Thanksgiving Day (2026)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Today the Church invites the faithful to give thanks for the many blessings God our Father has bestowed on us. We also ask Our Lord to grant us generously the material and spiritual favors that we need. In the communion antiphon, we’re told: You have crowned the year with your bounty, the hope of all the ends of the earth.

The Temporas are days the Church sets aside for thanksgiving and petition to God. They traditionally occur after the harvest is taken up. For many, it’s an annual occasion to rest and a favorable time to ask for Our Lord’s help to begin our normal work activities and the interior life afresh.

St. Teresa says we have a great deal to be thankful for and still stand in great need. Expressing gratitude and asking for specific graces are two ways we can daily pray to God our Father. In the first place, we need to recognize the gifts Our Lord has given us. We will not learn how to love if we are not grateful.

The first reading of the Mass further reminds us of the importance of gratitude to God for all His blessings. The Book of Deuteronomy says, “Be careful not to forget the Lord your God. Do not neglect his commandments and decrees and statutes I enjoin on you today. When you have eaten your fill, built and lived in fine houses, increased your herds and flocks, your silver and gold and your property, may you not become haughty of heart and unmindful of the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery in Egypt, guided you through the vast and terrible desert with its serpents and scorpions and parched ground, and brought forth water for you from the flinty rock” (Deut. 8:11–14).

We find Christ in the Gospel constantly giving thanks to God. And He is our model. When raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus exclaims, “Father, I give you thanks that you’ve heard me” (John 11:41). On the occasion of another miracle, Jesus took the loaves and after giving thanks, distributed them and the fishes to those who were reclining. At the institution of the Eucharist, Our Lord gave thanks before blessing the bread of the wine.

In the truest sense, said St. John Paul, we can say that the prayer of the Lord and His entire earthly existence became a revelation of the fundamental truth: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Thanksgiving is the source of all blessings from on high. “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” is the invitation the Church places at the center of the Eucharistic liturgy.

In The Forge, St. Josemaría says nothing is more appropriate than to give thanks to the Lord each day of our lives. We cannot forget. The best way of showing our gratitude to God is by becoming passionately aware that we are His children. Today, we especially recall our divine filiation as we give thanks to God and praise Him.

Our entire life is a gift that we have received from God through no merit of our own. For this reason, our habitual disposition of thanksgiving to God should overflow in acts of thanksgiving throughout the day. We are reminded in the preface of the Mass: “Father, all-powerful and ever-living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We can recall St. Paul’s principal reproach to the pagans as well: “Having known God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:21). We need to be continually thankful to the Lord for the benefits we have received during the past year, some we are aware of, but perhaps even more valuable benefits have come to us without our recognition of them. These graces include rescue from dangers of body and soul, the making of new friends who play a part in our salvation, and even apparent setbacks like sickness or professional failure.

We should enjoy great peace, since we should know that God will draw abundant fruit from circumstances and events that present themselves as unwelcome and are seemingly counterproductive. We later understand these very occasions to be divine caresses. These veiled graces are like the wood that God showed Moses; when he threw it into the sea, the salt water was changed to fresh.

The founder of Opus Dei used to recommend giving thanks to Our Lord for all of his gifts, including those we are unaware of. Possibly one of our greatest embarrassments at the Last Judgment will come from knowing the enormous number of divine gifts that we did not appreciate as such. There may also be our unwarranted resentment of what seemed to be indifference to our prayers. At least then, though finally, but with shame, offer thanks, since we will know the Lord has the goodness not to answer our many foolish requests.

It’s possible, said one writer, that if He had granted our misguided petitions, we would have heard the same reprimand the rich man heard: “Remember, son, in your lifetime you received many good things” (Luke 16:25). How surprised many will be to learn that with more supernatural outlook, they could have understood the providence of God at work in the midst of both good and apparently ill fortune.

Furthermore, our present gratitude is a foretaste of Heaven and Purgatory. After death, we’ll thank God for the times of tribulation He permitted us to undergo during our life. We will perceive in every occasion of suffering the tender affection of a Father who wants His children to be purified and to arrive all the more quickly at His side in glory. In the end, we will thank Him above all because He will have granted us the opportunity for true and fruitful penance.

May we thank the Lord always and everywhere, but especially during Mass, which is the supreme act of thanksgiving. In today’s liturgy, we pray: “We offer you, Father, this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for the gifts you’ve granted us. Help us to recognize them as the benefits we have received from you through no merit of our own.”

Since we’re in need of a great deal of assistance in order to advance, we can join constant petition to our continual thanksgiving. Although Our Lord grants us many graces without our asking for them, He permits other graces to come to us in proportion to the fervor of our prayer. Since we don’t know the measure of petition His unfathomable providence expects from us, it’s necessary to keep praying with intensity. We’re told in St. Luke we must pray and not lose heart (cf. Luke 18:1).

In the Gospel of today’s Mass, Our Lord grants us the full assurance that everything we ask for that is in our best interests will be granted. God Himself gives His word: “Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened” (Matt. 7:7–8).

