Can I get a word of Thanksgiving?

Given the increasingly dour news about our economy and the need to cut back (expenses) and to cut up (credit cards), I wondered as we move into this season of Thanksgiving, how and why people would feel a sense of thanksgiving. There are so many people caught up not only in a foreclosure crisis, but also caught up in job layoffs. There are so many people who have seen their savings dwindle or completely disappear; who have watched retirement funds telegraph the message to keep working – retirement is not in your future for some time to come. There are people who cannot get credit, or if they can, pay a high premium for it. Will there be people attending church on Thanksgiving Eve, as was our custom throughout our 20 Thanksgivings at Southminster Presbyterian Church, or will they think “why bother; there is so little left in my life for which to offer thanksgiving?” I haven’t gotten completely cynical about human nature, but as a Christian, I have been awed at the spiritual ennui that is gripping the hearts of so many people I see and hear around me.

After departing in recent blogs from the basic premise of Celticcrossings, I return to that concept that gave birth to this blog and which in so many ways gives focus and direction to my sense of what we should be about within our Christian faith. In the worship services that I attended in both Scotland and Northern Ireland, and those which were part of our worship ministry at Southminster from time to time, the celtic worship liturgy has a free-flowing quality which embraces all of life as both sacred and sacramental. So, at this time of Thanksgiving, even when things seem dark and getting darker, I wanted to share some liturgical prayers drawn from the Celtic traditions upon which you might choose to reflect at this season. The following prayer comes out of the oral, gaelic traditions of the Scottish Highlands:

Thanksgiving

Thanks to Thee, O God, that I have risen today,
To the rising of this life itself;
May it be to Thine own glory, O God of every gift,
And to the glory of my soul likewise.

O great God, aid Thou my soul
With the same aiding of Thine own mercy;
Even as I clothe my body with wool,
Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.

Help me to avoid every sin,
And the source of every sin to forsake;
And as the mist scatters on the crest of the hills,
May each ill haze clear from my soul, O God.

You may not have heard of a Scottish civil servant by the name of Alexander Carmichael, but he did a great service for his native country by collecting and preserving the oral traditions that abounded in the Highlands and the Hebrides in the late 19th century. His work was published in a volume known as the Carmina Gadelica; it is a Latin phrase which means “Gaelic songs, hymns, and incantations.” Carmichael says this about his work:

Whatever the value of this work, it is genuine folklore, taken down from the lips of men and women, no part being copied from books. It is the product of faraway thinking, come down on the long streams of time. Who the thinkers and whence the stream, who can tell? …These poems were composed by the learned, but they have not come down through the learned, but through the unlearned – not through the lettered few, but through the unlettered many – through the crofters and cottars, the herdsmen and shepherds of the Highlands and Islands.

Out of more recent liturgical traditions in the Ionian Community of Iona, Scotland, I offer two more Thanksgiving prayers. For me, they seem so timely and appropriate for those who need both a sense of community and a sense of hope.

Thanksgiving for Community

Thank you for our time in community,
For deep, if fleeting, friendships.
For those conversations late at night,
For the vulnerable intensity lubricated by laughter,
For the freedom to serve others,
And to affirm ourselves
In the face of all that you know and we know of our lives.
And we thank you for all the signs that the churches
With which so many are disaffected
Can yet be your body on earth in the community of creation.

All Shall Be Well

For the greening of the trees
And the gentling of friends,
We thank you, O God.

For the brightness of field
And the warmth of the sun,
We thank you, O God.

For work to be done
And laughter to share,
We thank you, O God,

We thank you, and know
That through struggle and pain,
In the slippery path of new birth,
Hope will be born

And all shall be well.

And it shall all be well, for those of us who keep our eye on prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. There is always an opportunity to give thanks, even if it is only for the freedom to think on these things with a degree of ... gratitude.

To each of you, may this season of Thanksgiving be for you and yours a time of thanksgiving as well…