Our Lady of Lourdes Church and School

This year, Thanksgiving Weekend coincides with the liturgical celebration of the Feast of Christ the King, or more formally, the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The ending of one Church year and the beginning of another is a fitting time to consider the blessings for which we are grateful as a community of faith. It is a rare moment when both a secular holiday and a religious holiday overlap, and the appropriate theme for both is one of gratitude.

Gratitude is a wonderful disposition of the heart. When family and friends gather together to feast and to enjoy one another’s company, stories are shared and our souls are enlivened. To pause, and to intentionally acknowledge that for which we are most grateful, perhaps even to name it in front of someone else, then is our heart stirred to express thanksgiving. A consistent source of thanksgiving for my part as pastor here at Lourdes, is the outpouring of giftedness on the part of all those involved in ministry in our parish.

Earlier this month, we invited a guest facilitator to join us here at Lourdes and to guide the different leaders of our various ministries through a process that involved identifying our God-given gifts, and exploring those gifts alongside fellow parishioners. This was in response to an effort on our part, a very intentional effort, to be more attentive to the many and varied ways in which God graces and blesses our community. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, all the gifts that are ours, are gifted to us by God. This gift of God’s is not only for the individual, but for the whole Body… “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ… Now the body is not a single part, but many… you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.” The wealth of gifts present among us is quite staggering. Those who participated in the facilitated session learned primarily about themselves and how God has graced them and blessed them uniquely, but they also began to glimpse what is possible when the community explores such giftedness together, all for the betterment and building up of the Body. Over these coming months, we will continue to work with those who participated, inviting ongoing reflection and growth.

Continuing to build on our awareness and our gratitude for God’s gifts, In the springtime, around Pentecost, we will be hosting a retreat-type experience to empower and enable participants to explore their giftedness and their purpose even further. “Called and Gifted” is a process that will be open to anyone who wants to discern their gifts and enter into a deeper discernment on where those gifts fit in our lives, according to the desire of God for us.

Why all this talk about gifts? Because Thanksgiving is a most appropriate time to remember how gifted we really are, how blessed we are at the hands of God. Our awareness of our gifts and blessings prompt a heart of gratitude before God and one another. It is a heart of gratitude that allows us to come before God and share our Thanksgiving, our Eucharist, and so to enter into right worship (ortholeiturgia) and right praise (orthodoxa) together as a Eucharistic people.

The word Eucharist literally means “Thanksgiving”. Without awareness of that for which we are grateful, how difficult it is for us to enter into full, conscious and active participation in our Sunday Eucharist? If I can’t name the reason for my gratitude, how can I enter into the saving mystery of Eucharist?

Gratitude is a wonderful disposition of the heart. When we gather together with one another as brothers and sisters in faith, to feast and to enjoy one another’s company, stories are shared as we break open God’s word for us. Our souls are enlivened as we share of ourselves and make our offering to be joined with the offering of Christ. This is the stuff of Eucharist, by which we are nourished and in which we are sustained by Christ in the life of discipleship.

Enjoy the warmth and grace of this Thanksgiving Weekend. Let it be for us a nourishing moment for the life of our faith.