What's There to Be Thankful For?
AM: Psalm 147 • Deuteronomy 26:1-11 • John 6:26-35
PM: Psalm 145 • Joel 2:21-27 • 1 Thessalonians 5:12-24
I received my Thanksgiving Morning Reflection assignment two days before the election, which I was afraid would confirm the bigotry, dishonesty, and cruelty of the ruling administration; and I thought, “What's there to be thankful for?” That was blasphemy. In repentance that evening during prayers out loud with my wife (a habit Kay and I developed when the lockdown began), I paid thankful attention to the individual friends and family we were praying for, and then to our time together by ourselves with this beautiful changing world to look out upon, and then to the medical workers and food workers who daily risk their lives in close contact with people who need them, to the scientists searching for cures and vaccines and other scientists searching for ways to reverse global warming. And I determined to write the same Thanksgiving Morning Reflection no matter what the outcome of the election.
So here it is.
In addition to all the thanks above, I thank you, Lord, because, in the words of the psalmist for today, “The Lord is gracious, full of compassion, slow to anger and of great mercy, good to all, and his mercies are over all his works”; “He heals the broken of heart and binds up their wounds, tells the number of the stars and calls them by their name..., makes peace.” I thank God for St. Paul, who, writing during the reign of that quintessential tyrant, Nero, exhorted us in 1Thessalonians 5:16: “In everything give thanks”; and for Denise Levertov, who wrote “Primary Wonder”:
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes, caps and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void and that, o Lord,
Creator, Hallowed one, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
Written (not the poem; the reflection!) by John Tabb DuVal
John is also thankful for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.