Praying with Thanksgiving

We celebrate Thanksgiving one day every year to remind us what we really want to do all year long. We can have a mystical experience every time we thank God if we know what we are doing.  A “mystical experience” is a conscious awareness of relationship (interaction) with the divine.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you are in an artist’s house admiring a statue she made. Imagine yourself praising her for it. You experience a bond of common appreciation. Praise makes your relatedness conscious.

Now imagine her telling you that she carved this statue precisely for you, to give it to you as a gift. What do you feel now? Does that add something to the experience? Make you aware of something more in your relationship? Add another bond?

Now admiration and praise have been extended into gratitude.

When we admire God’s work in the world, it is not like something we see exposed in a museum or decorating another person’s house. This could evoke admiration and praise, but not gratitude. When we realize, however, that everything around us, all that we see and hear and taste and feel and experience, was created and is being sustained in existence by God right now precisely for us, then we can move to thanksgiving.

With thanksgiving we enter into another area of truth, another level of mystery. This Person who created all we see around us created it for us. It is all gift. Recognizing this brings us into another kind of relationship with God.

Thanksgiving bonds us to God in love.

But we have to thank him. Just as praise turns admiration into personal relationship, expressing thanks turns gratitude into bonding. That is why we need to thank God explicitly. Thanksgiving is what makes gratitude conscious and real. Thanksgiving makes gratitude an experience. If we understand intellectually that everything on earth is God’s gift to us but do not personally thank him for it, we are not accepting or acknowledging the gift — not as gift.

And we won’t appreciate God as Giver.

We may use all that is provided for us, and be glad we have it. But if we do not personally and explicitly thank God for it, we will not experience what we enjoy as the gift that it is. And we will not experience relationship with God as Giver. We will not have the mystical experience of accepting and returning his love.

Nothing excites love so much as being loved. When we realize the love with which God has delightedly designed the universe for us, proliferating plants and flowers, spreading the stars throughout the sky, tripling to trillions the tastes and colors, sounds, sensations and varieties of pleasure available to us on every level of body and soul, how can we fail to love him back?

But we will not realize we are loved unless we thank God for loving us. We will not realize how and how much we are loved unless we thank him in detail, noticing the shades and nuances and delicacy of his love in the multitude of gifts he is lavishing upon us. Thanksgiving introduces us into the mystery of the multiple manifestations of God’s love. This is a mystical experience.

When we “give thanks” for the meal in front of us, we should go into detail, at least in our minds.

“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this food to eat….”

Look at it. Look at what is on the plate. How many different shapes and colors and textures and tastes! How many different kinds of food. How many people combined to produce it.

“Fruit of the earth, and the work of human hands….”

And of divine hands. Hands overflowing with generosity. God didn’t have to feed us with such variety, such richness, such a multiplicity of foods.

He could have made us to live on beans alone.

But he didn’t. That is the marvel and mystery of his love — which we enter into and appreciate by thanking him for it.

A “mystery” is not something unknowable. A mystery is “that which invites endless exploration.” That is what the mystery of God’s love is: love expressed in an inexhaustible series of surprises, experienced in an endless unearthing of benevolence.

By thanking God for his love we experience love. Love for God, love for each other, universal love.

We come to appreciate the meaning of the greeting at Mass: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God… be with you!”

This is the mystical experience that is the fruit of thanksgiving.