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Here's a little prayer for consideration at your holiday table.

(encourage everyone to observe a moment of silence, then begin)

God, thank you for this wonderful gathering.
For the many gifts of love you give.
This wonderful family, our cherished friends, our ancestors.
They are all here with us in mind and spirit, if not in body.
Thank you for our abundance, our warm home, our peaceful place of rest and renewal.
Thank you for this food today and every day.
Thank you for our livelihood, our daily bread, our resources in these troubled times.
Let us truly think of others with as much compassion and understanding as we can.
Let us help those in need, as they help us too.
Let us keep caring for each other, forgiving and forgetting, sharing the abundant love that only You provide us.
Most of all, we love you, dear God, and thank you for this precious life.
Amen.

(then encourage everyone to share what they are thankful for, either out loud, or silently)

My prayer for you, dear reader, is also a prayer of appreciation for your continuing time and attention, and for sharing my work with your friends, family and colleagues.  

I send you love and many thanks.

Quite simply, Thanksgiving Day is a time of appreciation for a bountiful harvest.

First celebrated at the Plymouth Plantation in 1621 (debatable) by the Pilgrims and the Native American Wampanoag tribe in North America, it was a meal shared by all.  Traditionally, this meal of appreciation is made from what each person has brought to the table.  In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October.  In the United States, the festival is held the fourth Thursday of November.

These days, whether we're farmers, natives, or not, Thanksgiving is often a time for family, friends and neighbors to join together in harmonious praise.  Grace, a blessing or a prayer of thanks to God is often said before the meal begins.

Tell us, please, what you and yours are thankful for this Thanksgiving.  Write a comment below and share the bounty.

I am Thankful for my family, friends, people I work with, and the great grace that God gives me beyond my needs and dreams. I thank God for good health and the ability to help others be healthy.  I am thankful for you, my readers and the Beliefnet community.

What are YOU thankful for?  Please comment below.

While a lot of us are having a hard time keeping food OFF the table, 1 in 7 Americans are finding it hard to put food ON the table this year.  So reports a study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In this nation, and era of abundance, it's hard to imagine that there are those who cannot afford food and go hungry.  Sadly, it's true.

Here's a report from the RNS, the Religion News Service, via Beliefnet news.

Let's say prayers for those who cannot find enough food.  Let's take action and contribute money to hunger programs, help stock food pantries and soup kitchens.  You may even have the desire to volunteer, putting your love and compassion for others into action.

Mark C. Taylor, noted philosopher, scholar, professor of religion and Chair of the Columbia University Department of Religion, has published a glowing, often super-real and sometimes surreal collection of essays on the human condition.  "Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living" from Columbia University Press is a must read.

Writing in an alternating dyad of daylight and nighttime entries, Taylor gives us 365 short essays that take us on a roller coaster of imminent demise and cheated time.  We're hurled about, shifted, dropped from high ledges, scooped up resurrected, then tossed again into the abyss.  What do we learn upon our return?  What the hell do we do when the ride is over?  Or is it ever really over?

The amount of detail, thought, and personal life story here is remarkable, and not something you've ever seen the likes of before.  Fasten your seatbelt, the ride begins with Taylor at the top of his career falling ill, saying goodbye to his wife on an ordinary day. Ordinary, but not so well. Taylor had felt ill, dizzy, and not himself all weekend but that morning he had to go to work, some 150 miles away. His wife had already driven halfway back home when she got an alarming call - Taylor was on his way to an emergency room.  Taken too ill to make his own entry that morning, she writes, "When we returned to the ICU, we were not prepared for what we saw: tubes, electrodes, and wires connected to Mark to monitors that registered a steady flow of numbers...In a few minutes the doctor who had accompanied us from the ER came in to talk with us, 'May I speak with you alone? ...Your husband is very, very sick.  He is in septic shock, and his vital organs are in danger of shutting down...'  We asked some questions because we are all used to a world in which information gives power, comfort, and control.  Finally I summoned the courage to ask the question I had been dreading, 'but he is going to be OK, isn't he?"  No, he wasn't simply going to be OK.  His life would never again be the same.

Surviving that episode, but not ever fully recovered, the kinds of life threatening illnesses he's gone through one never quite recovers from, as Taylor points out.  To recover is to return to the same person that one was in the first place.  Taylor finds himself in the category of survivor, yet reinvents the term into an entirely new reality.  He fully lives the fragile existence between finitude and infinitude that is our predicament.  We cannot escape death, yet we cannot fully live without embracing it; we cannot not live if we choose to live and that brings us to a mystery which is never fully solved. Taylor firmly, resolutely, chooses life.

