The very last day of the liturgical year we receive again the solemn warning about how we conduct ourselves throughout the time of our exile. The end of the book of Revelation offers some hopeful prophetic words about eternity, but reminds us that we must raise our minds and hearts to the mystery of Christ. Our sins and shortcomings ought to trouble us to some extent – we shouldn’t despair of course, but we should use the distress we experience, our guilt and shame, to plunge ourselves back into the merciful heart of God.
Thanksgiving Day
The celebration of Thanksgiving Day is valuable to our American Culture. If we celebrate this day well, it allows us to live out our Christianity and values and push back against the encroaching secularism of our time. Thanksgiving, when we pause to consider its meaning, and when we decide to open our hearts and be thankful, is a natural pathway to God. As important as the history lesson of the “first Thanksgiving” might be – and as useful as it is to firmly ground our traditional celebration – it has to be about more than Pilgrims, Indians, planting corn and eating a big meal.
Christ the King
Today we celebrate the culmination of time, and the final manifestation of the glory of Jesus Christ. Throughout our lives we catch glimpses of how God is guiding the course of the world, how He intervenes sometimes in very subtle ways. At the end of time, we will see clearly how intimately involved Jesus was in every movement of every human heart. Jesus is the King of hearts, the shepherd of souls, the new head of humanity – raising us who had fallen in Adam. He is the just judge who will decide if we will rise to share in His glory – fully divinized by His grace – or rise only to plunge deeper into death in hell. He is the merciful judge who draws even closer when we stray. As our head, he proceeds us into heaven – He is a shepherd whose body is composed of sheep. When one is lost or stolen, it is a wound in His flesh that he seeks to heal and recover.