To Friends, every day is a day of worship and a day of thanksgiving. Once a year we, Americans, come together as a country and try to see some way to be thankful for our state of life. Not everyone in this country sees this the same way. Some can relate to a universal ultimate, some find their own state of consciousness about as fleetingly ultimate as they can imagine. We all try to express our gratefulness, if not to a spiritual personage, at least to one another. Then there is the rest of the year.

This is my day of Gratitude. I live in a world full of things and experiences for which no sane person would be grateful. Nonetheless, moments of peace, compassion, innocence, affection, forgiveness and connecting with the Ultimate manage to outshine the darkness and make it bearable. When G. H.W. Bush was President, his "points of light" metaphor fit this world view. So let us all be proactive, not passive, points of light by being compassionate, considerate of a persons level of experience, affectionate, forgiving, generous, positively exemplary, reverent toward those whose religious beliefs you may not share, and grateful for the opportunities to be so.

Indigenous people helped the unprepared, relatively unskilled, exiled religious zealots from Europe that landed on their shores. Had the Mayflower stayed on course, they would have landed on a much more hospitable environment further South. The settlers gratefulness ended with a feast of celebration, then the newcomers determined to exterminate the original people. The pilgrims invalidated their expression of gratitude for themselves, the natives and their legacy. It was a dereliction of the Golden Rule. Let Thanksgiving be a day of enduring commitment to the duties of a follower of a compassionate, merciful, loving and abiding God, or moral purpose, who seeks life and abhors the absence of kindness and the proliferation of death. Be blessed and be a blessing, always.

Morningbear