Oh, For the Simple Life

Thanksgiving brings us to thoughts of hearth and home or, at least, Americans get into their cars and onto planes to retrieve something of hometown. At this season of the year with Thanksgiving we look to re-explore the metaphor of the earth, the harvest, and something of the simpler life.

Although raised in a small Pennsylvania town, how I recall the tales of driving to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country in quest of a pumpkin, just right for a perfect pie for Thanksgiving dinner. At other times of year, the pumpkin from the can would have sufficed, but this special day required a unique pumpkin. Strangely, somewhere our family had learned that it wasn’t the large orange variety, but rather the search was for the more yellow pumpkin with a long neck!

How often I would tell the story of how I had contributed to the unique holiday by teaching my mother an easy way to “cut” the pumpkin for cooking. After years of struggling to actually cut it up for cooking, I had the idea just drop it off the back porch and then gather the pieces for the boiling. This began the custom of how the perfect pie was cooked! Each family has its story.

Thanksgiving gives us the welcome invitation to explore the metaphors of a simpler life: the gathering of the harvest, the preparation of the family table, the gathering of family around the table and hearth. At least, for an instant things, seem simple. And that’s the insight – thankfulness and gratitude simplify a hurried and quickened life.

Life and People as Gift
Often at weddings I compare the marriage promises as gift between the husband and wife. I tell the bride and groom that the tendency with precious gifts is to guard and protect them. In trying to urge the couple to use their gift for each other, I tell the story of learning about my chalice early in my life as a young priest. Like so many things in my ministry, I learned most things from God’s People.

The story of my chalice was that I was hesitant to have just any one touch my cup used at the Eucharist. The reason was simple. Too much rubbing or a ring would scratch the interior of the vessel. A wonderful woman came to the rescue teaching me about patina on well-used

silver. Patina are those lines, ever so small, on silver from washing, drying and polishing silver. The good lady told me that the more patina shown on your silver indicated the more guests you had entertained. Then she remarked about how the delicate lines in the silver made the silver service glisten even brighter. Be thankful for the scratches, she told me!

Our fascination with Thanksgiving might just be an attempt to keep life together. In our rush and hurry, we get a little disconnected. Thanksgiving puts it all back together: the earth, the harvest, the work of human hands, people, relationships, the past and present. We discover each year that giving thanks allows us to see everything and everybody as gift. The good, the bad, the joyful, and the sad – life is all gracious gift.

Source and Summit
Our Catholic liturgical spirituality has long explored these same themes of gratitude and blessing God publically for his good gifts, especially the gift of being gathered in the Christ. Our experience of Eucharistic piety in our lives makes sense of Vatican II’s description of the Eucharist as “source and summit” of Christian life. The Eucharist is where we begin our Christian life and it is the end point of our journey. We begin and end in thankful praise of the Father.

In Christ we learn that all is gift graciously received from the Father by the power of the Spirit. Christ is the gift of the Father and we are gift taken up into the mystery of his death and rising. It's about the joys and the sorrows, the living and the dying. Human life and human toil are the gifts by which we discover God in himself and in one another. We are terribly gifted and we struggle to live in gratitude for gifts received.

What we learn at Sunday Liturgy is that we are a Eucharistic people. In Christ we receive “every good and perfect gift” and we are gift before the Father. We learn to be gift to our neighbor as well. “Eucharist” in Greek has two sources: “charis” or gift and “eu” to speak well. Eucharist then comes to mean the action of “speaking well over the gifts”. In our thankfulness we are gathered in that perfect gift which is Christ and we become gift to the Father. Life after all is simple gift and simple thankfulness for the gift.

CDH