By REV. DR. BRIAN GIGEE
“Thanksgiving LOVE”
“Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” -Romans 12:9-10
Thanksgiving Day won’t arrive soon enough! Thanks be to God as some are thinking most of 2020 has felt more like one long continuous Friday the 13th… if not nine months of Groundhog Day. Yet here she comes… the fourth Thursday in November showing up to allow America a cause to pause and offer thanks for the blessings of this life… and in an even greater way… thanks for life itself!
What will our celebrations look like? Different from years past for sure… but perhaps laced with a deeper sense of LOVE. Yes. That is my hope for all of us… that we will turn our day of ‘thanks’ into a deeper kind of love… a more focused kind of love for God in order to have a better love of self so that the country… and in time the world… cooks up to perfection a love of neighbor which everyone will want to taste. MMMmmm… and go back for seconds and more! Afterall, LOVE is the stuffing in our hearts to which everything else matters.
I like how Fr. Richard Rohr has put it…
“Love is who you are. When you don’t live according to love, you are outside of being. You’re not being real. When you love, you are acting according to your deepest being, your deepest truth. You are operating according to your dignity.”
Or again… as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin points out… “We are not human beingshavinga spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Oh, if all the world could say, ‘YES!’ Faith matters. We all believe in something…
Think of it like this… If we are truly created in the “image and likeness of God”—then our family of origin is divine. And if the scriptures hold true… that God is LOVE… then from way back… we were created by a loving God to be love in the world. So, at our core… is original blessing… not the food placed on our Thanksgiving tables, but US… the ones who gather around those tables. Say what you want about original sin or humanity’s persistence at messing things up… the starting point is positive and, as it is written in the very first chapter of the Bible… God’s assessment of the crown of the creation is… ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31)… that WE ARE ‘very good’! I love that! I love that we do have a good place to call home. If the beginning is right, the rest will be considerably easier… because we can know and trust the clear direction God has set before us.
But it comes down to this… we must all overcome the illusion of separateness. Our world is really good at this… yet… it is the primary task of ‘religion’ to communicate not just our worthiness but our union and to reconnect people to how it all started…
Here’s a LOVE prayer for Thanksgiving Day…
O God, Lover of life, Lover of these lives,
O God, Lover of our bodies and souls, and Lover of all that exists . . .
It is your love that keeps it all alive . . .
May we live in this love. May we never doubt this love. May we know that we are love…
that we were created for love…
that we reflect the love that is you…
and therefore trust we are perfectly lovable. May we never doubt this deep, abiding, and perfect goodness. We are… because… you are. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Gigee is a long-time resident of Pearland, having pastored four churches in Texas and Louisiana over four decades. Follow his blog ‘murmurings’ at https://briangigee.wordpress.com/. Send comments and / or questions to godworks247365@gmail.com.