There’s another reason to persevere in prayer: the more we petition Christ, the more our friendship with God matures. In human affairs, it’s necessary to ask a powerful person a favor; we seek a bond of union, an opportune moment, perhaps when the one approached is in a good mood, before making our request. With the Lord, however, we find Him ever ready to hear us.

“What man is there among you who, if his son asks him for a loaf, will hand him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will hand him a serpent? Therefore, if you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:9–11).

We have every reason to approach our Father God with confidence, no matter what hour of the day it may be. Nothing should be able to diminish our faith in God’s almighty power.

What can we request? “Who has nothing to ask for? Lord, that sickness. Lord, this moodiness. Lord, that humiliation. I don’t know how to bear it for love of you.” We desire good things, including happiness and joy for people at home. Besides, there is the lot of those who hunger and thirst for bread and justice, which weighs down our hearts. Furthermore, we can remember individuals who experience the bitterness of loneliness. At the end of their days, they receive no affectionate glance or any helping gesture.

St. Josemaría says, “The greatest misfortune is sin. Sin is the only evil we want to remedy through our petition, however, since it makes us suffer most is sin. Here there is a flight from God and the danger of souls being lost for eternity.”

The Church constantly points out that our prayers will reach God’s presence more quickly through the mediation of Our Lady, the Mother of God and our Mother. For this reason, she perennially recommends the Rosary, that efficacious prayer of petition. It does so in a special way during the month of October. Pope Pius XI says, “Don’t forget to give importance to spreading devotion to the Rosary. It’s very dear to Our Lady and is so highly recommended by the Roman Pontiffs. It’s a fine way for the faithful to fulfill the command of the Divine Master: Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it shall be opened to you.”

May we not overlook this advice. Our acts of thanksgiving should try to be a norm of our lives. Chesterton says, “When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

We should try to see the hand of God in everything. St. Paul says, “What have you that you have not received?” (1 Cor. 4:7). And the Psalm asks the question, “What shall I give back to God for all that He has given to me?” (Ps. 116:12).

In the preface of weekdays, we pray: “We do well always and everywhere to give you thanks. You have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift. Our prayer of thanksgiving adds nothing to your greatness but makes us grow in grace.”

In the first Eucharistic prayer, we say, “We come to you, Father, with praise and thanksgiving.” In the second Eucharistic prayer, it says, “We thank you for counting us worthy to stand in your presence and serve you.” In the third Eucharistic prayer, it says, “We offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice. All creation rightly gives you praise.” And in the fourth Eucharistic prayer: “Father, we acknowledge your greatness. All your actions show your wisdom and love.”

Everything is a gift, including the crosses that God may send us. We should try to have a desire to lead a lifetime of thanksgiving. We could also try to thank God for the special gifts He’s given us that we may not think about very frequently: our hearing, our sight, our limbs. There may come a time when we have problems in those aspects of our human body and we realize maybe the decades that God has given us those things.

I heard an elderly priest in his 80s once who said that he had to have some cataract operations, and the doctor told him that he wouldn’t be able to see for two or three days. And he was wondering, “What would I do for two or three days?” And he said, “I suddenly realized, after almost 50 years of being a priest, how much we priests need our eyes to say Mass, to read our breviary, to give a class.” He said the following morning was about the man born blind. He felt the Holy Spirit was hitting him in the teeth with a baseball bat. “Here I have given you 80-plus years of sight. You’re not going to be able to see for three days and you’re all worried about it.”

Every day we can fill our day with wonderful hymns of thanksgiving to God for the food we eat, for the health we enjoy. Humble souls are grateful souls because they realize that everything is a gift; everything is on loan.

Our thanksgiving after Mass each day can be a special time to thank God for our Christian vocation. At times, we can thank God for the things we don’t have, which perhaps it’s not the will of God that we would have those things. It’s good sometimes we thank God without asking for anything. Thank Him for the crosses, the contradictions, the misunderstandings, the miscommunications, the providential injustices.

It can be easy to be thankful for the good things. The things we find more difficult may be more difficult to thank Him for. We can thank Him also for small things, for bed sheets. When I came to Kenya, there was a priest, parish priest in Singapore who had a parishioner who was the manager of a five-star hotel. They were changing the bed sheets. The manager asked this parish priest if he had any use for a thousand bed sheets. He didn’t, but he knew I had moved to Kenya. The parish priest contacted me, he sent me a thousand bed sheets. We distributed them to many people.

We kept certain bed sheets for a home for street kids that we had—maybe 20 or 30 of them—in a certain area of Nairobi. After a few days or weeks, I asked one of these kids, “So, how do you find the bed sheets?” Very aware that this kid probably never had bed sheets in his life. And the kid said, “Well, they’re okay,” he said, “But I was wondering if the next time, if they could be black.” And I was wondering why would you want black bed sheets? And he said, “So they don’t show the dirt.” Perfectly normal male psychology. I was thinking we could ask the manager of that five-star hotel in Singapore if he wouldn’t mind changing all his bed sheets to black; we could start a whole new culture of hospitality. So if you go to some hotel and you find there are black bed sheets, well, you know where the idea came from.

