Thanksgiving Day Grace

Thanksgiving Day Grace

This was originally posted on November 24, 2008

Perhaps one could open A Course In Miracles, Text or Workbook, digital file or printed book, at any page and within a few minutes find a passage suitable for offering grace or prayer before a meal with a gathering of friends. There are many such passages, many of them poetic, many in the form of a formal prayer.

Currently, I like a section from the Workbook Lesson 169:

By grace I live.
By grace I am released.

The entire page would work for a patient group, but if that is too long, this passage from the same section would work:

What is the Face of Christ but his who went a moment into timelessness and brought a clear reflection of the unity he felt an instant, back to bless the world? How could you finally attain to it forever, while a part of you remains outside, unknowing, unawakened, and in need of you as witness to the truth
Be grateful to return, as you were glad to go an instant, and accept the gifts which grace provided you. You carry them back to yourself and revelation stands not far behind. Its coming is ensured. We ask for grace, and for experience that comes from grace. We welcome the release it offers everyone. We do not ask for the unaskable. We do not look beyond what grace can give, for this we can give in the grace that has been given us.
- A Course in Miracles

In years past, when I was asked to give a reading from A Course In Miracles before Thanksgiving dinner, I read this passage from the Text:

The Holy Spirit has given you love’s messengers to send instead of those you trained through fear. They are as eager to return to you what they hold dear as are the others. If you send them forth, they will see only the blameless and the beautiful, the gentle, and the kind. They will be as careful to let no little act of charity, no tiny expression of forgiveness, no little breath of love escape their notice. And they will return with all the happy things they found, to share them lovingly with you. Be not afraid of them. They offer you salvation. Theirs are the messages of safety, for they see the world as kind.
If you send forth only the messengers the Holy Spirit gives you, wanting no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love’s messengers to remove from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you His messengers to send to your brother, and return to you with what love sees. They have been given to replace the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the end of fear.
Love, too, would set a feast before you, on a table covered with a spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden, where no sound but singing and a softly joyous whispering is ever heard. This is a feast that honors your holy relationship, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest. And, in a holy instant, grace is said by everyone together, as they join in gentleness before the table of communion. And I will join you there, as long ago I promised and promise still. For in your new relationship am I made welcome. And where I am made welcome, there I am.
- A Course in Miracles

This passage, from the text, continues:

I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. To the ego, sin means death, and so atonement is achieved through murder. Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed instead of you. Yet would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? Mine was of no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of salvation, but not its Source. No one can die for anyone, and death does not atone for sin. But you can live to show it is not real. The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain to fill your meagre store and make your life complete. This is completion as the ego sees it. For guilt creeps in where happiness has been removed, and substitutes for it. Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt, because it goes beyond the body.
- A Course in Miracles

If the three paragraphs are too long, and certainly they are best used in the context of grace within a gathering of fellow Course students, the single third paragraph may do quite well:

Love, too, would set a feast before you, on a table covered with a spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden where no sound but singing and a softly joyous whispering is ever heard. This is a feast that honors your holy relationship, and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored guest. And, in a holy instant, grace is said by everyone together, as they join in gentleness before the table of communion. And I will join you there, as long ago I promised and promise still. For in your new relationship am I made welcome. And where I am made welcome, there I am.
- A Course in Miracles

Update, 2009 - Check back the day before Thanksgiving for a Thanksgiving Grace reading on the ACIM Speaks podcast.

Thanksgiving Angel was looking for me

I was returning home one Thanksgiving evening, and as I was about to enter my apartment building, a man was passing by, walking at exactly that juncture. He stopped and offered me the Thanksgiving leftovers he was carrying. I did not need them, but he said he had no place to keep them. He had just come from an AA meeting. It was his first year, first Thanksgiving in AA and he was very happy. I accepted the food from him and invited him to my apartment. We became friends. His name was Nick.