A Slightly Different View of Thanksgiving

This week our nation will ‘celebrate’ the secular feast of Thanksgiving.  We put ‘celebrate’ in quotes because the day has become less one of focus on thanking the Lord for His blessings bestowed upon us and more one of thanking ourselves for that with which we’ve managed to overload our tables, and thereby overloaded our stomachs.

But the focus of this article is not on excess or self indulgence for one day out of the year.  Rather, this focus in on a more traditional view of giving thanks.

It would be an overgeneralization to say that ALL of us have more than we need.  But we can agree that it’s certainly true for most of us.  When we think about our excesses, we often stop to ponder how we might share from the many blessings we’ve been given with those who DON’T have enough.

Without wanting to promote any sense of pride among us, our little community sponsors quite a number of outreach activities for those in need.  This has far less to do with some concerted effort on the part of our people as a community than it does the individual hearts of the really good people who make up this Orthodox community of believers.

In short, we want more than anything to be found by our Lord to have hearts that conform to His will, to His example, and to His commandments.  We really want to feed the hungry, to clothe those in need, to visit the sick, to pray for any and all who are in need.  We want to LIVE Matthew 25:34-36!

In short, we want to be giving, not just of material goods, not only of finances, but of our time, of our effort.  The Lord has showered us with His love.  Now we want nothing more than to be reflections of that love to others in need.

And in this giving, there is the root element of thanksgiving, for we show the Lord our thankfulness for the excesses with which He has blessed us to the extent that we share from those excesses.

And what is the result of this kind of sharing, of this “thanksgiving of giving”?

The immediate response is yet more thanksgiving on the part of those who receive in their need.  It doesn’t matter if we know of their thanksgiving.  In fact, it is better that we don’t know.  May their hearts be moved to give thanks to the One who provided the excess so that they might receive, not from us, but from Him!

St. Paul expresses this in his second letter to the people of Corinth with these words:

Now may He who supplies seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed you have sown and increase the fruits of your righteousness, while you are enriched in everything for all liberality, which causes thanksgiving through us to God.  For the administration of this service not only supplies the needs of the saints, but also is abounding through many thanksgivings to God, while, through the proof of this ministry, they glorify God for the obedience of your confession to the gospel of Christ, and for your liberal sharing with them and all men, and by their prayer for you, who long for you because of the exceeding grace of God in you. Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!  (2Cor 9:12-15)

What is this “indescribable gift”?  Is it not God’s uncanny ability to bless so many with one single gift?  Thanks be to the Lord for all things!

Have a most blessed Thanksgiving 2024!

 

Starting With a Clean Slate

It’s an expression we use related to “new beginnings”.  It can relate to a new job, to a remodeled home and how it gets organized, or perhaps more appropriately, to a change in attitude after making a sincere confession.  All of these wipe clean what was before, and provide a path for changing the way in which things will be planned to happen afterward.

When the clean slate points to our spirituality, it has as its focus the level of our faith.  If we choose not to have the slate filled with failures that have just been wiped clean, our faith needs to be such that we live according to a plan that will not duplicate the shortcomings we fell into before.

St. Theophan the Recluse says this:

Sincere faith is the renunciation of your own mind.  It is necessary to make your mind naked and present it like a clean chalkboard to faith, so that she can draw herself on it like she is, without any admixture of foreign sayings and attitudes.  When the mind’s own attitudes remain within it, then, after the attitudes of faith are written on it, there appears a mixture of attitudes.  The mind will be confused, encountering contradictions between the actions of faith and the sophistries of the mind.  Thus are all who approach the region of faith with their own sophistries… They are confused in the faith, and nothing comes of it but harm.

What is the Saint explaining to us?

Faith is the renunciation of your own mind—the intellect is a gift from God, but too often used in a way where we allow it to supersede what the Spirit shows us in faith, and so its use becomes detrimental to us.  Faith must win over intellect.

Present (your mind) like a clean chalkboard to faith—We need to give our faith unencumbered access to “write” our path to salvation without the intellect in its way.  Then we must labor to conform the intellect to where the faith is leading us.

When the mind’s own attitudes remain, after the attitudes of faith are written on it, there is a mixture, and confusion and contradiction between faith and intellect—We can’t allow the righteous directions set by faith to be “overwritten” by an intellect attached to this world.  Faith leads us to the life that is eternal.  Intellect steers the life that ends all too soon here on this planet and its dirt.

Thus are all who approach faith with their own sophistries—Our faith gets lost in lies told by this world that get ingrained into our intellects.  Like the world around us, our intellects, which receive instruction from the world, can and often do lie to us.

They are confused in the faith, - If we give leave to our intellects to direct our lives when we really need to rely on faith, it’s easy to see how confusion results.  For example, “My faith tells me to reach out to and help the beggar on the corner.  My mind tells me that he’s a charlatan, and any good that could come from my helping him will be lost in sinfulness.”  The Holy Fathers teach that giving alms is NEVER a wrong thing for the giver, and the good that can come from it, “yay or nay” belongs to the receiver.  There is an account from the Holy Fathers of a monk who, seeing a beggar struggling with the cold, took off his coat and gave it to the beggar.  On the following day, the monk saw his coat - the very same on, in a shop window for sale.  He became angry with himself for not discerning that the beggar would misuse the gift - to sell it and use the money for some unrighteous purpose.  That night he had a dream, and he saw the Lord standing, wearing his same coat, with the Lord asking, "Do you like My coat?"  He understood then that his giving was righteous.  "God knows your hearts." (Luke 16:15)

So, “wipe our slates clean,” and allow the Lord’s finger to write what path or paths He chooses for us to take on this day, and in all successive days.  Fill the slate only with that which brings spiritual gain.  And as best we can, praying for His blessing to do so, let us with all our strength follow where He leads.