Just Gratitude

Today’s one of those days in our common calendar that’s particularly unitive. Pope Leo suggested that folks “say thank you to someone” this Thanksgiving, for instance, and the New York Times highlighted that “People should think about gratitude more often.” After all, it’s good for people’s health, their mental wellbeing, their relationships, and their general life satisfaction.

But it’s also an act of justice, a way of rooting ourselves in what’s true. Nothing we have was owed to us, including our very existence. God chose us freely and gratuitously. And then he carved out a place for us amid a fallen world, coming among us as one of us. He’s provided for each of us with generations of people throughout the centuries whom we don’t know and have never met, who have preserved and handed down the faith to us. He’s arranged each of our lives so that they’ve been filled with formation, guidance, and constant care, by way of great joys and also sufferings, trials, and difficulties. And he’s given us a living hope, one that can swallow up all the darkness of the present age.

To offer a free and gratuitous expression of thanks is to acknowledge this grace and mercy at the very core of our lives. It seems the least we could do.

So, we’d echo the Pope’s words, and the New York Times’s, this year: let’s join one another in heartfelt expressions of thanks today – for all of the many blessings that fill our lives, and in gratitude especially, to our good God, whose generous hand has bestowed each and every one of them.

Once more, to all of you, happy Thanksgiving.