#Thanksgiving
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Choose love.
Considering thanks, amid grief.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Amid all our worries about prices, war, and so much more, still it comes. Comes the invitation to be a person (and perhaps a people) of gratitude. That is, to be a person and a people who look first for that which is received as gift (the Christian definition of ‘grace’), and so respond in two beautiful steps: 1. Receive the gift; 2. Give thanks for the gift.
Today, along with so many people who know and respect and indeed love her, I have been working at coming to terms with the death of Bonnie Rodgers. By any measure, dare I say human or divine, here is an extraordinary human being – of faith, of love, of commitment, of renewal, of prayer, of encouragement, of humor, of truth, of deep and lasting connection person to person.
The news last evening of the end of her earthly life “did not,” as the old saying goes, “compute.” Bonnie has always been, for the almost 25 years that we’ve known one another, more profoundly alive than anyone else I’ve known in that same quarter century. Someone that alive, dead? I cannot fathom it.
But today I came across those who remind that grief is gratitude. In this is a doorway, at least ajar, to see in this pain the light of grace.
Happily we accepted the gift of Bonnie’s person in word and action. Now is the time to give thanks. And the giving thanks is itself another grace, linked to the first, and powerful. Powerful in its fullness, its completion, its beauty.
Bonnie, tomorrow we who know you, and knew your love of life, gather around tables of gratitude at Thanksgiving. In a manner so real that it rips at the soul, it is singularly appropriate to give thanks precisely as we mourn your going forth from us.
You have given so much. We have received so much from the Lord through you. In this wrenching sorrow, precisely within it, I thank you for all, and I thank God for all you are in God.
Rest in peace Bonnie. One hundred thousand thanks.
(image from Catholic Television).
Here’s a plan.
Believe it. 
Thank you, Fr. John for describing so eloquently what all of us who know and love Bonnie are feeling…
Thank you Anna-Marie. This is a profound loss for us all. I’m sorry I missed a call from you today. I hope to speak soon. Thanksgiving blessings to you.