This Week's Prayer

Holy and loving reality, we come to this season of Thanksgiving knowing that every season, every moment, every breath must be a season of gratitude – that the most basic spiritual practice, discipline, virtue, and grounding is gratitude.

Grateful constantly for earth and sun, air and water, life and love, life becomes possible. Without thanksgiving, life is only a kind of walking death.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for “this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees,” (many now displaying the beauty of their bare branches) -- “for the blue, true dream of sky.”

Thank you for our home – and our capacity to find ourselves at home wherever we are – for the earth, the universe, wherever we go, is our home.

We will always have problems. Approached with gratitude, we can learn to love our problems, for they are the arisings of life. With hearts of thanksgiving, we can respond with compassion to all that arises.

Grateful for life, we can respond compassionately to those who are sick, supporting the medical teams in West Africa fighting against a deadly virus.

Grateful for our capacity for concern and respect and fair treatment, we can respond compassionately to both perpetrators and victims of unjust abuse, oppression, racial distrust and prejudice.

Grateful for what we know of peace, we can respond compassionately to those whose lives are torn apart by war, supporting the efforts of peaceful and fair conflict resolution.

Grateful for the abundant bounty of our lives, we can respond compassionately to those who suffer poverty.

Grateful for simplicity (beautiful simplicity that liberates from the burden of things, for the things we own and consume also own and consume us) we can turn away from the crazy getting and spending that lays waste our powers.

Grateful for the love of family and friends, we can respond compassionately to affirm those bonds in ways other than buying stuff.

Let our hearts, then, overflow constantly with gratitude.