The Thanksgiving Feast

Celebrant:  Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People:      It is right to give him thanks and praise.

Those are familiar words. We say them every week at the Eucharist (from the Greek word meaning thanksgiving). What if, however, we thought of the Eucharist as larger and more expansive than what we do on Sunday mornings? What if every offering of our thanks was a moment of Eucharist? What if we fed on the bread of gratitude in every moment, with every person, and in every place?

I am not just talking about the act of counting or naming our blessings, though there is nothing wrong with that. I am really talking about thanksgiving as a way of being, seeing, and relating. What if we understood thanksgiving to be more about what is happening within us than what is happening around us? Maybe we would look at each moment, each place, each person and hear those other familiar words, “The Gifts of God for the People of God.”