A Thanksgiving Homily
Deacon Tracy Jamison, OCDS, PhD
Many people nowadays are concerned about sustainable development, and that fact is encouraging. What is discouraging, however, is that it is very difficult to set reasonable goals for sustainable development and then actually to achieve them. In 2015 the United Nations General Assembly, for example, set seventeen such goals to be achieved by 2030, for peace and prosperity for the nations and the planet, now and into the future. These goals seemed like good goals that any nation ought to be pursuing. All the member nations of the UN signed off on them. The Vatican encouraged all faith communities to support and help achieve them. But here it is ten years later, with only five years to go, and how are we doing? Not very well. The progress report looks very bad indeed.
In order to be achievable, sustainable development goals must be economically sustainable, morally sustainable, and theologically sustainable. Nothing is sustainable without God, including morality, the rule of civil law, and the economy. The founding fathers of our own nation understood that belief in God is essential to the republic. God is the foundation of unity, intelligibility, goodness, beauty, law and order, and justice and peace. In the past, we have possessed and enjoyed these common goods because our nation and culture acknowledged God and gave thanks to God. No purely secular republic has ever sustained such goods.
Without faith in God it is practically impossible to sustain public morality and general respect for the inherent dignity of the human person. George Washington understood that justice in the republic requires that the people maintain faith in God. In Europe, even secularizing philosophers like Immanuel Kant had consistently said the same thing. But now young people for the most part no longer have a firm faith in God, and you can see the effects of the lack of faith all around you. Any nation that is not under God is not indivisible. The future will be difficult. Lawlessness will escalate. Disunity and dissent will generate more violence and more wars.
Christendom is gone, both in Europe and in the United States of America. Secularism has taken over. Benedict XVI predicted that the Church of the future will be small, poor, and purged of its nominal members. He also predicted that the hearts of the lost will once again begin to appreciate the Church when they eventually find themselves miserable, oppressed, and horrified in a totally planned world. Most young people have to learn the hard way the necessity of putting God first in their lives, and they are not naturally inclined to value the unborn and the elderly. The good news is that as society becomes more violent and as life becomes more expendable, people’s hearts become more open to signs from God.
Everyone who denies the existence and goodness of God falls into a contradiction. God alone is necessary and sufficient for happiness. The existence of God is the metaphysical foundation of science as well as religion, and the goodness of God can be known by reason as well as faith. Every citizen of every nation in every age has the inalienable moral right and duty to acknowledge God, to pray to God, and to trust in God. Moral rights and duties are grounded in human reason and human nature as designed and created by God, certainly not in any national consensus or popular majority.
Every republic has a civic moral duty to acknowledge its dependence on God and to give public thanks to God. It need not and should not make laws for the establishment of a state or federal religion, but it must provide for the civic acknowledgment of God as the source of all goodness, authority, and moral law. In our own nation, there was a mutually beneficial cooperation between church and state, not a complete and absolute separation. Secularism has taken Christ out of Christmas and God out of Thanksgiving. Our own founding fathers were not all Christian, but they all believed that the existence and goodness of God can be known by reason alone.
Thanksgiving was the one holiday where our nation did its civic moral duty and publicly gave thanks to God. As the first President of the United States, George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in America, marking November 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God,” and called on Americans to “unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions.” Later, Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving obligatory for all states in 1863 and called upon all citizens “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience to fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
There is no perfect political solution for what ails us. Only God can unify and sustain this nation. If we lose God, we lose everything. God is our only hope for the future of our nation and for the forgiveness of our sins. God is our only hope for true happiness in this life and in the life to come. Let us turn our hearts back to God and continually give thanks to God through Jesus Christ and the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and let us urgently pray for faith in God to be cultivated and sustained in the hearts of the young people of our nation once again, before it is too late.
About Deacon Tracy
Deacon Tracy Jamison was raised in a Christian family as the son of a Scotch-Irish evangelical minister in the Campbellite tradition. As an undergraduate he majored in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Cincinnati Christian University, where his parents had been educated. At this institution he met Joyce, who was completing a degree in Church Music, and after graduation they entered the covenant of Christian marriage in 1988. Through the study of philosophy and the writings of the Early Church Fathers, Tracy was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in 1992. Under the influence of the theological writings of St. John Paul II he began to study the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross and entered formation as a Secular Carmelite of the Teresian Reform. In 1999 he completed the doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, and in 2002 he made his definitive profession as a Secular Carmelite. In 2010 he was ordained as a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Currently he is an associate professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary of the West.
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