Tonight, on Thanksgiving Eve, our Church family gathered to pray together the Thanksgiving Akathist. It has become a tradition in many Orthodox Churches in America to worship together with this prayer at Thanksgiving time. It is a prayer service that was chanted by believers in concentration camps under the totalitarian anti-Christians of the mid-20th century. And it only gains in meaning across the years.
One of our catechumens, a military veteran and former state police investigator, after our service tonight spoke of his special love for the 12th Ikos of the Akathist:
What sort of praise can I give Thee? I have never heard the song of the Cherubim, a joy reserved for the spirits above. But I know the praises that nature sings to Thee. In winter, I have beheld how silently in the moonlight the whole earth offers Thee prayer, clad in its white mantle of snow, sparkling like diamonds. I have seen how the rising sun rejoices in Thee, how the song of the birds is a chorus of praise to Thee. I have heard the mysterious mutterings of the forests about Thee, and the winds singing Thy praise as they stir the waters. I have understood how the choirs of stars proclaim Thy glory as they move forever in the depths of infinite space. What is my poor worship! All nature obeys Thee, I do not. Yet while I live, I see Thy love, I long to thank Thee, and call upon Thy name.
Glory to Thee, giving us light
Glory to Thee, loving us with love so deep, divine and infinite
Glory to Thee, blessing us with light, and with the host of angels and saints
Glory to Thee, Father all-holy, promising us a share in Thy Kingdom
Glory to Thee, Redeemer Son, who hast shown us the path to salvation!
Glory to Thee, Holy Spirit, life-giving Sun of the world to come
Glory to Thee for all things, Holy and most merciful Trinity
Glory to Thee, O God, from age to age
I had come straight to the service from visiting and praying with two older Orthodox Christians, brothers by birth, who are now both hospitalized in a nearby medical center. Just the day before, I had been in a meeting about setting up our first prison ministry to meet the needs of a number of Orthodox inmates behind bars in need of spiritual support. To be able to give thanks to God even in the toughest struggles is hard but has a special deep beauty. The phrase “Glory to God for all things” featured also in the Akathist is famous as a last utterance by St. John Chrysostom, the famed fourth-century composer of the primary Liturgy used by Orthodox Christians on most Sundays and other services, while he was in exile under persecution.
When seasick, we can look to the horizon for grounding. Likewise in the storms of life’s troubles, we can look in gratitude to God’s rule for reassurance of his Providence and sustenance for us, in both this life and the life to come.
At times like Thanksgiving, we gather in families, and especially in our Church family, in the parish that is a small local fractal of the Church and humanity as a whole worldwide. Our parish is in a biblical sense a foundational little nation, while we pray for the big nation of America under God. In Church, the head of our family is God, and our Mother in the Church is the Theotokos, the Mother of God.
We should not separate our family activities from our Church family’s life. For while indeed God is everywhere, just as is water in the atmosphere, so too we go to the fountain of Living Water in the Church, the Body of Christ, to be with our Church family, as certainly as we look to home to be with our human family. The Church in our home flourishes on the vine with our Church family at Church.
Long ago, the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock. They were heterodox Protestants but sought a better life in a wilderness where they could worship God freely. Gov. Winthrop in his diary described their thanks. Having had a long hard sea-crossing behind them and a wilderness before them, they gave thanks to God in some stark worldly circumstances.
The Orthodox Church as always has deeper and broader perspectives. Going back to around the year 1000 on the Western calendar (around 6509 on the Church calendar!), we remember how an ancient text tells of Leif Erikson’s Viking mission to Christianize America. They landed around Newfoundland according to archaeologists, with priests in the group, and must have given thanksgiving prayers. Because this was prior to the Great Schism, they would have been Orthodox Christians, too.
While their mission (at the northern tip of what geologists consider the Northern Appalachians in which our mission today dwells) didn’t flourish across time directly as the West went into Schism, indirectly we remember it as the first coming of Orthodoxy to America, seen later in the Russian mission to Alaska, all the way up to our modest country mission in Winfield, Pennsylvania, glory to God! For tonight’s Thanksgiving Akathist was our first in our new temple as a Church, and our first Thanksgiving in our 10-year history not in a rental space, but in a permanent tabernacle. Glory to God!
Tomorrow we celebrate the American national day of Thanksgiving, a beautiful day but one that like American Christmas often gets lost in worldliness, in gluttony and greed and display of one kind or another, idolatries of matter and of family comfort and success apart from God. However, Orthodox Christianity offers Americans a path through to the authentic roots of Thanksgiving, and of our country in God. In particular, the ancient Christian emphasis on the uncreated energies or grace of God offers us a way of experiencing through our faith and the Church a sense of God’s presence with us even in the most forbidding wildernesses of our lives, and the opportunity to transfigure them into a blessed glimpse of Paradise–as for example St. Anthony the Great did in his desert dwelling.
The day after Thanksgiving we will start our Nativity Fast. It is 40 days to honor our God and His Mother leading up to Nativity, on December 25 on the Church calendar, which is January 7 on the civil calendar. We wait for our Christmas because it is worth waiting for, and we fast instead of engaging in the worldliness of the anti-Christmas. Because we love God Who taught us to love our neighbor more than ourself, part of our fasting should be in alms-giving and helping our neighbors. Like, even by this unworthy sinful priest, visiting those in the hospital and in the prison especially on holidays, and the struggling fellow members of our Church family far and wide. For Thanksgiving is an action word. It finds meaning in the original faith of our Fathers and Mothers in the ancient Church, who still stand with us in Church in our iconography and in our prayers and in their presence glorifying God with us–and even did so in concentration camps, too.
Glory to God for all things!