Prioritizing What We're Thankful For

Cardinal Dolan submitted a great article to the New York Post reflecting on what really matters as we all begin to take a break for Thanksgiving:

...my prayer this Thursday will be not first one of praise, but of petition. I will ask the Lord to keep us a culture where personal friendship, genuine conversation and family unity can be a high priority. I’ll beg God to keep those values constant in our society.

Why? Because I’m fearful they’re disappearing.

Experts in behavioral sciences and sociology seem to share my apprehension. These scholars write that personal contact — verbal, face-to-face quality conversation and healthy leisure where we simply “spend time” as family or friends — is going the way of the rotary telephone. Now we prefer to text, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — with a personal phone call or letter even becoming quaint, and quality time in each other’s company rare.

And now the days that a classic, civil culture sets aside for such lofty projects as visiting, conversing or sharing a meal together — such as the weekly Sabbath and holidays such as Thanksgiving — are in jeopardy.

The stores, we hear, will open on Thanksgiving. Isn’t that a sign of progress and liberation? Sorry, but no — it’s a sign of a further descent into a highly privatized, impersonal, keep-people-at-a-distance culture, one that values having stuff and doing things over just being with people whom we love, cherish and appreciate.

While a student in Europe, I once spent New Year’s Eve in Holland with two other classmates. We stayed at a simple pensión run by a cheerful elderly couple, and our rate included breakfast and supper. That morning, the owners explained that New Year’s Eve was for the Dutch a solemn, quiet evening with family and friends.

Thus, they explained, the meal in the hotel dining room would not be available, and, they warned, nothing — no restaurant, bar or store — nothing in the city would be open. “This evening is for us,” they said, “like we understand Thanksgiving is for you. Everybody is with family or friends.”

Just as the three of us were about to conclude that we’d have a lonely, boring, hungry evening ahead of us, the couple exclaimed, “So, tonight, you are not customers. You are family. You join us, our children, grandchildren and close friends for supper.”

The three of us were near tears. And that evening of conversation, good food, song and even prayer before the meal was ever-memorable.

Read the whole thing here.