Today’s feast day ends our liturgical year, and this year it opens the week of our U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Both feasts are the kind that pull us out of ourselves and our day-to-day concerns. In the opening prayer for this solemnity, we pray “that the whole creation … may render your majesty service and ceaselessly proclaim your praise.” That “whole creation” we know from science is already 14.6 billion years old and is a universe still expanding. We meditate on Christ whose kingdom is “not of this world” but more than this world, the universe. We meditate on Christ who will be with us until “the end of time,” billions of years from now. We meditate on a Christ who in Jesus is revealed to be present in this universe, injecting it with sacrificial love, thus creatively transforming history and reconciling everything with the Father, and therefore bringing the universe into the fullness of beauty and harmony of which it is capable. For us U.S. people, as we step back from present time and look at our country’s history, flawed though it is, we can see even in our lifetime that things have changed for the better. When we look at our own lives, our personal history, we can see with gratitude how something greater than ourselves has been at work, and we give thanks. And we rededicate ourselves to our own roles as participants with the Christ in helping to do this transforming work.
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia