It’s turned cold here in the Bay Area, with some rain during the week. We live on the edge of turning seasons, a turning of the natural world and a turning of the spiritual world. We rotate with time, as it pulls us ever forward, having spent the past, now spending the present, and soon to spend the future.
For time disappears behind us as if we are traveling on a path through the woods, speeding on a highway that parts the trees, and we glance back furtively to see what we have left behind.
As Christians, nothing is lost, nothing is wasted, and I find that immensely comforting. As my bishop of blessed memory often said, everything counts, nothing is lost, and when I reflected on his words, I would think, that cuts both ways, the good and the bad.
But then when I think of tragedy in the past, I know that is can be remade to our benefit. For suffering does indeed ennoble us, gives us texture and understanding. Suffering teaches us how to love in the midst of pain, and it teaches us how to love the unlovable.
My mother had a fall recently. She is 103, 104 in January, and she mentioned this afternoon that she had been reliving her life in her head. I suppose it is her version of her life – her memory bank. Other versions, perhaps not sanitized versions, might appear in our Life Review when we enter Heaven. Many of those who have died and returned to life give accounts of a Life Review in which we see scenes in our life, possibly triggering regret and repentance.
For at the end of the day, the end of our time, where the dark road through the forest emerges into the bright daylight of Heaven, we recall the miraculous words that open Jerusalem’s gates: I’m sorry. I haven’t loved enough.
I ponder these things as we spin from fall into winter, from Trinitytide into Advent, from Thanksgiving into Christmas. The days grow shorter, the nights darker and crisply cold. The air seems clearer and cleaner, and I’m told that winter’s clarity peaks in January, a good time to ascend Mount Diablo (aka Angel Mountain) and see forever.
And so we approach Thanksgiving and give thanks for our lives on this good planet Earth. We are a part of something, you and I, an integral piece of the cosmic puzzle. We can see our world is beautiful yet corrupt. Our flesh is good but it decays. Our loves decay. We must be on guard to love more and not less, to give more and not less, lest we shrivel into something not so integral, a piece of dust in a galaxy of time. How do we do this? How do we turn evil into good? Hate into love?
We cannot do it alone.
We open our hearts to our Creator and invite him in. Come into my heart, dearest Lord Jesus. Come in and live there, plant seeds of life, turn my decay into glory.
We live in a miracle, the miracle of America, where freedom does indeed ring. It is up to pull the heavy rope at the base of the belltower to ring the golden notes of freedom across our land. We pull and let go, pull and let go, pull and let go. The bell swings in the tower, calling the lost and forlorn to our shores, to enjoy equal justice, equal opportunity, and equal expression.
Each one of us then glories in our uniqueness, for no two of us are the same. We are dignified and sanctified having been created in the image of God, and we join hands to fulfill our purpose, why we were created and what we are meant to do.
We give thanks. We give thanks for those who sailed from distant shores in search of peace, fleeing persecution or poverty or penury. We give thanks for those who offered their time and talent to make this country better, to make this country safer, to make this country the way that the God of Abraham desires it to be. The list is a long one and growing longer – all the men and women over four hundred years who gave themselves to freedom, by responding responsibly to the call to be all that you can be.
We give thanks for all these blessings, and we pray that we do not take them for granted, that we see them the fruit of our prayers and our work and our humility. We see these blessings of the land and our nation as great gifts not to be squandered, but to be understood as cultivated carefully through the generations.
We give thanks for the children and the fathers and mothers who raise them to be in awe of their birth and what the talents given to them in this remarkable country. We see our sons and daughters grow in love and wisdom, feeding on our lessons of life, of lives lived in the past, of deeds done through the years, of the need to plant seeds in fertile soil to reap a good harvest.
We tell the stories of The Little Red Hen, of Chicken Little, of The Boy Who Cried Wolf so that our children learn to value industriousness, truth about skies falling (or not), and sounding false alarms. We heard these stories, and many many more, and we pass them on to our children.
We are thankful for all of these things as we spin from November into December, but most of all we are thankful for life, for the unborn forming and growing and seeing light and breathing those first breaths. We are thankful for death too, oddly and gratefully, as a culmination of our life, a joyous exclamation point that finishes our story, our own Book of Life that we will see one day, opened before us by our dear Lord Jesus.
And we are thankful for our Creator of all, from whom all blessings flow.
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 