“EUCHARISTA”
The Eve of a General Thanksgiving: 23 November Anno Domini 2016
Fr. Charles Varsogea (with minor additions and emendations by Father Jay Watson SSP
The Lord made Adam for life, life in its fullness. The Lord, The Word, said: “I AM” The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Life—Being! Not merely existing for drudgery, busy-work, or mindless mathematical causation, but for LIFE. The love of The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The love of life and joy at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The thing for which we are all most thankful, whether we are aware of it or not, is life. Like the first colonists to Plymouth and its environs, we celebrate Thanksgiving with food because we can’t live without it. Turkey, ham, even potatoes, get old after a while. In fact, some of the foods that are central to our Thanksgiving dinners are rarely eaten on the other 364 days. What we are really celebrating when we gather around that mountain of food is the life we draw from it. We are what we eat in more ways than one—in all the ways there can be. Life is sacred. It is a gift from God. It is rare and precious, and, thus far, found only on our little globe.
Our only experience of the life for which we are so thankful is as a set of relationships. No man is an island wrote the 17th century poet/theologian John Donne. None of us has, or even can, grow up in complete isolation. To live is to relate to other people. To truly live is to relate to Our Lord and God, our Maker and Redeemer. True spiritual life is found in Holy Communion. To give thanks for life is to give thanks for one another…all First Article gifts: eyes, ears, reason, home, food, wife, husband, children, parents, the list actually is virtually endless. And also, to give thanks for life is to give thanks TO one another. You are your brother’s keeper. The Lord, Whose existence is so perfect that He identifies Himself, His Name if you will, simply as The Holy Tetragrammaton: “I AM,” has, from eternity, been Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He Who most perfectly “IS,” has the most perfect relationship(s).
We may not always think about life and thanksgiving in these terms but we feel the truth of it in our bones. More than any other holiday, and the last Thursday of November is ONLY a holy day if one is gathered by The Spirit around the Word and His Father at Altar, including Christmas, Thanksgiving is about gathering with our families. We are most aware of our family ties at the very time when we are most inclined to give thanks for our lives. Part of what makes pride and arrogance and selfishness such fundamental and deadly sins is the fact that they tempt us to think of ourselves in isolation from everyone else. But, the people with whom we live are not merely in our lives, they ARE our lives. They are not interruptions of or intrusions into our solitary existences. They are small “types” of communion—togetherness in love. They are to mirror our lives IN Christ—the union of Communion.
People are all that matter in the universe and they are all that will last beyond its destruction (“I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”) Long after the Earth and Sun and the rest of the galaxy have faded away, people will continue to live. Some will live in fellowship with one another and with God and some will continue to exist miserably frustrated (and that’s putting it mildly) by their choice to remain cut off from His presence. Heaven is the perfect and eternal homecoming, while hell is a crushing homesickness that never ends.
Each Lord’s Day as we are gathered around the Blessed Sacrament these truths are set before us in a variety of ways. The central feature of The Faith, is Gottesdienst, God’s Service to us. The central feature of God’s Service is found in The Holy Communion! In the Mass, which is a venerable and fitting name for The Sacrament as our Symbols so say, we are bound to Christ in both flesh and blood. The Lord’s Supper also binds us to one another. Because of its power to connect, and make one, it is rightly called Holy Communion. Because it gives us life by absolving our trespasses and because it prompts our deepest and most lasting gratitude, we call it The Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving (literally the good gift).
No matter where, or with whom you celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, you will have much for which to give thanks. You can be thankful for the Grace of God which is given to you without requiring anything of you, by Grace, through Faith, in Christ Jesus. You can be thankful for the promise of life everlasting with God and with all who trust in His promise of mercy. You can be thankful for all of the people with whom you live. You can give thanks for the love, times, shared lives, and memories of those who have gone on. We thank Jesus our Savior that He saved His tender lamb St. Virginia and that we too shall join her in His tender arms in the “twinkling of an angel’s eye,” for The Shepherd is at the door. “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”
You can give thanks for the opportunities yet to come to do good for others. You can give thanks for the people who love you here and now. Life is sacred because Jesus is. Life is shared because Jesus is for you—you second person singular and third person plural. Life is forever because Jesus is I AM. Life is a gift—a Eucharist—that is given to you this evening.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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