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"Reading for Thanksgiving Service: THANKS BE"

“Thanks be” is a “yes saying” despite cracking insights into emptiness at the center –
And the manifest elegant terror with which people destroy themselves and others.
Is it, then, a saying, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him?”
Yes and No (speaking of the universe), depending upon how we read the next line:
“BUT I will maintain mine own ways before him.”

Thanks be for what is?
      No, but for some of it, and for what it yet may be,
      And for me too, and you, and all our children growing
         in the light of care and the safe darkness of nightly sleep.

Thanks be!
      Thanks be for the best of visits over holiday cranberry conversation
            and for what we learned in all others …
      And thanks be, for some of us, 
         that our much too much indulgence and Thanksgiving stuffing is over!
      And for small surprised – for a two-year old boy who with fatherly kidding is asked,
          “You don’t cry, do you?” answers, “I’m a baby.” (as if that should settle it).
          “Do babies cry?”
          “Yes, they do it,” he says, matter of factly, and laughs to build another house of blocks. 
      Babyhood is gone with that lesson learned so well.

Thanks now, as in all times of needs (as all times are), 
      For the integrity of a few before some lack in the many -
      For the courage of those who risk when the risk is right …
O, Yes, and thanks for Prometheus 
         who stole the fire 
         and all men 
         who take secrets 
         from Nature 
         for warmth and cure …
      For all who will not let humankind die of the cold – nor in the inferno – 
         but find some way of moderation.
      Only moderate and gentle souls then?
      Are there no hot coal souls to love?
      Yes, some of them too, for who would prevent the love of Zorba,
      or stop dead the finger-tip living body-minds in the moment of their expansion,
      and have we not some feeling for archy’s moth
      who would burn himself out in one glorious candle blaze and falling star wonder?
Do we pity the adventurers or wish we could follow after?

Glory, praise, and thanks be to be Almighty – no names –
      Do not let us turn it off in the confusion of ancient words …
      BUT BE THANKFUL! – That we can understand.

Thanks be for a friend who comes through,
      and for the lives of those who gave and are gone;
      For quiet peaceful hearts, and more …
      For bells and colors and music-box sweetness,
      And all the blare of the mind blown Yea of too much sound never yet enough!
      For warm feet in the bed on a cold night,
      And someone who remembers your name;
      For return of something lost, and finding something to give.
For skin-deep beauty too, be thanks, for who shall hate beauty_
      And for beauty of personality, all the more thanks, that the latter is the greater.

Oh praise and thanks for little things –
      for letters we looked for and they came –
      for a good night’s sleep –
      for the ringing telephone at the right time,
         and its silence a good bit of the time.
Thanks for the smallest of favors where there have been none,
      and for giving them away because we want to.

Thanks!

Something we planned went well and we discovered “we knew we could do it all along.”

And thanks, especially, for those who give thanks when they've done something well,
         instead of feeling dissatisfaction and worry for the future even in their moment of triumph.

Oh, thanks for rain, and sun, and odd shaped trees,
         for plants to share our homes with,
         and pets who know us better than we know ourselves …
         for coffee beans and those, who pick them,
         and all the tea in China and America and RULE BRITANNIA for its good cup.

And more than any of these, thanks be for
         understanding, accepting, astonishing, forgiving, tried and trying love, by this and any other name,
         response and responsible love of those who call out our best –
            and we theirs.

Thanks be for those who give us “The facts,” 
   and those who give of themselves
   and for all who bring the two together.

We are grateful …
         Happy grace and grateful cheer for every Thanksgiving now and in July –
         every Christmas in April,
         for spring in the colder-than-stone winter;
       
         For every topsy-turvy advent of joy –
         and every discipline of whole-being health,
         even down to the doors of shock and recognition which open us to ourselves.

And thanks for bananas.
         For slipping up on skin of tumble-down false dignity –
            to human dignity,             
         And all this for so little investment.

Thank YOU-IT-HE-SHE-AND ALL
      for eyes that shake hands,
         ears of the mind hearing more than all outdoors;
      for the crazy touch of sanity in the laugh that wasn’t there –
         yet it was – a laughing with, not at.

And thanks to all the goodness
      for thinking!
      and for making hard decisions without having to get too upset about them.

THANK YOU IS A SOMETIME THING,
            but that is not the fault of gratitude.
      Sometime when all the mystery of life and death –
      of loving and unloving, and loving the unloving
      almost make it to consciousness;
When sorrow deeper than hurting wakes up in the strange new presence of peace:
Sometime when all – some all – which all? The All sweeps through the spaces 
      between our naked-thought-bodies
      and their covered-up once upon a time idea and bloodless trappings,
Let us begin again,
      Give again,
      Forgive again,
         and catch your yearning in its flight.
      For the hope of all sakes alive and well.
         Thanks been, thanks be, thanks dwell. 

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jake wrote

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