Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s time for my annual reminder to everyone that the word “Thanksgiving” and the word “Eucharist” (the Greek word for what Christians do on Sundays) mean the same thing. Why is this? What does it mean to say that worship and prayer is primarily “thanksgiving”?

“Liturgy” means the work of the people, or perhaps “public work”, but what work could the people do that would be satisfactory to a creator God? Do you remember in Euthyphro when Socrates asks just this question, and the young man Euthyphro finds that he has better things to do than to answer theological questions, though he was a self-declared expert? What is it that the creature can do for the creator?

All we can do is say “thank you.” But the how matters. “Thanks, bub,” we say as we ask for the time. The sparse words are proportionate to the sparse gift. But what do you do to give thanks for everything? You had probably better spend some time at it and make your thanksgiving beautiful.

This is the reason for all of the rituals, the special foods, the gathering at Grandma’s house, the decorations; everything must be beautiful! The Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann writes:

The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole ‘beauty’ of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the ‘necessary.’ Beauty is never ‘necessary,’ ‘functional’ or ‘useful’… It is heaven on earth.

The whole essay from For the Life of the World is worth reading. Let me sum it up for you: it is the act of thanksgiving that allows us to enter into the Kingdom of God. There’s no other way in except through the realization that all is grace. This is why the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer recalls all that God has done in history. Without the recollection, there’s no thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for what, exactly? When you realize that everything is a gift, you can have everything revealed to you as a gift. Does that make sense?

As you gather with your families on Thursday (if you’re American), remember that all is grace, that every one who shows up, even Uncle Bob, is a gift of God to you, and thus should be reverenced as a revelation of the goodness of God to you.

Happy Thanksgiving!