THE APOSTLE PAUL’S exhortation to “pray without ceasing” and “to give thanks in all circumstances” is the inspiration for putting together one more prayer booklet for you – this one focused on Gratitude – prayers, poetry, music, and as you come to the table to celebrate Thanksgiving, some table graces.
We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time.
To our mother, we send our greetings and our thanks. Now our minds are one.
Excerpt from Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address
As we sit at table and rejoice in the mercy and goodness of the one God, may the bonds of friendship be strengthened, may our fellowship be a light in the darkness, and most importantly may we remember that in opening ourselves to each other we open ourselves to God.
For food that stays our hunger, For rest that brings us ease, For homes where memories linger, We give our thanks for these. Amen.
“The common understanding of the word ‘gratitude’ simply does not convey the magnitude of gratefulness and all that it offers as a way of being in the world.”
Kristi Nelson, Wake Up Grateful
Gratitude passes through you like the clouds of mood, like rain turning to sleet or gray skies breaking into blue. It is only gratefulness that stays, holding your trembling hand beneath the hospital sheet as you count each breath, or jumping up and down when you hear good news. It is the faithful companion we have always been seeking, this feeling of fullness that follows us everywhere we go, less like a shadow trailing the body, and more like a glimmer held in the heart that promises never to leave.
A recent U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you.
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
Give it back with gratitude.
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time. Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
Do not hold regrets.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Ask for forgiveness.
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.
Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short. Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
Look at the silver lining they say. But what if, instead, I pluck it off and use that tensile strand to bind myself to those things I do not want to lose sight of...
Families knit together by evening walks, board games, laughter. The filament fixing us to friends no matter the distance apart. A braid of gratitude for small kindnesses. The thin gauge wire of loss.
Let me twist that lining around my finger, its silvery glint a reminder of just how quickly life can change. I will remember to love more. I will remember to give more.
I will remember to be still
I will knot the string tightly. So it won’t slip away. So I won’t forget.
Sometimes it just stuns you like an arrow flung from some angel’s wing. Sometimes it hastily scribbles a list in the air: black coffee, thick new books, your pillow’s cool underside, the quirky family you married into.
It is content with so little really; even the ink of your pen along the watery lines of your dimestore notebook could be a swiftly moving prayer.
O God, Source of this whole shebang, we thank you that in your bewildering wisdom and for your oft puzzling purposes, you launched us on this wondrous exodus of life toward the promised time of freedom and fulfillment, and that in your staggering compassion you girded up to be our traveling companion until we find our way to each other and your kingdom.
We are thankful to you for gifts of taken-for-granted commonness: the song of a bird, the strum of wind, a hundred shades of green, a parent’s praying patience, a friend’s voice, a changed way, work worth doing, children’s questions, a new thought; our bodies, enough food, wine slowly shared, a quiet walk, the touch of hands, catch of eyes, hark of dreams, the wash of rain, snuggle of darkness, stardust on the roof, the assuring, disquieting sense of your presence in it all, the goad to repentance, the nudge to gratitude in the utterly everywhere of small miracles.
Most of all we are thankful beyond understanding it that even in adversity, pain, and suffering, even in the face of defeat and death, as in all else, your Spirit labors for our healing, resilience, and deliverance, leaving on us your eternal fingerprints of grace and glory; through Christ our Lord. Amen.
A little over 400 years ago in what became Plymouth, Massachusetts, indigenous Wampanoag joined English colonists to celebrate a successful harvest. Viewed from different perspectives during the centuries that followed, that singular event was subsequently woven with yarn drawn from fact and fiction into the Thanksgiving Day we now observe. In recognition of the presence of indigenous peoples at that time, a choral work by an Ojibwe composer is included below.
Dan Raessler
Based on a song gifted to the Ojibwe composer Andrew Balfour. The text is: Come in Come in, two-legged beings come in all people
There is good life here Come in!
https://tinyurl.com/andrewbalfour
Although this is a Reformation Sunday cantata, Bach includes a joyous setting of the first verse of the chorale we frequently associate with Thanksgiving, “Now thank we all our God.”
https://tinyurl.com/cantata79
Originally a Dutch patriotic song from the late 16th-cetury, “We gather together” has had a place in the United States as a Thanksgiving hymn for well over one hundred years.
https://tinyurl.com/kremserhymn
Sung by Aretha Franklin on the occasion of Eric Holder’s farewell from the Obama administration.
https://tinyurl.com/AFranklinAmerica
Somewhere someone needs help. Send love. It matters.
If you can’t get there yourself, then take a deep breath.
Breathe in the weight of their troubles. Breathe out and send all those burdens into the Light where sorrows can be held with the most tender and infinite grace.
Breathe in what you can do.
Breathe out what you can’t change. Spool out a thread of connection, send courage and calm. For the nights can be long and filled with shadows, and sometimes terrible unexpected waters will rise.
Somewhere someone needs help. Send love. It matters.
there will be sun, scalloped by clouds, ushered in by a waterfall of birdsong. It will be a temperate seventy-five, low humidity. For twenty-four hours, all politicians will be silent. Reality programs will vanish from TV, replaced by the "snow" that used to decorate our screens when reception wasn't working. Soldiers will toss their weapons in the grass. The oceans will stop their inexorable rise. No one will have to sit on a committee. When twilight falls, the aurora borealis will cut off cell phones, scramble the Internet. We'll play flashlight tag, hide and seek, decorate our hair with fireflies, spin until we're dizzy, collapse on the dew-decked lawn and look up, perhaps for the first time, to read the long lines of cold code written in the stars....
After it all, the events of the holidays, the dinner tables passing like great ships, everybody made soups for a while. Cooked and cooked until the broth kept the story of the onion, the weeping meat. It was over, the year was spent, the new one had yet to make its demands on us, each day lay in the dark like a folded letter. Then out of it all we made one final thing out of the bounty that had not always filled us, out of the ruined cathedral carcass of the turkey, the limp celery chopped back into plenty, the fish head, the spine. Out of the rejected, the passed over, never the object of love. It was as if all the pageantry had been for this: the quiet after, the simmered light, the soothing shapes our mouths made as we tasted.
