Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Thanksgiving Blessings by the Pound

In this issue, we turned over the better part of four pages of The Messenger to young people in the diocese and asked them to share with us their blessings as we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving. We were overwhelmed with the response: Almost 1,000 replies were mailed, emailed or dropped off at our office. They came in the form of drawings, poems and paragraphs.

Parents should be happy to know that they were named as blessings in almost every youngster’s list. Sometimes they didn’t take top billing which was, more often than not, given to a pet. I was surprised to see the number of pets some of the young folks had. (I don’t know why it surprised me since we had two dogs, two parakeets, a number of cats and an aquarium of assorted fish in our household.)

It was also a pleasant surprise to see some of the advanced writing skills of our young people both in our Catholic schools and our religious education programs. Sometimes we hear reports of technology “dumbing down” young people, and to a certain degree, technology can take over your life if you permit it, but some of these folks not only grasped the English language but used it effectively. (Here’s a chance for teachers to pat themselves on the back.)
Because we fell into the “too cute” trap a number of times, we left the spelling of the younger children alone. One example: A child talked about being thankful for teachers, and if something happened a “supper visser” — read that as supervisor — would be called. Again, the way the younger children spoke of their blessings not only gave us a smile but also spoke of the insight children have about their world.

They know they are blessed with homes, food, parents, grandparents and other relatives and much more of everything than less fortunate children have. Often, if they attend a Catholic school, they counted this as a blessing as well. These are places where they and their teachers can speak openly about their faith, they said.

We had no idea what kind of response we would receive when we sent out our email inviting schools and parishes to send in their comments. Had we known we would be reading almost 1,000 entries, we may have paused ever so slightly about whether we wanted to do this — not really. We wanted to know what our young people think, what and who they see as blessings. We were not disappointed. That’s the trick though, to have enough faith and hope to try something like this, not knowing what would happen and yet determined to take a chance. Isn’t that what hope is?
We never tire of trying to find a way to engage our readers, to invite them into the conversation with us about their faith, their hopes, their dreams and how the church impacts their lives as well as ours. This Thanksgiving we are thankful that so many young people shared their blessings with us.