The Thanksgiving for Gives and Takes (Blessed be!)

Thankfulness at a moment of loss seems odd. Am I glad for death, pain, or suffering?

No.

These things exist, because we and the devils have chosen badly. As a result, the cosmos is not what it should be. In the interconnected cosmos, even one error sets loose ripples, distorts and twists what was so beautiful that even the faintest hint of ugliness, hatred, or evil mars utterly what was and should be.

Thank God, however, that the divine craftsman built well. The joy is fundamental and so even in the despoiling of the cosmos good can come. The cosmos is well engineered and builds toward life. There is hope leading to faith fueled by love that over time takes each ugly error and brings truth. All ugliness is subsumed and made part of beauty, the sour note becoming a crush note in a greater composition.

The great cosmic plan endures and slowly the love takes the death, pain, suffering and gives them meaning. This does not occur immediately, nor does the sinfulness of sin change, but the meaning is changed. God works slowly, because God is gentle. The best news is that our merciful God is all powerful and so nothing is lost that should be found, forgotten that needs recollecting, or dead in the face of God’s life.

I am thankful then for the gifts God gives. Every laugh, all the jollifications, each moment of joy is directly from God. They are what should be and often is. I am thankful for the good work of God in the “taking.” Humanity has done what humanity has done and God will not obliterate the truth of our blood stained record. Instead, Divine Love, perfect holiness, does not hide the truth of our evils, Wounded Knee, Auschwitz, the abortion clinic on the corner, but instead subsumes all we have done in justice.

There will be justice for the victims of Stalin’s gulags, justice for the slaves of antebellum Alabama, justice for the victims of Armenian genocide. Justice was, is, and will be and so there must be a going from this broken world. We must bear our family and friends going hence, because otherwise the good that is coming could not come.

Death is a mercy and a foe. Death is a mercy, because otherwise we would be stuck in this present reality where nothing is so good that it cannot be corrupted. Death is a foe, because death defies the fundamental truth that life conquers. We love life and death, cruel, ugly death, has been turned by the good God into a doorway to life.

Death is swallowed up in life, ugliness turned to a mere contrast to harmonious beauty, and the lies of the world, the flesh, and devils, made to highlight the eternal truth of the cosmos, the spirit, and angels. Glory be! Blessed be! Happy is the person who knows that nothing can stop love. 

Job, a man inflicted by evil, understood. He mourned. He faced evil and yet knew happiness was coming for whosever will:

20Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. 21And he said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return there.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”