A Holy Catholic Thanksgiving
The word itself is a bell rung at dawn: Thanks-giving.
Eucharistia. Todah.
A blood-stained hymn first sung when the angel passed over the houses marked with lamb’s blood,
a cry flung upward when the walls of Jericho fell,
a song torn from David’s throat as the Ark came home.
Long before the amber rivers of gravy,
before the cinnamon breath of pie,
there was an altar on a green hill outside the city gate.
There the true Harvest was lifted up,
arms spread wide like a farmer flinging seed across the furrows of the world.
From that single wounded Ear of Wheat the whole earth is fed forever.
Listen: every crackle of autumn leaves beneath our boots
is the faint echo of the soldiers’ dice rattling for His cloak.
Every candle on the table is a shadow of the seven lamps that burn before the Throne.
Every glass lifted is a dim reflection of the chalice He pressed to trembling lips:
“This is the cup of My Blood; do this.”
The Pilgrims knew.
They stepped onto a shore of graves,
half their number swallowed by winter.
Yet when the corn stood high the next autumn,
they did not first carve turkey;
they knelt.
Somewhere among them a hidden priest in layman’s clothes
raised the Host above a makeshift table of planks and wonder,
and the American soil first tasted Heaven.
So come,
before the avalanche of plates,
before the laughter and the football roar,
fall on your knees in the hush of the house
and let the old words rise like incense:
My Lord and my God,
You who spun galaxies like golden grain across the night,
who set this blue planet turning like a pearl on a poor child’s string,
who breathed into dust and made us living souls,
who walked our roads with wounded feet,
who still walk them every day in the guise of the priest,
we dare to thank You.
For the martyrs’ blood that soaked these shores ,
for the bells that still ring free across the wounded land,
for every trembling hand that has ever lifted You above an American altar,
for every grandmother’s whispered Ave beneath a foreign tongue,
we thank You.
For breath.
For sight.
For the taste of butter melting on tongue like forgiveness.
For the laughter of children who do not yet know how much this moment costs.
For the silence after grace when every heart remembers it is loved.
And when the dishes are abandoned and the last candle gutters,
slip away,
find the nearest tabernacle glowing like a hearth in winter,
and there, in the ruby flicker of the sanctuary lamp,
offer the only gift You ever wanted:
Take this fleeting life,
this fragile republic of days,
this heart too small to hold what it has received,
and let it be one long Magnificat,
one unending Te Deum,
one lifelong Mass of Thanksgiving.
Then go home.
Eat the cold pie.
Laugh too loud.
Fall asleep under a roof still free.
The true Feast never ends.
It only waits for us at dawn,
when the priest lifts the Host again
and the bells answer back across the fields:
Thanks be to God.
Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God.
Have a Blessed Thanksgiving,
Mike the Grateful