Thanksgiving Homily Stories

Ten lepers were healed on the road to Jerusalem. Ten people who had been cut off from their families, their community, their Temple, their whole life — healed, completely, in an instant. Nine of them kept walking toward Jerusalem, toward their priest, toward the life they'd been missing. Which was the right thing to do, technically. But one of them turned around. He came back, fell at Jesus' feet, and gave thanks. Jesus noticed. "Were not ten made clean?" He said. "Where are the other nine?" Not in anger — in sorrow. Gratitude is apparently not the automatic response to grace. It has to be chosen.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that "the world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder." He was writing about children — about the way a child can spend an afternoon fascinated by a single beetle or a puddle of water — but he was really writing about gratitude. Gratitude, he argued, is not primarily about the size of the gift. It is about the act of noticing. The leper who turned back had made a choice to notice. Most of us receive gifts from God every day and walk on to Jerusalem without stopping. The spiritual discipline of Thanksgiving is the discipline of turning around.

I want to share a story I made up. Imagine a woman who kept a jar on her kitchen table — not beautiful, just a plain mason jar. Every evening before dinner, she put one small stone in it for something she was grateful for that day. Not big things. Small things. A phone call. The sound of rain. That her knees still worked. By the end of each year, the jar was full of ordinary things. She called it her "jar of abundance." When her grandchildren asked about it, she said: "This is how I remind myself that I am rich." — That's not a real story. But that's a real practice. What we give thanks for is what we have. The Eucharist is the Church's jar of abundance — a gathering of all the ordinary mercies of God.