STAND

On this Thanksgiving Day, I realize with humility that the older I get, the more profound the chasm between all that I have for which to be thankful and my ability to give adequate thanks.  My life is rich with family and friendship, framed in memories and potential, and blessed with health and happiness.  Oh yes, the world around can seem warped; I can wax poetic with the corrections needed to promote the greater good and cure the social, political and moral ills which bombard our senses from every news outlet; OR I can just stand in my space, in this moment, and be grateful.   Be grateful that the path I have forged was the right path and the person I see in the mirror is surprisingly just who she needs to be.  Stand in that knowledge.  Stand in gratitude that my journey has been joined by others whose love buoys me.  Link with those on whose shoulders I stand… those living and deceased, known intimately or admired and emulated. Be silent, and just stand.

In a recent post, my friend and spiritual director Michael Fox wrote:
"When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God, we find ourselves in a new and particular relation to a few of our fellows. The relation is so surprising and so rich that we despair of finding a word glorious enough and weighty enough to name it. The word Fellowship is discovered, but the word is pale and thin in comparison with the rich volume and luminous bulk and warmth of the experience which it would designate. For a new kind of life-sharing and of love has arisen of which we had had only dim hints before.

By no means is every one of our friends seen in this new and special light. A wholly new alignment of our personal relations appears. Some men and women whom we have never known before, or whom we have noticed only as a dim background for our more special friendships, suddenly loom large, step forward in our attention as men and women whom we now know to the depths. Our earlier conversations with these persons may have been few and brief, but now we know them, as it were, from within. For we discern that their lives are already down within that Center which has found us. And we hunger for their fellowship, with a profound, insistent craving which will not be denied."

My pastor Father Mike Carroll recently used a similar sermon theme to describe the interconnectedness of the family we build as our own. He used the corollary of the roots of the Sequoia, whose shallowness might cause the great trees to be toppled in storms but for their tendency to weave in and around and through the roots of their fellow trees. For that reason, like those of us in fellowship, they grow in stands and find their strength as one.

All days are not Thanksgiving Day.  All days are not even thanks-giving days.  Some days when seemingly-desperate circumstances seem to chase us or our loved ones around every corner, we go inside ourselves seeking the strength to re-set, to carry on, to advise.

In the words of the spiritually-charged song Stand by Donnie McClurkin,

"Tell me what do you give,
when you've given your all

and it seems like you can't make it through.
Well you just stand

when there's nothing left to do.
You just stand

watch the Lord see you through.
Yes after you've done all you can,

you just stand."
Today is a day to acknowledge that it is the connections I have made that have woven the spiritual and personal tapestry that I call “Me.”  With a lot of earnest effort, even more love and support, and a sprinkling of luck, there was my yesterday, here is my today, and there is my tomorrow.  And so today, in deep gratitude to all who have loved me into this moment, in eager anticipation of what tomorrow will bring for me and for all those I love, and in absolute assurance that there is an undeniable compass guiding it all to exactly the right conclusion, I just stand.