By Tom Maguire
Associate editor
Thankfulness is not just recommended, “it’s our destiny,” Bishop Douglas J. Lucia told the congregation at the Nov. 22 pre-Thanksgiving Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Syracuse.
Thanksgiving, he said, “has the simplicity of a family gathering together for a meal. But it is rooted in what I consider to be one of life’s important lessons: the value of thankfulness.”
He added: “As we say in the Mass: It is right and just for us to give God thanks and praise.” The bishop also noted that the word “Eucharist” is from the Greek word for thanksgiving.
Bishop Lucia told the story of a teacher who asked her impoverished first graders to draw a picture of something they were thankful for. A boy drew a hand and classmates thought it represented the hand of God or the hand of a farmer. The teacher asked the boy whose hand it was. “‘Why it’s your hand, Teacher,’” the boy said. Then the teacher recalled that frequently at recess she had taken the boy by the hand. “She did it with many of the other children and never thought much about it,” but the boy did, the bishop said.
The Mass was also for the Chancery campus, and one of the petitions expressed the wish that the employees be “mindful of the gifts and talents with which God has blessed us and use them in humble service.”
