abandoned me to the sadistic wiles of some very mixed up men when I was 11 years old.
And I get the comparative grief thing. And your several attempts to say I’m not humble enough. I know that I’m angry sometimes, and just like King David who shouted at God in some of those psalms, perhaps I’m still in that phase and not yet sufficiently serene and humble.
Look, I’ve been a single step parent, a God parent in fact to a girl who is now a young lady. I gave home to this child when she was 8 years old, and she’s 22 this September and just finished her combined honours degree in psychology and philosophy and obtained a good pass. This young woman, no relation to me, was abandoned by her parents, both of whom are quite mad, and I gave succour to her. It’s been tough, especially as I’m diagnosed as ‘bi-polar’ and having to manage on the state old age pension.
And it is true that a very few people have been kind to me in the past. and I, too, have been kind to many. In my enforced retirement I did voluntary work for over 5 years past, several days a week, and for the most, didn’t even get expenses, but I freely gave it; sadly because of this economic climate, even those charities have had to close.
This ‘new priest’ at ‘MY’ church has rattled me…………sure I should pray for him. I should but I won’t…….that’s my pride, I know that, I’m not stupid.
And I keep praying. I don’t know if you’ve ever read “Don Camillo”. Well I’m a bit like him. But he used to hear ‘The Lord’ I only hear silence. It doesn’t stop me praying, but up till now I’ve never heard a reply.
And I believe I have a guardian angel, and I think he has interviened at times in the past, but I don’t know for sure.
Perhaps I’m being devisive or petulent, but I can only be true to myself and as honest as possible. I dare to show the real me with all my fears, struggles and uncertainties, I respect your empathy and covet your faith and commitment. I will never stop believing in God but I have yet to be convinced that it’s right that I should carry the guilt and shame for the sin of Adam. That’s not fair, it’s not logic, and as far as I’m concerned it’s not true.
With love,
Paul
nothing makes me feel closer to the Almighty than thanking him. Where does the list start, because it has no end.
Dear Fr Joe,
I’ve been thinking about this “thankfulness” again and still can’t agree with you and what the other guy dictates. Somewhere in the Scriptures Jesus tells His apostles to ask God for anything as if you asked for bread, would a loving father give you a stone?
If one’s experience (and I can only speak from experience), is to have received only stones, and scorpions, then how can I manufacture thankfulness, and for me, the “Well Christ became one of us and died for our sins” just does not cut it at present because I know deep in my heart, if Jesus walked through my village today I would follow Him to the end of the earth…just to see Him would be enough. The stick is no longer green and I cannot just magic up sufficient faith to be able to overcome the experiences that have left me cold to this idea of “thankfulness”.
Trust has a lot to do with this very difficult dilemma; and I suppose it’s the same with the gift of scorpions…trust that if one did muster up the courage to actually put your head above the parapet walls and be seen and then have the temerity to ask for something only to be given something nasty, then trust in this “benevolent God” can never be established and thankfulness is right out of the window. And it’s the same in this life. I have had the courage to risk asking for something, and then be told that it’s no longer available, and that’s the pattern over and over again.
OK, you might try to shame me and bang on about this tremendous gift that God gave me in giving me personally His Son to die for me…I’ve heard it all before, right back 60 years ago by the nuns shaming us and controlling us; I didn’t get it then and I still don’t get it. Perhaps you’d say I don’t have enough faith, and I’d probably agree with you, but in the mean time why should I be thankful for the “booby prize”?
In labour pains and by the sweat of my brow I have certainly earned my living, and every day it’s like pushing string. Thankfulness comes naturally when one recognises a true gift, especially a sacrifice, and can enjoy that gift and have no fear that it’s going to be taken away. I have no experience of receiving anything; it’s all been either conditionally given or hard earned. I can muster mild appreciation but fail miserably to be thankful for my lot.
It’s the same with this “faith” quandary. If you haven’t got it then you haven’t got it. To fake it would be living a lie. When you have had to live your life realising that there’s no one (human not mythical), no single one person that you can trust and rely on because the experience over more than 6 decades has been exactly that, then it’s very difficult to make the bunny appear out of an empty hat. And Jesus, if He really does exist, is so distant that He might just as well be light years away.
With love,
Paul
Dear Fr Joe,
When God set that fiendish trap that caused Adam and Eve to commit original sin He banished them from that Eden and told the woman that she had to give birth in the pains and anguish of motherhood and that Adam would have to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow. Is it this that you are telling us that we must be thankful for?
Or is it that He gave us a second chance and by following all the rules we might get a chance to win the ‘get out of jail card for free’?
Quizzically, Paul