Dear SVdP staff and volunteers,
Thanksgiving Day is my favorite day of the year. Its brand is family and togetherness, and its flavor is a hearty and plentiful feast – harvested from the year’s seed, soil, weather, and labor. It’s the one day of the year when it seems that everyone is invited to a dinner party, whether with family and friends, or with strangers at a community center or place of worship. As awesome as all that is, my favorite part is “the Why.”
Why give thanks? Pope Francis writes of gratitude as “a unique human response worthy of the immense Gift of God. A heartrending gratitude which, beginning from the contemplation of that Child swaddled and laid in a manger, extends to everything and to everyone, to the entire world. It is a ‘gratefulness’ which reflects the Grace; it comes not from the ‘we’ but from him; it comes not from the ‘I’ but from God; and it engages the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. In this atmosphere created by the Holy Spirit, we raise to God the thanksgiving for the year that is coming to an end, acknowledging that all good is his gift.”
God is the Why for Thanksgiving, and in fact, the Why for everything we do at St. Vincent de Paul. When our gratitude is directed to God, we all benefit: our guests, our residents, our neighbors, our families, and ourselves. All that we are and all that we have are gifts from God, and our job is to respond with gratitude. We show that gratitude by examining those gifts, accounting for them, and lovingly sharing them with each other as God calls each of us to do – through our unique and unrepeatable likeness of him.
Thanks to you and your work this year, we fed, clothed, and sheltered thousands of men, women, and children who had nowhere else to turn. Countless times you provided a listening ear, a patient conversation, and a tender heart. Thank you!
I’m especially grateful for all of you working holidays this year, in order to serve our homeless guests and residents of our housing ministries. Thanks for the patience and kind regard you witness to them while you are apart from your friends and family; that is a gift beyond measure.
After the day’s festivities, and as the beauty of autumn fades and the still of winter settles in, I invite you to bring thanksgiving to mind each day: Gratitude is the attitude that makes our greatest expressions of love possible.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Yours in Christ,
Michael
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Michael E. Vanderburgh
Executive Director
Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Dayton
124 W Apple St
Dayton OH 45402
(513) 257-6266 mobile