Our American friends celebrated Thanksgiving this Thursday. It’s a huge deal there and the occasion for getting together as family and friends. Here in the UK we don’t, of course, have a day specially set aside for thanksgiving. Perhaps this is a shame, as saying thankyou is such an important part of being human.

This Sunday we start a new year in the Christian calendar. Advent is essentially a time for looking forward – to Christmas in particular, but also to look forward in general, and to do so with hope in our hearts as Christian believers. But before we focus on where we are going to, a little pause to reflect on where we have come from. And what a lot we have to think about in our recent journeys!

Please join me in giving thanks for the past year, whatever it may have held. Join poet Malcolm Guite in this thoughtful sonnet written for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving starts with thanks for mere survival, Just to have made it through another year
With everyone still breathing. But we share
So much beyond the outer roads we travel;

Our interweavings on a deeper level,
The modes of life embodied souls can share, The unguessed blessings of our being here, The warp and weft that no one can unravel.

So I give thanks for our deep coinherence Inwoven in the web of God’s own grace, Pulling us through the grave and gate of death. I thank him for the truth behind appearance,

I thank him for his light in every face,
I thank him for you all, with every breath.