(Thanksgiving 2011: This homily
was given on November 24, 2011 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr.
Raymond Suriani. Read Luke 17: 11-19.)
My homily this morning is on the
“challenge” of giving thanks.
Most people would agree (and
rightly so!) that it’s a good idea to give thanks—and not just on one Thursday in
November, but every single day of the year.
They might not always recognize the fact that God is the one “from whom
all good things come,” as we say in the third Eucharistic prayer—hence he should be the one to whom their
gratitude is primarily directed—but they do recognize and understand that giving
thanks is an important activity for them to engage in.
And yet, it can also be a
challenge—for them, and for all of us.
In today’s gospel, for example, a
healed Samaritan leper comes back to Jesus and gives thanks to God for his
healing.
That certainly makes him a lot more
virtuous than the other nine lepers who were also healed that day but did not
come back. However, the question that
really interests me is: Would this man
have done the same thing if he had not
been healed? In other words, would this
Samaritan leper have still been able to give thanks to God in the midst of his terrible
illness, if it had not been taken
away? Would he still have been able to
find a reason (or a number of reasons) to say “thank you” to the Lord?
Obviously, we can’t know with
absolute certitude the answers to those questions, although we can certainly
speculate on the matter. But there is
one thing we do know for sure: It would
have been much more of a challenge!
Giving thanks after a great physical healing like the one this man
experienced is relatively easy. Giving
thanks when God says no to the request for a healing and allows you to go on
suffering is far, far more difficult.
But it’s just as important! In fact, it’s even more important—because crosses and sufferings are never completely
absent from anyone’s life! So if we’re
only going to give thanks when everything is “perfect,” then obviously we won’t
be giving thanks very often!
And we will be miserable—because
ungrateful people are some of the most miserable people on the planet!
I suppose all of this came to
mind because of my own experience during the last 12 months. As most of you know, last December I was
diagnosed as being in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, which means that
this is my first Thanksgiving since the diagnosis.
Consequently it’s a very
“challenging” Thanksgiving holiday for me.
In all honesty, it was much easier for me to give thanks in years past when
I had no major health issues to deal with.
Ah, the good old days!
But the same is probably true for
most, if not all, of you. You might not
have Parkinson’s (and I pray you don’t!), but that doesn’t mean you’re completely
free from the challenge to be grateful.
You might be challenged today in your thanksgiving by cancer, or heart
disease, or diabetes, or lupus or some other serious ailment—or simply by old
age. You might be challenged today in
your thanksgiving not because your own physical health is deteriorating, but
rather because someone you love is really sick.
Or because someone you care about
deeply recently died.
Of course, it’s not only physical
health problems that can challenge our willingness to be grateful in this life;
we can also be challenged by other crosses
and difficulties, some of which come into our lives with little or no warning:
a lost job, a broken friendship, a failed marriage, a betrayal—the list goes on
and on.
In preparing for this homily I
decided to take what might be called “the thanksgiving challenge,” and write
down some of the things that I am grateful for in the midst of my present
health situation. I’ll conclude my
homily by briefly sharing these insights with you. Perhaps you’ll relate to some of them, such
that you’ll be led to thank the Lord for the same realities in your life:
- I’m thankful to God for the love he has shown me through other people since my diagnosis. That love has been most evident through the faithful, daily prayers that are being said on my behalf—some by people I’ve never even met!
- I’m thankful to God for the opportunity this disease has given me to grow in empathy and in compassion for others. It’s much easier to relate to those who are suffering and to console them when you are suffering yourself.
- I’m thankful to God for giving me the opportunity through this illness to offer up some suffering in reparation for my sins and for other people—especially the souls in purgatory. Hopefully that will make my own experience of purgatory a lot easier!
- I’m thankful to God for using this illness to keep me from getting complacent in my spiritual life. We all tend to pray more—and to pray more fervently and attentively—when things are difficult in our lives.
- I’m thankful to God for the way this disease has made me more grateful for the little blessings of life that I experience every day—things I used to take for granted.
- I’m thankful to God for the motivation that Parkinson’s has given me to refine my priorities. Not that my priorities were way out of order beforehand, but they definitely needed a little “tweaking”—which is probably the case for most of us.
- And, finally, I’m grateful to God for the way that Parkinson’s Disease has made me more repentant. When you have a serious illness of any kind, you realize that, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “We do not have here, on earth, a lasting city.” Consequently, keeping your relationship with God in good order becomes extremely important.
Those are some of the ways that I’ve
become more grateful to the Lord during the past year. Hopefully you can identify with at least some
of them, based on whatever is challenging
your gratitude at the present time.
Of course, I look forward to a
Thanksgiving Day in the future when I can stand at this very same pulpit and
tell you that I’m grateful to God for something else: a cure or a healing.
Now, I admit, it wouldn’t be very
challenging to be grateful on that Thanksgiving Day—but it would definitely be
nice!