Tis the season to be thankful...

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough” ~Meister Eckhart, 13th century German theologian.

We are celebrating the Canadian Thanksgiving this coming weekend, It will be a weekend filled with fall activities, with closing the cottage for another year, mulching leaves, or perhaps getting the garden ready for another long, cold, Canadian winter. It will be for many of us a weekend that finds the family gathered around a table filled with the bounty of another harvest, At church services decorated with fruits of that harvest, we will sing those old familiar thanksgiving hymns and perhaps listen to a sermon extolling those things for which we should be thankful in this land of plenty. And then many of us will forget all about Thanksgiving until it rolls around again next year!

For Meister Eckhart, though, it is none of those things. It s simply saying ‘thank you’ to our God quietly in prayer. He’s not talking about thanking those people who open doors for us or help us in some other way. We are Canadians and ‘thank you’ crosses our lips almost as many times in a day as the word ‘sorry’ does! While acknowledging others with a thank you in this way is good, there also needs to be another deeper ‘thank you’ expressed. This for me is that ’thank you’ that while it is not necessarily verbalized resonates deep with us throughout the year.

For the past 9 months I have been deeply thankful for the skill and dedication of all the medical and support personnel who have been a part of our lives. I only hope that they have some small idea the difference they have made. In addition, after 69 days, for my husband to be able to walk out of the doors of a premiere health facility without owing a cent was a reminder that simply through an accident of birth, we are living in a country where this is possible instead of elsewhere on the globe there this would not have been our experience. But in reminding us of that it is also reminds us of what we need to do to ensure that everyone, everywhere, can have the same experience.

And that is perhaps why Eckhart said what he said some 700 years ago. Being thankful reminds us of those things in our lives that are important and meaningful to us. In remembering those things, we become aware that the same things are important to people everywhere. Along with this comes the realization that we need to do whatever we can to make sure that everybody will get to experience them as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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