Given that this is only my third blog entry, I hate to reference material I’ve already written.  However, as we approach this Thanksgiving weekend, I can’t help but go back to the captivating Alexander Schmemann and his reflections on how we relate to the world God has given us.  One of Fr. Schmemann’s repeated points is that our biggest problem as the human race is a “non Eucharistic life in a non Eucharistic world.”

What in the world does that mean?  And what in the world does it have to do with Thanksgiving weekend?

Last Sunday we had an instructed Eucharist.  One of the many informative tidbits I did not get around to fitting into the service was the origin of the word “Eucharist” itself.  The term comes from the Greek for “giving thanks.”  So, in a “Eucharistic" worship service what we are primarily doing is giving thanks to God for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In the Eucharist, our whole being is (or ought to be) oriented towards God in praise and thankfulness.

The Eucharist is also the central activity that we perform as a Christian community, and a “Eucharistic” mentality should therefore permeate our whole lives as Christians.  When Fr. Schmemann says that we live a “non Eucharistic” life, he means that we have lost that sense of living our lives in a continual, natural state of thankfulness to God.

We might compare the “Eucharistic” mentality which sees the world gift from God to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings--the simple characters who delight in the natural world around them.

Tragically, I think our "Non-Eucharistic" attitude more often resembles that of the evil wizard Saruman, who rips trees up by their roots and ravages the natural world in order to build a great army for the forces of darkness.

Like Tolkien's bad guys, we have lost the ability to see the world as God’s gift to us.  Instead we see the world as dead, raw material which we can plunder for our own needs.

As we sit down to our bounteous meals this weekend and give thanks for all the privilege and comfort we enjoy in North America, it might be worth pondering how we can translate that sense of thanksgiving into our natural state of being.  A state where we are not just thankful for what we can "get" for ourselves out of God's creation, but a state where we a see creation itself as a profound, bountiful and delightful gift to us.