Re-live, re-enjoy and be grateful! (Thanksgiving Day, 2018)

It is so easy to fall in love with the gift and forget all about the Giver; to admire a painting and never think of the painter; to enjoy music and never know the heart from which it came; to accept and love ourselves and not to care for the One from whom we came. We like to think of ourselves as doers and achievers but the basic fact of life is that we are primarily receivers and transmitters not achievers. We all started out as zero, zip, nada. We did not ask to be. We did nothing to get here. Our very existence is a huge and beautiful gift of God. So our most basic relationship with God therefore should be one of gratitude, and today is a great moment to do so. God gave us a memory so that we can remember and give thanks. The memory enables us to bring forth from the storeroom of the past the wonderful moments of success, love and happiness, so that we can re-live, re-enjoy them and be grateful. “Lord, give me a grateful heart.” To remember and give thanks. That is what the Holy Scripture is all about. The Bible is the written history of many of the wonderful gifts God has given us from the very creation of the world and the promise of even greater gifts in the future. In the beginning the memory of these gifts was handed on orally to each succeeding generation and then under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit written down so that all could remember and give thanks. “Lord, give me a grateful heart.” To remember and give thanks. That is what the Mass is all about. The Mass is the perfect act of thanksgiving that Jesus commanded us to, “Do this in memory of me.” It is the perfect sacrifice Malachi foretold which would be offered up from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. “Lord, give me a grateful heart.” To remember and give thanks. That is why we have a Thanksgiving Day, and in so doing we grow in the love of God. It is in gratitude for the gifts that we grow in the love of the Giver. As we say in the preface at Mass, “Our act of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in grace through Jesus Christ, or Lord.” Gifts are the language of love, the more one loves the more one gives. God will continue to look over us with His Divine Providence and then at the end of our life he will give us the greatest gift of all the gift of the Giver to be known, loved and possessed forever • AE