He grows ideas. He plants gardens. He harvests concepts and post-modern, existential seeds of being and its first cousin, non-being. "What we most long for is elemental.  Earth, Air, Fire, Water.  The elemental is the original, the first principle, the ground of whatever is whatever is not.   It is the underlying substance without which nothing can be.  As such, the elemental is that from which everything emerges and to which all eventually returns."  He is, we are, that dirt he digs.  That we dig.

Taylor writes about splitting his time between city and country.  For 35 years he has lived in western Massachusetts, high on a hill, in the middle of forest and small-town intellectual life as a professor at Williams.  Now, with his appointment at Columbia University, he divides his time between the wilds of nature and the chaos and culture of New York City.  He finds the two both similar and starkly different.  Always one to embrace technology, be it shovel, pick-ax or trowel - computer, cell phone or matrixed network, Taylor seems to be at home anywhere.  He's rooted in past; planted in present; futuristically comfortable.

"Though steel and glass remain, the arcades have become digital, and the commodities virtual.  In the city, place is transformed into the space of anonymous flows.  When technologies shift first from steel and steam to electricity and then to information networks, currents are redirected and the rate of change speeds up.  Mobility, fluidity, and speed intersect to effect repeated displacements in which everything becomes ephemeral and nothing remains stable or solid.  In this world, faster is always better and speed becomes an end in itself.  For those circulating in these currents, there is never time to pause and ask, 'Faster and faster but for the sake of what?'"

The tension between life and death, the speed and uncertainty of "last" times is ever-looming throughout Taylor's essays.  The last lesson, the last visit to a relative, the last moment of lovemaking, the last laugh, the last goodbye of a son or daughter is forever on the cusp, unbeknown to us until it's happened. Then it's the past.  We scramble for meaning, and to learn something applicable to our own living and eventual demise. Taylor talks about his mother's strokes and ultimate cerebral hemorrhage that ended her up in a hospital with life support.  He gave her a kiss, feeling the warmth and perspiration on her forehead, thinking of what the neurologist had said shortly before this last good bye, "her brain just exploded."  By now that must be a family metaphor in the Taylor family of teachers, writers and professors.

Taylor reminisces: "Ever the teacher, in death my mother had a final lesson for me: every moment is the last moment or, in terms I would later read elsewhere, the last time returns eternally.  This awareness need not weigh us down, rather, it can lift us up by helping us to realize the infinite value of what is always passing away."

Recovering from, or rather surviving his struggle with septic shock and a constant life-threatening severe diabetes, while co-teaching "What is Life?" a course on philosophy and biology with a friend from the science department, Taylor received news of a biopsy.  It was positive for cancer.   "Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares you for the words, 'I'm sorry, you have cancer.'"  Taylor, the philosopher draws a distinction between recovery and survival, the latter moves you into a new sphere; a dance between what was old and never before possible, into a valuation of life's fragility. "For survivors the acceptance of life's fragility can actually be liberating.  If the future everyone dreads has already arrived, there is no longer any reason for it to hold us in its grip.  Once you realize that the end is near, even when it seems distant, time unexpectedly slows down.  There is no longer any need to rush because whatever you think must be done quickly doesn't really matter."  Not quite joy or happiness, for sure, and never anywhere near a painter of rosy scenarios, Taylor still manages to embrace the intimate relationships formed among cancer patients in waiting rooms and chemo suites.

Now in remission, Taylor makes the point that as a survivor, he is never fully "cured," there is always some scar or remnant from the original trauma or repair.  His serious case of incurable but now manageable diabetes is an example.  Taylor's pancreas does not manufacture insulin, so he is hooked up to a computerized insulin pump that has a tube embedded in his leg.  Still partially manually operated, he dreams of the day that it will be fully automated, in effect transforming him into both human and cyber-being, monitored by a net connection. "The mechanical and digital devices that now function as my pancreas are, in other words, nodes in this worldwide web, and my body has become a prosthesis of a prosthesis... We become both metamind and metabody--cells in an intelligent global organism whose lifeblood is information.  The networks that sustain life are the current embodiment of what once was named the divine Logos.  In today's divine economy, to be is to be connected and to pull the plug is to die."  Here is an elegant example of Taylor's stark and complex humanity: a mix of philosopher, metaphysician, and medical theologian.

A lot of this book I honestly find to be quite difficult yet satisfying in a strange and unexpected way.  This is no lightweight read.  Filled with haunting memories of those gone, chased with bitter pills of our limitations and eventual demise, there are glimmers of hope and happiness to be found.  Taylor is aware of the challenges he's placed in front of the reader.  "Happy eras, we are told, are the blank pages of history, and so it would seem - of books.  Perhaps it is because it takes more courage to write about happiness than unhappiness."  He points us to his favorite joyous writer, Nietzsche who is himself in a desperate mode.  "Intense unhappiness becomes bearable by imagining that things might be otherwise elsewhere.  The writer must write this elsewhere to get through the night and the darker the night, the better the writing."

