November 26, 2009   Cycle C

Sirah 50:22-24      Psalm 138    Luke 1:39-55

Thanksgiving is a time when we traditionally reflect on our blessings.  Blessings.  It is a word we use easily enough when we say our meal prayers, “Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts…”  We bless ourselves as we begin our prayers with the sign of the cross and we say, “God Bless you” when someone sneezes.

This Thanksgiving I would want to turn our hearts and minds to see blessings a little bit differently.  Not necessarily as words that we say or something that one person gives to another.  Rather, to think of blessing as being together in kindness.  See that blessing as not something you do, but as something you are to one another. 

The encounter of Mary and Elizabeth in the Gospel passage today, is truly a blessing.  It is a moment of their meeting, a relationship that acknowledges the other’s worth.  It is being together in kindness. 

There is a story I read of a young man by the name of David Fajgenbaum.  He speaks of the day that he received the phone call in 2003.  At the time he was a freshman at Georgetown University.  He had just finished football practice as the college quarterback and he was pretty pumped up.  Then he called his parents to ask how things were going.  His dad was oddly subdued.  Finally he told David, “Son, your mom has brain cancer.” 

Well, David was stunned, but his mother, Anna Marie, was adamant that he stay in school.  David threw himself into his studies and grew increasingly isolated.  He wrote, “I felt I was the only person on campus with a sick parent.  When everyone’s sitting around laughing and talking you don’t bring up your mother’s latest MRI or say you’ve been crying.

When his mother died the following October, David starting hearing from friends who had no idea that his mom was sick.  Some had gone through the same experience.  David learned then that nearly half of all college students had lost a loved one within the previous two years.  “The mother of one of my best friends had also did of a brain tumor,” David remembered.  “How do we not know that?  Because we did not talk about it.”

David then invited five students who had lost relatives and friends to his apartment to talk.  They decided to meet every other week to share their stories and help one another to cope.  They also began raising money for the foundations working to cure the diseases that had claimed their relatives and friends.  The group was the beginning of the National Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers Support Network, or AMF, which stood for the initials of his mother.  Today the organization includes some 2000 participants on 23 campuses. 

David is now 23 and a second year medical student and plans to continue growing AMF.  He writes, “This organization is about one thing, being there for one another.  And every time I see those initials, AMF --- I see my mom and I know I am honoring her by helping her.  She would have liked that.”

David and his friends are the heralds of what I speak about to be a blessing to others.  To reach out in kindness and acknowledge the other’s worth and their suffering and pain. 

We bless one another when we meet in kindness.  Discipleship begins with a sense of gratitude for the life breathed into us by God and renewed in the life of Christ.  Discipleship is then expressed in becoming for others what God has been for us.

Truly today as we gather on this Thanksgiving, it is a good time to remember and cherish the people in our lives who are in need and in deed.  People are treasures to us.  They are blessings to us in sickness and in health, and they have been with us in kindness and they have let us know that we count.

Thanksgiving then is a time to remember those who have attached words to us.  Words like “May I help?”  “I’m right here.”  And “Blessed are you among woman.”  And labels like “friend, beloved, special, lover, the best, treasure, one in a million, heart of my heart.”  We may have been, and maybe are someone who hasn’t always been recognized for our gifts.  But we, who come together on this special day, a national time of gratitude, know in our hearts and prayers those who have been with us in kindness.  Today we thank God for many things, but especially we remember people, those who have been with us in kindness and who, in their encounters, have blessed us.

Amen.  Amen.  Msgr. Tom, Pastor Christ the King