By Fr. Eugene Hemrick
Yeshua Fellow
Traditionally Thanksgiving is an event in which we count our blessings and express our gratitude for all we have received from God.
The blessings we list are concrete and visible to the eye: family, food, a roof over our head, friends.
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, we read:
for some people, miracles serve us as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine Providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.
Einstein offers us a novel way to celebrate Thanksgiving -- to leave our concrete visible world and ponder the very debts of God’s harmony.
On my life’s journey I sowed, harvested, and cultivated soil. It was wonderful to witness a small seed come to life and be an essential source of life. Equally astonishing is Einstein pointing us to God’s harmony, making us wonder why there is the harmonization of water, soil, and seed.
Why do the changing seasons harmonize? Why the harmonization of the sun and rain?
Through today’s quantum revolution that studies the behavior of energy and matter and other scientific breakthroughs, we are now discovering new laws working in harmony in such things as a tiny particle of dust.
The Nano-Nano world is upon us, making us wonder about these astonishing discoveries. There is an answer -- an unimaginable spirit at work, a spirit we call God.
Numerous ways to celebrate Thanksgiving exist. One overlooked way is to embrace a physicist’s mentality -- to ponder life’s miraculous harmony.
We need not be genius mathematicians and go into great depths. We just to silently ponder our heavenly existence. It is easy to get caught up in Thanksgiving commercialism, the here and now and its enjoyment. I’m suggesting that we substitute He for it: He, God, preferring the supernatural over the mundane.
Thanksgiving should be a cherished time in which we pray:
Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.
Praise and exalt him above all forever.
Angels of the Lord, bless the Lord,
You heavens, bless the Lord,
All you waters above the heavens bless the Lord,
All you hosts of the Lord, blessed the Lord,
Sun and moon, bless the Lord,
Stars of heaven, bless the Lord,
Everything growing, bless the Lord.