I am Grateful

A Homily for Thanksgiving Day 2024

Have you ever been grateful for losing? Have you ever been grateful for what you’ve lost? Have you ever been grateful for your failures?

This Thanksgiving day I think it’s important to remember that gratitude is not a privilege nor is it a choice. Gratitude is not something we do rather it’s part and parcel of who we are! As people sitting here today, only by the gift of God’s life breath, our very being is geared toward gratitude.

Life has not ever been, nor is it now, about win or lose, gain or loss, success or failure. The sooner any of us can get free from those false dichotomies and limiting visions of what it means to be fully human, the sooner we can come to know the liberation that lies in loss, rather than the libertine life to which lies about loss lead.

There is a fundamental truth at the heart of the Christian journey of faith, one that is inescapable, no matter how desperately we may try, from time to time, to escape it. And that truth is this: The more we gain and grasp the smaller grows our hearts and the more we loss, release, and let go, the more our hearts expand. Generosity doesn’t lie in gain rather it lies in loss. Compassion wanes with winning and finds its leaven in losing. Our precious humanity takes flight by failure and is too often sunk by success.

As soon as any of us imposes the limiting framework of win/lose, gain/loss, or success/failure on any person, or on ourselves, we do damage not only to their human dignity but to ours also. We can’t sacrifice the mystery of the human person for safe categories by which we can judge others and ourselves and thereby give the lie to Jesus’ words: “He who would lose his life for my sake will save it.”

Our wins, our gains, our successes, though not bad in themselves, can tend to go bad in ourselves. Wins only widen the distance between us and them. Gains only grow the divisions between the haves and the have-nots. Success only gives a surface shine to a life lived misled.

You see when we are hit with losing, loss, and failure we are given a chance to touch afresh the depth of our own human vulnerability and we can never touch our human vulnerability without at the same time coming into touch with the Divine Invulnerability dwelling in us all. From there alone does generosity grow and compassion warm and we become more human not less, and therefore ever more Divine.

So this Thanksgiving let us take a moment to give thanks for losing, for the losses, and the failures by whose light authentic human faces shine. And let us learn to go out to each other in solidarity, especially to those made most vulnerable in a culture that prizes winners over losers and the successful over those who fail. In our losses let us embrace those our world deems lost. In our failures let us embrace those our world deems failed.

Gratitude, when it is all said and done, is neither a privilege nor is it a choice. Rather it is fundamental to what it means to be fully human and to live a fully human life, which depends on the full humanity of our brothers and sisters as well. Gratitude alone grants grace where grace too seldom flows. Let gratitude not just grace our tables today, or be the grace at our tables we pray, but let it also break beyond our limited lives and grace the lives of the so many limited today.

So let us be grateful to be found with the losers, one with the lost, and one with the failures… because there is where we find Christ and there Christ finds us.