ThanksWords. ThanksActions. Thanksgiving.

Dear Friends,

As this Thanksgiving week opens, it is likely that the attention of people around here and around the country is divided between whatever you do to earn your living and last-minute thoughts and plans for Thursday's gathering  - hopefully with family and friends - to celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving.  And that is okay.  We likely learned as children that anticipation is at least as important as an event in itself.  And if we didn't learn it as children, we may have been instructed on the same point at some point by the Rolling Stones!

In our madcap-paced society, it really behooves us to make the attempt - whether sometime this week or throughout the coming blessed (and so overlooked) season of Advent - to radically slow down physically, emotionally, spiritually and to consider what are those blessings for which we are truly thankful.  Gratitude is a revelation to our deep hearts of what our world - both the greater one and our own personal part of it - actually looks like.  Gratitude is one of the healthiest reality checks we have been given.  Don't let it slip by.

I have been considering what are some of the people, things, events, memories and hopes for which I am most grateful - particularly writing from this office at the Mercer School of Theology.  I have been trying to push the envelope on gratitude this year.  That is, to both round up the usual suspects and push myself to delve deeper into good reason for thanks.  So here is a very partial list.  I would invite you to add your own.

Thank you, good God, for . . .

family - a first and lasting blessing, from generation to generation;
for fellow workers in the work of this school, and in the diocese of Long Island in all its congregations;
for friendships, both those which have endured for decades and those being planted today;
for the Word of the Gospel, which constantly reveals the gentle power to give and to renew life, to revise perspective and expectation;
for this beloved nation, crazed in these days in its maddening and confusing current culture, yet filled with great good hearts, people of love and hope;
for the right to free speech, although the exercise of it often reveals first the crazy-making current culture referenced just above (!);
for the invitation to delve together ever more deeply into contemplation of you, dear God, in prayer and thought;
for the reality of the godly worship that takes place daily, and certainly weekly, throughout this world;
for those who gather bodily at that worship, for those who are joined to those gatherings at heart, and for those who would be there but for obstructions remaining painfully from the past;
for hope in a future unseen, untested, but filled surely with the living Spirit of Jesus Christ;
for possibility;
for mercy;
for light;
for grace;
for the oft-revealed ultimate deep openness of the human heart.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!  Thank you for your past and present interest in the work of Mercer School.  Do check out our coming events on our homepage (www.mercerschool.org) and register to come visit.  And if there's planning for the future you'd like to have us undertake, be in touch! We'll do it together.  That's the best way to do anything at all.

With gratitude,
John+

PS - sometimes what we need and that for which we're grateful is quite simple - like "a stone to roll."  Take a listen.