BONUS BLOG: the real thanksgiving table

With gratitude to John Alexander Wright —

THE REAL THANKSGIVING TABLE

As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m always drawn to Hyatt Moore’s contemporary painting of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:16-24] and to this quote:

“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.” (Karl Barth, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s “A Long Obedience.”)

That I am here at all is by sheer grace. It evokes a gratitude far deeper than thanksgiving for this or that particular blessing. There wells up in me a more profound gratitude for “nothing,” i.e., for no thing in particular, a gratitude for “being itself.”

Father Michael Dwinell’s words come to mind: “If for a moment we can catch a glimpse of what it is like not to have to worry about justifying our existence, then we will catch a vision of how everything is a miracle, how everything floats in and upon a vast ocean of tender grace. The miracle is that we exist at all. . .It’s an ongoing, incredible miracle. In the excruciating humiliation, pain, and presence of [grace’s] ego-destroying judgment, we can then come to desire God as much as God desires us.” [“Being Priest to One Another”]

Then we realize that no one, including ourselves, “deserves” a place at the Thanksgiving Table. Every one of us is, in one respect or another, “poor and maimed, halt and blind.” And our only proper response to God’s amazing grace, besides our profound eucharistia and alleluia, is, as “one blind beggar showing another blind beggar where to find bread” (D.T. Niles), especially when it’s at our own table!