A Thanksgiving Toast
New York Times: November 25, 2009

Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing 
out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and 
reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it's worth raising a 
glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who've gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful 
for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.

What would our lives look like if they held only what we'd planned? Where would our wisdom or 
patience -- or our hope -- come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving 
table or for the faces we're missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?

It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any 
accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next 
Thanksgiving rolls around, we'll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected 
has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with 
suffering as much as with joy.

That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past 
and celebrate the present and open us to the future.

There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, 
a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what 
life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. 
So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our 
lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.