Thanksgiving Homily...

We live in a culture of cultivated ungratitude. To be discontent with our lot is as American as apple pie. It’s the air we breathe, the environment we live in, and from the time we are children we are programmed to seek out whatever is next, whatever we assume is better, and to shed even the useable things we have for the coming big thing.

There’s a good side to this. Innovations brought into being by people unhappy with the status quo have brought great good to our lives. Would anyone really want a Model “A” Ford for thier everyday car again? That millions of us have never even given polio, a scourge in times past, a single thought is a tribute to those who believed we needed to do better.

But there’s a dark side as well. The kind of discontent that drives innovation can also set us on a perpetual journey, a lifetime of never being happy with what we have or where we are and a discarding of important things that have stood the test of time.

After a lifetime of watching commercials we seem to be never be able to rest, never be able to settle down and enjoy. New cars, new jobs, new people, more of this, more of that, last year’s clothes perfectly good but already out of style, and the TV says you got to have more. They want you to feel this way, the people who produce goods and services. Your boss always wants you to be hungry because then they can drive you farther and faster. The government wants you to consume and acquire so they can tax and spend. The idea is to keep the great pyramid of cards together by everyone buying into the idea that more is better, contentment is laziness, and busy people without time to think about what they have make the best worker bees to feed the hive.

No one in their right mind craves hard times but in these days when things are lean there may also be the still small voice of God calling us to something better. Perhaps God is reminding us that this mad chase we’re is just that, a kind of insanity that robs us of our happiness even as our life is sucked away from us for no good reason.

Hard times shatter our illusions, refocus our lives, and call us to see things in a different way. Their poverty forces us off from the buy, buy, sell, sell, work, work, merry-go-round and gives us a chance to catch our breath and regain our perspective. We see, perhaps only in hard times, the illusion of things, the dark side of the American dream, and realize what can transcend them all. We’re like an alcoholic one day into sobriety, we hurt, but we see the world with eyes clear for the first time in years.

No one wants hard times, difficult days, the threat of poverty and the challenge of sustaining life. But they are hear and wise people, discerning people, people who have come to their senses will see in this a precious opportunity, a call from God to have eyes of gratitude, the awareness and cherishing of all that we have, all that matters, and all that lasts.

And with those eyes wide open we can become, perhaps for the first time, free of the illusions, awake from the long dream, loosed from the meaningless chase our culture sets before us as an ideal life, and truly alive. God grant us the eyes, the heart, the soul of gratitude. Make us aware of all that we have been blessed with. Quiet the rumblings in our heart, the unease of a mind focused on that which matters little.Grant us in this day, a sense of all that we have been given and the many ways you have sustained us and in so doing help us to turn our hearts first to You and in that light see the world anew.