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 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:
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:
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:
- 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:
- 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.