It is in this "elsewhere," as the title leads, this vivid point of real and unreal playing together, where, or rather elsewhere, that Mark C. Taylor both uncomfortably and comfortably resides.  


Order it from Columbia University Press - here.

A wake up call, that's what suffering offers us, according to the poet and writer, Scott Cairns.  Suffering is not about the pain and hardship, per se - we need to look past suffering to what is beyond.  "The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain" is a highly insightful and deeply spiritual guide that I found very moving and helpful. I heartily recommend it to you.

Using illustrations and examples of his life, the events of September 11th, and quotes and aphorisms from the Bible and such luminaries as Simon Weil, Emily Dickenson, Saint Isaac of Syria, W.H. Auden, Saint Simeon the New Theologian and a carefully-selected array of others, Cairns reminds us that pain and suffering grab our attention: sometimes gently, often intensely.  Through suffering, God shows us what needs to be attended to.  He writes,

Under most circumstances, then, the occasions of our suffering are capable of revealing what our habitual illusions often obscure, keeping us from knowing. Our afflictions drag us--more or less kicking--into a fresh and vivid awareness that we are not in control of our circumstances, that we are not quite whole, that our days are salted with affliction.

What do we do with suffering and affliction?  Endure it? Let go of it?  Give it to God?  Cairns suggests the first step is to set ourselves aside; let the ego be suspended for a moment, allowing grace to enter and inform.  Ultimately, though, what we need to learn is how to live, but most importantly, how to die.  Cairns encourages us to learn and live gently, almost effortlessly towards the inevitable, using our afflictions as tools.

...we must come to recognize our suffering as a means, a circumstance of our common journey that can offer us a clearer view of the task at hand. Along that journey, our afflictions and our suffering may also provide to us a glimpse of what actual virtue might require.

Virtue?  In the sense of goodness, chastity, worth, or is it to make the most of something bad or unmanageable that is inevitable, employing logic and reason as Plato taught us?  God only knows.

Cairns is a Christian, an Orthodox Christian to be precise, who has written and taught on the many frontiers and salvations available with Christ.  He has had the occasion, several times, to visit the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos in Greece, where monks have lived for over a thousand years.  Taking time in total wilderness and seclusion, Cairns has personally lived a life of ceaseless prayer and contemplation, yet returning to the challenging world of family, job, and responsibility.  On his last visit there, he reflects,

I realized--experienced, even--that the body of Christ is a good deal more than a figure of speech; it is an appalling truth and mystery, uniting us beyond our knowing with one another, and uniting us with an ever-greater mystery, the perichóresis--the circling dance--of the Holy Trinity Who is our One God.

I do not expect to comprehend--much less ever to explain--the particular mystery of, as I come to speak of it, One Holy Essence Whose Mystery is expressed in relational, interpersonal terms, but I do hope to share something glimpsed among the struggling monks on their Holy Mountain, something gleaned from their ongoing, written tradition, and something I have labored to acquire as my own.

Looking for an answer to his toil and suffering, Cairns looks to God, in the tangible humanity of Christ.  He toils to be like Christ, an adventurous, endless, joyous yet arduous pursuit seeking to comprehend and apprehend himself, bathed in the mysterious Image of God.  The point is to be like Christ, to not only follow Him, but to merge into His infinite grace; to be "at one" with Him.

Our familiar English word atonement (which, believe it or not, comes of combining at-one-ment) was coined in the sixteenth century for the express purpose of reinfusing our theologies with a more vivid awareness of how it is that Christ saves us--He joins Himself to us.

Alas, most of us squander our opportunities, Cairns laments.  We do our best, yet pain and suffering are still with us.  We get distracted.  We become perplexed, tired, uncertain, and even hopeless at times.  These are also opportunities.  Perplexity may also be grace.  Weakness becomes a virtue.  These vacillations, Cairns teaches, are the tools of God, they lead us to Him and our pain and suffering become doorways to our healing and ultimate forgiveness and salvation.

A mixture of poetry, anecdote, intelligent research, memoir and meditation, Scott Cairns' "The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain" is itself a means to an end.  This is a deeply good and beautiful essay; a useful handbook to true love and infinite care through and in God's magnificence.

Order a copy today.  Better yet, give it for the Holy Days coming soon.  Here's a link to it at the Publisher, Paraclete Press.

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