We can thank God for the small things that we experience every day that perhaps we take for granted: the bed we have to lie down on, the roof over our heads. We’re told in Scripture, “If you knew the gift of God” (John 4:10). A spirit of gratitude can turn a negative into a positive. It’s very difficult to be grateful and not to be happy.

We can be thankful for our mistakes because they teach us valuable lessons. We can be thankful when we’re tired and weary because maybe it means that we’ve made a difference. We can be thankful for our limitations because those limitations give us opportunities for improvement. We can be thankful for each new challenge because it will build up our strength and character. We can be thankful for the fact that we don’t already have everything we desire; if we did, we’d have nothing to look forward to. We can be thankful when we don’t know something because we realize it gives us the opportunity to learn.

We’re told in The Way: “Give thanks often to Jesus, for through Him, with Him, and in Him, you’re able to call yourself a child of God.” As popular wisdom asserts, gratitude is proper to those who are well-bred. Giving thanks for favors, humbly and without affectation, is a sign of nobility, a true bond of union among men. The natural order itself, affirms St. Thomas, requires that whoever has received a favor should respond with gratitude to his beneficiary.

Our Lord was moved by thankfulness, and the selfish indifference with which some people received His favors hurt Him. Ten lepers came to meet Him, asking to be cured, and as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at Our Lord’s feet giving Him thanks. Jesus said sorrowfully, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” (Luke 17:17).

Our Lord missed the gratitude of those nine. When He rewards that person’s gratitude with a much greater gift: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well” (Luke 17:19). To the person who humbly recognizes his debt and is grateful for his benefits, God grants new graces. St. Augustine teaches: “With good reason is he promised much more. For whoever is faithful in little, with perfect right will be put in charge of much. Just as the one who is ungrateful for what he has already received becomes unworthy of new favors.”

If we do a favor for a person and he thanks us, we’re much more inclined to continue helping him. In our prayer, we can thank Our Lord for our Baptism, a totally undeserved gift, and to rejoice in the countless good things that He has so lavishly bestowed upon us. Thanksgiving is the very first emotion that should be born in us in response to our Baptism. The second is joy. We should never think of our Baptism without deep feelings of interior gratitude. St. Leo the Great says, “Thanks to the Sacrament of Baptism, you have been turned into a temple of the Holy Spirit.”

One day, when we are in God’s presence eternally, we will comprehend with full clarity not only that we owe our existence to Him, but our lives were full of His care, His graces, and His benefits, more numerous than the sands of the sea. We will realize that we have only reason to be thankful to God and to others. Only when faith is dead can a person be unaware of those benefits and this present obligation.

In The Way, St. Josemaría says, “Get used to lifting your heart to God in acts of thanksgiving many times a day. Because he gives you this and that. Because you have been despised. Because you haven’t what you need, or because you have. Because he made his Mother so beautiful, his Mother who is also your Mother. Because he created the sun and the moon and this animal and that plant. Because he made that man eloquent and you he left tongue-tied. Thank him for everything, because everything is good.”

In both the human and supernatural realms, our reasons for thanksgiving are great. We can’t count the movements of the Holy Spirit in our soul, the graces we’ve received in the Sacrament of Penance and in Holy Communion, the times when our guardian angel has protected us, the merit gained through the offering of our work and hardships for others, and the times when others have helped us.

It doesn’t matter if we only perceive a small part of this. We can give thanks to God for all the benefits we’ve received over the years. Our Lord taught us how to be thankful for even the least of favors: “Whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward” (Matt. 10:42). The Samaritan who returned to thank Our Lord went away with an even greater gift: faith and Our Lord’s friendship.

Our Lord expects us to go and say to Him many times each day, “Thank you, Lord.” Everyone loves to be thanked. When we’re grateful to others, we remember their favor affectionately, no matter how small it may be, and we wish to repay it in some form. Many times we can only say something like “thank you.” The joy shown in such a gesture contains our thanks. Our whole day can be filled with acts of service and favors for those around us. It costs little to show our gratitude, and it does so much good by creating a better atmosphere, improving relationships, and making charity easier to practice.

We must seek new strength with which to serve Him and endeavor not to be ungrateful, for that’s the condition on which the Lord bestows His jewels. Unless we make good use of His treasures and of the high estate to which He brings us, He will take these treasures back from us. We shall be poorer than before, and His Majesty will give the jewels to someone else who can display them to advantage and to his own profit and that of others. For how can a man unaware that he is rich make good use of his riches and spend them liberally? It is impossible.

Taking our nature into consideration, that anyone who fails to realize that he is favored by God should have the courage necessary for doing great things. For we are so miserable and so much attracted by earthly things that only one who realizes that he holds some earnest of the joys of the next world will succeed in thoroughly abhorring and completely detaching himself from the things of this earth.

We can be thanking God for the great mercy He has shown us and for the innumerable and often unseen benefits He confers on each one of us. Let us ask Our Lady to help us to grow in that spirit of appreciation and thanksgiving, so that spirit of thanksgiving may be present even in our breathing, as a manifestation of how much we appreciate all the great things that God has given to us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW