If we were further to ask after God’s specific purpose in creating a creature who knows light as light and can have dealings with God, our question would land us, on this Sunday before the Thursday of our Thanksgivings, at another beginning, the beginning of the Westminster Catechism. There we are told of God’s purpose in making us: we are the creature who may glorify God and enjoy God forever. According to our theologian, this should not be difficult, for after God beheld creation finished and good, “There was no place for grievance or complaint in face of this totality (for who could make it? Who could be the critic?), but only for the praise and thanksgiving of all creatures in heaven and on earth.”

Those of us who know light as light and can have dealings with God, of course, do find room for grievance and complaint. We have no difficulty becoming creation’s critics in the face of this world in love with darkness or bowed down at the mercy of nature’s whim. The consequences are deadening: “Suddenly,” notes Marilyn Robinson, “it seems there are too few uses for words like humor, pleasure, and charm; courage, dignity and graciousness, learnedness, fair-mindedness, openhandedness; loyalty, respect and good faith. What bargain did we make?” she asks. “What could have appeared for a moment to compensate us for the loss of these things? Perhaps,” she goes on, “I presume in saying they are lost. But if they were not, surely they would demand time and occasion—time because every one is an art or a discipline, and occasion because not one of them exists except as behavior.”

Perhaps that is why, in a feeble attempt to compensate, we designate a day, declare an occasion—as a nation, as a culture--wherein we collectively call a halt to our murmuring in the wilderness, in order that the One who has afforded us our brief pilgrimage might be thanked.

Ancient Israel paused not annually, but weekly for such thanksgiving. The day was called “Sabbath,” which means, literally, “rest.” On one wholly human hand, the rest is from daily work, from the tasks at hand, from the labor that may or may not satisfy. Yet as our theologian says of the Lord God’s rest on the seventh day, of which ours is but a pale reflection, “[God] was neither tired of His previous work nor concerned about His future work.” Rather, “free from all activity, resting now that His work was finished,” God rejoiced that it was so good.

We were made for the Sabbath not that we might catch our collective breath; but that in a regular discipline of corporate gratitude [in our rejoicing together that God’s creation is good, very good] we might catch a glimpse, notice, behold the goodness of God’s gift day by day. We are invited, says our theologian, to participate in God’s rest and, if we accept the invitation, to behold creation as God beholds, to find ourselves [literally] “left wholly and utterly with the grace of God,” with the gift of it all!

Unfortunately, we seem to have forgotten how to behold! We understand utility, we glorify productivity, we amplify noise, we stimulate every sensation. But behold? We can barely remember the time or occasion we last beheld…what?: a child’s deep breath at three in the morning…dew on a single blade of grass…the smell of a sunrise…the last ember out?

If we turn here for help from the theologian, mostly we find word of God’s goodness parsed into some logical system. No, here we need the artist, the poet, the musician, even the architect: the creators with a small “c,” whose seeing and hearing and ordering of the space and time and sounds of God’s creative hand beckons us to see and hear and touch and taste not first as critics, but as God’s grateful, astounded, awe-struck and silenced children.

Biblically, the psalmists are God’s poets and musicians, literally leaping with their thanksgivings across the rocky hills of Palestine. They help us first and most. No doubt John Donne would never have ventured language as he did without their cadence fresh in his ear [Salute the last and everlasting day,/Joy at the uprising of this Sun, and Son,/Yet whose just ears, or tribulation/Have purely washed or burnt your drossy clay]; nor would Gerard Manley Hopkins have noticed the world charged with the grandeur of God [And for all this, nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things]; nor without the psalmist would W. H. Auden have punctuated our Time Being with late word of Him who is the Life [Love Him in the World of the Flesh;/And at your marriage al its occasions shall dance for joy].

Though it is a less weighty poet’s words I offer as help for this Thursday next, when around the table graced by heads unaccustomed to bowing twice in one week, we attempt our thanksgivings. The poet is Mary Oliver and the poem is simply entitled Gratitude. Its text asks eight questions, questions I imagine the Lord God asking us, as we stand poised to receive the promised gift of eternal life…questions we would do well to entertain before that morn, lest we miss the Sabbaths made for us until then. These questions prompt my thanksgiving. Listen.

What did you notice? What did you hear? What did you admire? What astounded you? What would you like to see again? What was most tender? What was most wonderful? What did you think was happening? These questions call us to attention before a creation good beyond our deserving. They invite us to look and listen and remember and cherish and delight and inhabit the depth of things. They address us as the only creatures left to wander the planet wholly and utterly aware that we wonder with the grace of God, before the gift undeserved.

Curiously, what Oliver notices and hears and admires, what astonishes her and causes her to look again, coincides with all that God bid the unnamed man and woman behold in the first of Genesis and coincides with what Jesus bid the crowd behold on the Mount: every plant yielding seed, every beast of the earth and everything that creeps on the earth. The lilies of the field, the birds of the air: behold them for they neither toil nor reap. Rest with me, quit your anxieties, says the Lord God in the Garden and Jesus Christ in these latter days, and behold it is good, very good.

So Oliver asks herself, What did you notice?, and turns our mind’s eye to see “The dew-snail;/the low-flying sparrow;/the bat, on the wind, in the dark;/big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance/…the uproar of mice in the empty house/the tin music of the cricket’s body;/the blouse of the goldenrod.” This demands time and occasion to notice.

Then, What did you hear? “The thrush greeting the morning;/the little bluebirds in their hot box;/the salty talk of the wren,/then the deep cup of the hour of silence.” What astonished you? The swallows making their dip and turn over the water. What would you like to see again? My dog; her energy and exuberance, her willingness, her language beyond the nimbleness of tongue, her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness, her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.”

These questions offer themselves as tutor to our thanksgivings. What if, around the table heavy laden, we paused, knowing light as light and in preparation for having dealings with God, and asked one another these questions…or asked them of ourselves before alone we sipped from the deep cup of the hour of silence? “Help us,” we have prayed before, as we have marked the end of another’s life, help us who are still alive and breathing, “to walk, amid the things of this earth, with eyes wide open to the beauty and the glory of the eternal.” Help us to take the time, to create the occasion, to accept the invitation that finds us left wholly and utterly with the grace of God. Help us to glorify you, O God, and enjoy you forever.

When asked by the religion editor of the New York Times what made the occasion of Thanksgiving day important, Miroslav Volf, who spoke to us many years ago and now teaches theology at Yale Divinity School, replied that there were two important features of his family’s celebration. One is “’the presence of strangers,’ in his case often students from Croatia (his homeland) and Serbia. The other is his brother-in-law’s prayer.

“”He has a rare ability,” said Miroslav, “to make the ordinary sit comfortably within the sacred space of a ritual…. After he has said amen, all around the table—those of us who are deeply religious and others who think, ‘The less religion the better’—have seen the ordinary shimmer a bit with transcendence, a sign that what surrounds us is neither just there nor somehow owed to us, but a gift from on high.’”

May this Thursday next be for you and yours a Sabbath, a day of rest, an occasion set aside to behold creation as God beholds, to be left wholly and utterly with the grace of God, to see the ordinary shimmer a bit with transcendence, to give thanks that, in Him who bid us behold the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, we have been given a sign of grace made flesh: that what surrounds us is neither just there nor somehow owed us, but a gift from on high. Thanks be to God.