Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry Newsletter

See Divine Mother blessing us all in Her Love

November Dwapara 312
Dear Ones, November starts the holiday season for so many of us here in the USA and elsewhere. This can be a time of gaiety and joy, but for many people it can bring up an ache in their hearts due to a recent loss, or from one long ago that has never quite healed. Now that our family has also suffered our profound loss, I will share my process on how we hope to move forward through this time. It is my lot to write to you each month, and I hope this process is of some help to all of you in your own loss, or in feeling compassion for those who have also had a profound loss in their lives. I had mentioned to a grief counselor at hospice that I was feeling very apprehensive about the holidays, especially Christmas. It was hard to imagine that special day without Tim and I felt it would accentuate the deep sense of loss in our lives. And Thanksgiving was the last holiday we had together before illness really entered our livesThe counselor said that those who seem to do the best during the holidays are those who face them head on, and have a plan on how they will include the love and memory of the beloved in the day. I had counseled people along those lines myself, in the past, and now I was on the receiving end. You can be guaranteed that you will be thinking of the missing loved one on that day. So do it consciously, so you at least have some control over the direction of it. . Send extra love that day in prayer and meditation, and if the situation allows it, also do it as a family, one way or another. Even if your family is not very meditative, you could have a picture of the departed loved one and have a moment of silence to send him/her love and blessings from your hearts This will bless all involved, and should bring a sense of Gods love and peace. It also helps to review the original meaning of the holidays, to expand the meaning of it beyond your own personal story. The first Thanksgiving was a harvest festival, typical of what they would have had in England. The Pilgrims had lost half of their members that first year. When I think of that, it puts my life in perspective. So what we call the first Thanksgiving was actually a celebration of a successful harvest after a horrendous year of much heartache. So, from this we can derive it is good to find ways to cheer up and party anyway. Only four adult Pilgrim women were left alive for that first Thanksgiving. Imagine their task of cooking that meal (though I am sure they got the older children to help). I picture them cooking and knowing that meal would be a comfort to them all. Holiday has at its root Holy Day, and this can help us keep our focus on God. The Pilgrims did not call this harvest festival a "Thanksgiving," because it was essentially a party, although they did give thanks to God. To them, a Day of Thanksgiving was purely religious. The first recorded religious Day of Thanksgiving was actually held in 1623 in response to a providential rainfall. Thank you all for your service in prayerGod bless you all. Joy to you, Mary Kretzmann

Ananda Healing Prayer Ministry

Every day should be a day of Thanksgiving for all the gifts of Lifefor sunshine, water, and
the luscious fruits and greens which we receive as indirect gifts from the Great Giver. He makes us work so that we may consciously and thankfully deserve to receive His Gifts. The All-Sufficient One does not need the benefit of our thankful hearts, but when we are grateful to the Fountain of all gifts, our attention is concentrated, for our own highest benefit, upon the only Great Source of all supply, which alone can unfailingly, undeceivingly bestow upon us the lasting gifts of wisdom, abundance, and Spiritual treasures without the confinement of any mundane measure. There are millions of people today who are drunk with egotism, who think that they keep themselves alive because they feed themselves with their self-earned magic gold of delusion. They never stop to think that man can neither make a grain of wheat, nor a leaf of green, nor the illusory, glittering, yellow gold, nor the paper and ink of which greenbacks are made; neither can he create first life independently of Godthe life that gives power to the precious green papers. For these people, Thanksgiving Day, although soiled with the blood of unthankful turkeys, is a great day of awakening and of thinking of the most important and the most forgotten Molder of our Destiny. People, drunk with delusions, eat meat almost every day, and at the same time forget the Savior who saves them from all sorrows. It doesnt matter how many turkeys are sacrificed in order to offer thanks to the Giver of all Life, if only meat eaters may have their meat and think of the Most Adorable One at the same time. However, it is better to eat meat and think of God, rather than add to meat-eating the highest sinGod-oblivion. But many of you could thank God in meditation more consciously and better while munching on the meat of peace, than while dipping your lips in the gravy and the flavor-camouflaged flesh of a turkey, where once sensitiveness guarded the throne of Life. Millions of people who eat turkey forget to thank God at all, and think more of the turkey than of God. A few people thank Him for the taste of savory turkey. If you eat turkey, be sure to stuff it with the best Blissspiced dressing of thankful remembrance of God for all His highest gifts of wisdom, peace, power to accomplish, and also for His other inconsequent gifts of turkey dinner, and so forth. Be sure to thank God for forgiving you for compelling the quickening of the turkeys evolution against its own will. And also thank God that you are not the turkey, to be used for the festivity of Thanksgiving. I am glad for you if you can find Heaven just by not forgetting God while partaking of your august turkey dinner, and I shall have to be happy for the turkeys, that they have found Heaven, and freedom from the misery of daily gobbling and the fear of waiting their doom through all of you, even though they were unwilling that it should happen. Anyway, dont mind my sympathy for the turkey, for I am more sympathetic toward you, who are superior to the turkey, lest you bring greater trials upon yourselves by forgetting God. He is waiting to hear your unceasing knock of devotion and to open the Gates of Omnipresence to receive you. Whether you eat turkey or not does not matter if you will only knock hard with devotion on the doors of your heart. He will open the Gates of Omnipresence to receive you. Make every day a day of Thanksgiving without regular feasts, and continuous contentment will sparkle in your body, mind, and Soul. If you eat turkey, be sure to search for the all-freeing God from then on until you find Him on the brink of unceasing seeking.1

BY PARAMHANSA YOGANANDA (Inner Culture, November 1934)