Provincial Ponderings - November 2024

With Thanksgiving being so late this year and Advent beginning just a few days later on December 1, it will not surprise you that I find myself thinking about gratitude and hope as I share this pondering with you. Thanksgiving brings gratitude to the fore and Advent calls us to wait in hope for the God who comes to bless our lives and our world with peace and joy.
What may surprise you is how gratitude and hope are not only deeply inter-connected, but how they speak to human experience that opens us to God, while bringing hope and healing to the world. That all sounds pretty heady, so let me come back to earth by telling you about a person, a dear and holy woman, whose great spirit and soulful energy has blessed me (and countless others!) with joy, courage, and hope to “keep on keeping on” in the challenge and the mystery we all call life. 
   
My friend, Patrina, is a Sister of Mercy with a smile a mile wide and with a personality that is warm, friendly, and gracious from her core; that is to say from her big and tender heart that is so kind and loving. I met her many years ago during retreats. She was always that breath of fresh air, that proverbial shot in the arm, and burst of energy to lift me and many others out of the doldrums or worse, from being down in the dumps! Patrina’s person and presence, so real and so human, was a huge boost of encouragement not to lose heart or hope, as joys and sorrows mingle in our hearts, in our life stories, and in our world. In my wondering why she has been so present to me as I have been mulling this Thanksgiving and Advent pondering, the ‘aha moment’ came when I remembered her answer whenever I would ask her, “Patrina, how are you?”   “Blessed and grateful,” she would respond, not once or occasionally, but always – “blessed and grateful.”   As I linger gratefully in my soul’s experience of Patrina’s words, they speak as much, if not more to me, of who she is than simply how she is. The message I hear her speaking of herself is “I am blessed and grateful.”  
    
As I ponder the words, blessed and grateful, it strikes me that they reveal and reflect inner dispositions of mind and heart that inspire a vision and a plan for a people and a world to be transformed from fear to freedom, from violence to peace, from despair to hope.
 To know ourselves blessed is to have real experiences of being touched and shaped by unearned and amazing grace, wonderful gifts, and tremendous goodness throughout the times and seasons of our lives. Choosing to live our lives through the lens of grace and blessing is that sacred space where, by faith, we perceive the real presence of God, where we become more attuned to the sacredness of our own being, and where we recognize and reverence the dignity of every other being as well. To be grateful and to choose to live life with an attitude of gratitude recognizes that every grace and blessing given to us is a gift to be somehow shared and given away - for the glory of God, for our own well-being, and for the hope and healing of all the world.

“Blessed and grateful,” Patrina always said, as if they could only be said together. She was on to something I think: the experience of true blessing inspires deep gratitude, and deep gratitude inspires an even deeper experience of the grace of God’s blessings in life. Joyful thanksgiving for all of life’s blessings inspires longing and hope for peace on earth and good will towards all.

Grateful people who know themselves as blessed bring love, hope, and light to birth in ways great and small. As we celebrate Thanksgiving and the season of Advent, I hope and pray that you find yourself blessed in God’s great love for you, and ever more grateful for the gift that you are in that love.

There is an old adage about life comes to mind as I close for now that says, “you will find what you are looking for.”  So, if you choose to look for blessings, you will find them. And if you choose to live with gratefulness and in gratitude, you will find what you need to do that too! And behold, in blessing and in gratitude, God’s dwelling is with the human race (Rev. 21:3)

Happy Thanksgiving and Blessed Advent to you!
Gratefully,
Fr. John Collins, C.Ss.R.
Provincial