Tag Archives: thankfulness

We express ourselves in thanksgiving.

humanity, quotes, , , , , ,

At this season of Thanksgiving as a holiday, it seems good to consider thanksgiving as a way of life, even a way to Life. First, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones brings up a good point about the Garden of Eden:

“. . . The terrible fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. . . .”

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (1971)

Mikael Toppelius, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, Finland

Fr. Alexander Schmemann also mentions that garden:

“In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic — an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God — Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.”

But that sad picture is not the end. The Son of God became incarnate, and Jesus Christ is the New Adam. He has fulfilled all that the first Adam failed to do, and now in the Divine Liturgy we can:

“…ascend to heaven in Christ to see and to understand the creation in its real being as glorification of God, as that response to divine love in which alone creation becomes what God wants it to be: thanksgiving, eucharist, adoration. It is here — in the heavenly dimension of the Church, with ‘thousands of Archangels and myriads of Angels, with the Cherubim and Seraphim … who soar aloft, borne on their pinions …’ — that we can finally ‘express ourself,’ and this expression is: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. This is the ultimate purpose of all that exists, the end, the goal and the fulfillment, because this is the beginning, the principle of Creation.”

“In thanksgiving we recognize and confess above all the divine source and the divine calling of our life. The prayer of thanksgiving affirms that God brought us from nonexistence into being, which means that he created us as partakers of Being, i.e., not just something that comes from him, but something permeated by his presence, light, wisdom, love – by what Orthodox theology, following St. Gregory Palamas, calls the divine energies and which makes the world called to and capable of transfiguration into a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’ and the ruler of creation, man, called to and capable of theosis, ‘partaking of the divine nature.’”

-Fr. Alexander Schmemann

These three quotes from Fr. Alexander are from the book, For the Life of the World, an incredibly rich and deep explanation of Orthodox Christian theology. Our women’s book group and sisterhood at church are reading it right now during our Nativity fast, and I discovered that it can be found on YouTube being read in its entirety. You can listen for free here on the channel The Orthodox Voice: For the Life of the World.

If you want to read for free instead, a pdf file is here: For the Life of the World

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.”
I Thessalonians 5:18

Getting back to thanksgiving as a holiday, this year I’ll be giving thanks and praise with the angels in the morning in Liturgy, and in the afternoon feasting in the traditional American way. Whether your celebration is small and quiet, or large and festive, I hope you remember much to be thankful for ❤

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Currier & Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

 

 

 

 

The heat and the oxygen.

poetry, , , , , , , , ,

“I ask this much” was the title of a post I wrote ten years ago, not long after my husband died. My thoughts then were inspired by the poem below, which I recently revisited. Yesterday I began to notice afresh the near constancy of my murmuring and complaining; today I was encouraged by the testimony of my former self, who wrote back then,

And every day, I feel a great Love surrounding me, like the pleasant air that holds me and gives me oxygen even while I am having those pity parties. Or like the sun whose heat is keeping me alive and giving me energy.

Let us be up and doing! And let’s start by asking the great Maker of the sun and of us, for His light, and strength, and joy. Our asking will be the beginning of the receiving.

PRAYER at SUNRISE

O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

–James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938

Boredom, the rhythm and the minutiae.

grief, poetry, time, , , , , , ,

 

 

 

 

 

BORED

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

-Margaret Atwood

Here we have a different perspective on boredom from what I posted yesterday…  and I love this poem. But I wondered about the line, “Now I would know too much.” Why would the narrator prefer less understanding — which is what I took as the meaning of knowing — ? In what way would it be too much? But then I mused on how well I relate to the feeling of regret, regret that there were any moments or hours in which I was not fully conscious, and thankful for my late husband. That of course would have been the perspective of a saint; if I had the chance to go back, I’m sure I would still not be one of those.

That made me think, maybe the line I didn’t get refers to the fact the narrator has come to realize, that “he” was not going to be around indefinitely, and that the loss of him would be incredibly painful. It’s the sort of intelligence that sinks deep into the soul, where the struggle to comprehend it continues indefinitely. Now, if she could go back, she would not be the same person, and the kind of knowledge she would take back to the past would be truly too much to bear in that “present.” It isn’t given to us humans to skip back and forth through time, which is a good thing, because just reading this poem demands more of my mind than is comfortable. Most of us can barely attend to the present, and excessive theorizing can be a sad waste of our hours.

That I should read the poem during the holiday season, when I’m already prone to missing my husband a LOT… well, it happened, and it’s okay. It prompted me to think of some specific moments and places, my own husband’s hands (easy for me to pay attention to), and habits, and “boring” things he would talk to me about. I even remember a time when I was sitting in a boat, trying really hard not to be bored.

Nowadays, I’m increasingly thankful for all the days that God gave me before, during and after the years I lived with him, though I can’t go back and be this thankful retroactively. And even if I was not always present in the moment, God was always present with me. That is a thought that wakes me up, again and again.

Mr Glad and His Sister

Always some mountain looming.

poetry, work, ,

GRATEFULNESS

Each day the engine of my gratefulness
must be coaxed and primed into action.
Of course like any old clunker,
it would just as soon stay put.
For even after the labored start beats the inertia,
and the plume of white smoke struggles upward,
the same hills always appear,
soaring daily—tall and ominous as before.
There is the long slow hill of “aging”
so gradual and smooth at first.
And then that steep grade called “the news.”
Yes, and always some mountain of a war
looming out there, never too far in the distance.
Even an old idea or a feeling long abandoned
might conspire to halt this fragile progress –
valves sputtering, tires flattening, clutch slipping.
But the old “potato, potato, potato” sound
of the engine, and all its mysterious fuel,
for which I am truly grateful
somehow
keeps stumbling along.

-Dale Biron