Thanksgiving

I just wanted to encourage all of you in your celebration of the Year of the Eucharist to note that Eucharist means "thanksgiving", making this annual celebration all the more poignant this year. Abraham Lincoln was a prophetic sage; when he immortalized this day in the American calendar, he was recognizing the importance of crediting God with our blessings, as a nation and as families who make up our nation. The celebration offers us the chance to return an investment to those who risked their lives to forge a new nation, those men and women dedicated to the belief that God created us good, noble, and free, possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: the missionaries and martyrs, the colonists and pilgrims, pioneers and patriots, the soldiers and slaves. We stand with generations of immigrants as well as those who worshipped and thanked the Creator long before anyone else arrived on this plentiful soil.
As Catholics and people of goodwill, we can honor the Lord this day by thanking Him for creating us good, for loving us into existence, crowning us with redemption, and sustaining us through the Holy Spirit. We can call upon the intercession of the cloud of witnesses at our Table, our spiritual family whom we hope to join at the Eternal Banquet. Let us make this Year of the Eucharist, an entire year dedicated to thanksgiving, one in which we never forget the blessings remembered and hopefully felt this Thanksgiving Day. Let us join our domestic table to the Altar, and enthrone Christ in our hearts. Let us share our plenty with those in poverty. Let our nation grant such prosperity to those in need. Let us be the Salt which leavens the world, a Light to the nations, a City set upon a hill.
Let us praise and thank the God of Abraham and Sara, the God who led his people out of bondage and beckons us to Eternal Life. May we join our cross to His, place our hopes at His feet, and follow the Way of Truth and Life, this day and always. Amen!