“Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
I begin with the simple things of my days:
Fresh air to breathe,
Cool water to drink,
The taste of food,
The protection of houses and clothes,
The comforts of home.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:
My mother’s arms,
The strength of my father
The playmates of my childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives
Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies
And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;
The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the
Eye with its reminder that life is good.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:
The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;
The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I
Feared the step before me in darkness;
The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest
And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;
The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open
Page when my decision hung in the balance.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:
The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,
Without whom my own life would have no meaning;
The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;
The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp
And whose words would only find fulfillment
In the years which they would never see;
The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,
The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;
The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,
Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;
The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream
Could inspire and God could command.
For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment
To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:
The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,
My desires, my gifts;
The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence
That I have never done my best, I have never dared
To reach for the highest;

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind
Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the
inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the
children of God as the waters cover the sea.

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,
I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,
Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.”

Howard Thurman (1899 – 1981)

“All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”

Dr Martin Luther King Jr, born on this day in 1929

“Love is the only thing that increases twofold every time it is shared.”

Albert Schweitzer, born on this day in 1875

“Oceans embrace a continent.
Space welcomes the sun.
Embrace yourself this generously.

Form your arms into a circle
And cherish the arising of serenity.

Attend the birth of something new.
Thoughts dissolve into peace.
As you become the One who embraces All.”

Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras (translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra)

“We are finite and infinite at the same time. We are like waves in the ocean; the wave is the ocean and yet not the ocean. There is not any part of the wave of which you cannot say, “It is the ocean.” The name “ocean” applies to the wave and equally to every other part of the ocean, and yet it is separate from the ocean. So in this infinite ocean of existence we are like wavelets. At the same time, when we want really to grasp ourselves, we cannot — we have become the infinite.”

Swami Vivekananda, born on this day in 1863

“Know first who you are and what you are capable of…
We are always learning, always growing. It is right to accept challenges. This is when we progress to the next level of intellectual, physical, or moral development. Still, do not deceive yourself: if you try to be something or someone you are not, you belittle your true self and end up not developing in those areas that you would have excelled in quite naturally. Within the divine order we each have our own special calling. Listen to yours, and follow it faithfully.”

Epictetus (55 – 135 CE), Greek Stoic philosopher

The Sacredness of Ordinary Life by Father Daniel O’Leary,

“God is always incarnate,
always just below the surface
of our daily lives.

Every moment of every authentic experience
carries the felt message for us
of divine grace.

God is the energy
that sustains all our human happenings
and emotions.

To become more aware of God’s earthy,
hidden dynamicall around us,
we need to
Look more intensely,
Think more imaginatively,
See more deeply,
Feel more attentively,
Love more freely.

Ordinary life
is very sacred indeed.”

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”

Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, born on this day in 1908

“To be humane, we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise, ingenious and modest statement ‘I do not know’.”

Galileo Galilei, who discovered Io, Europa and Ganymede, moons of Jupiter, on this day in 1610

For Those Who Have Far to Travel: An Epiphany Blessing by Jan Richardson,

“If you could see the journey whole,
you might never undertake it,
might never dare the first step that propels you
from the place you have known
toward the place you know not.
Call it one of the mercies of the road:
that we see it only by stages as it opens before us,
as it comes into our keeping,
step by single step.
There is nothing for it but to go,
and by our going take the vows the pilgrim takes:
to be faithful to the next step;
to rely on more than the map;
to heed the signposts of intuition and dream;
to follow the star that only you will recognize;
to keep an open eye
for the wonders that attend the path;
to press on beyond distractions,
beyond fatigue,
beyond what would tempt you from the way.
There are vows that only you will know:
the secret promises for your particular path
and the new ones you will need to make
when the road is revealed
by turns you could not have foreseen.
Keep them, break them, make them again;
each promise becomes part of the path,
each choice creates the road that will take you
to the place where at last you will kneel
to offer the gift most needed—
the gift that only you can give—
before turning to go home by another way.”