Dear Family,
We will celebrate Thanksgiving Day with the Eucharist at 10:00 am on Thursday. (We won’t have an 8:00 am morning Mass.) What better way to celebrate than with the gift of the Lord that means “thanksgiving,” that is, the Eucharist. The Greek roots mean ‘good grace,’ or another way of puffing might be “the best relationship you can have.” Where better to start than with the Lord, especially since he has already started with us.
It seems a bit ironic to me that going all the way back to George Washington, it takes a civil proclamation to call us to thank God. But we also say “In God we Trust” and we proclaim allegiance to one nation “under God.” It seems God is part of our DNA.
Our relationship with God is very personally guided and determined by our individual choices. And yet if we are to celebrate as one people then the call to give thanks as one people needs to come from the place where we say we find our unity, the government which we entrust to lead us.
Right now, I think many of us are having a hard time finding any kind of civil unity. The fact that “God is part of our DNA” might be a good way to find a common point from which we can move to make the repairs we know we need to make to our national psyche. For some reason my memory is taking me back to something Franklin Roosevelt said and Normal Rockwell illustrated.
With gratitude to Wikipedia for the following:
“In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), President Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
...The speech before Congress was largely about the national security of the United States and the threat to other democracies... In the speech, he made a break with the tradition of United States non-interventionism...He outlined the U.S. role in helping allies already engaged in warfare.
In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy...
The first two freedoms, of speech and religion, are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. The latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and... also included the “freedom of fear” against national aggression...”
So, I give thanks,
In Jesus,
