COMMENTARY: Everyday revelations, everyday blessings

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.) UNDATED _ November begins in the Roman Catholic Church calendar with memories of saints and prayers for all souls. […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ November begins in the Roman Catholic Church calendar with memories of saints and prayers for all souls. Many believers feel it goes downhill from there.


For them, November means endings, not beginnings, a loss of light and a gain of regret, a sense that the waiter is coming with the bill we must pay for the year.

And didn’t we just unwrap this year now dying all around us, when was that, just yesterday?”No shade, no shine,”Thomas Hood wrote,”no butterflies, no bees, no fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no buds. NovemberâÂ?¦” To citizens already worn down by time and chance the month does not suggest giving thanks as much as it does just holding on for dear life.

But Thanksgiving is well placed close to year’s end, offering a feast whose candlelight softens our faces, making us all look better, with a gentle if flickering light in which we see and are seen less harshly and perhaps even more truly than in the rush of the rest of the year.

Thanksgiving provides an interval on that last rise of the season in which we may look again at the people and things that flash by as small towns do from the express train window. Thanksgiving permits us our world to reveal itself to us once more.

Thanksgiving is, therefore, an experience of Revelation, a season that, despite notions promoted by bookkeeper theologians that it ended with the death of the last apostle, has never closed. The holiday provides a quiet time in which to grasp the religious mystery that glistens like a jewel well set in everyday life.

Crowds, for example, or traffic jams may be so familiar to us we never look much at the people involved in them. They are always going some other place than we are. But we are on the same pilgrimage, filled with commuting, errands, shopping, and the coming and going as ceaseless as the chain of headlights on darkened highways.

Inspect the faces in any group. They need not be travelers to be carriers of revelation. They may be people waiting to pay the bill for their baskets of groceries. Inspect the latter and you enter their lives to see the bread and wine of the Eucharist of their family lives, the nourishment to sustain them through the deaths, large and small, of everyday existence. Perhaps there is a treat there, a birthday cake, or someone’s favorite food. These are hints and proclamations of the love with which they are selected, the family circle they will nourish, the unending mystery of what, in the final analysis and at the end of the year, we mean to each other.


Or watch the men and women _ the children, too _ as they form a procession to receive the Eucharist and return to their pews. Learning from their faces is spiritual meditation at its deepest for in the faces of these ordinary people we find inscribed the stories of life itself.

Such people, so unselfconscious as they approach the Sacrament, have faced and borne everything life has thrown at them _ death and illness and disappointment, but hope and courage, and simple dignity, too, as well as love, aged in the casks that never go sour, that keeps them going. The mystery, the only religious mystery, and all we need do is to look around us to see it.

Look as well at the faces of people doing their Christmas shopping. Forgetting themselves, they are searching for a way to make somebody else happy. They are breaking out of themselves, yielding and sometimes sacrificing, out of a love too deep ever to be reported in magazines as shallow as”People.” At an airport, watch the wonderful dramas of departure and homecoming that are taking place all around you. Inspect the friends and family members watching for their loved ones as the plane unloads. The faces light up, great smiles break across them, people embrace, the mystery of simple affection is celebrated before our eyes.

Perhaps, then, we may take the in-between moments of this feast to be thankful for the religious mysteries that the day allows us to recognize. They are too good to miss and they surround us all the year long.

DEA END KENNEDY

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