Thanksgiving and the Empty Box

December 3, 2025

For 32 years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as a priest at St. Robert Bellarmine and celebrating Mass with our school community each week. A tradition that always fills me with gratitude is celebrating our Thanksgiving Mass.

For this year’s Mass, ten boxes were placed along the foot of the altar. During the offertory, each class—from our kindergartners to our eighth graders—came forward to fill a box with canned goods for those struggling with food insecurity. It was an act of kindness that helps teach the next generation about giving back, living out the Gospel injunction to help those in need, and being thankful for the blessings that God has given us.

When Mass ended and the children returned to class, something struck me about the scene they left behind: one of the boxes remained empty.

At first, I thought it might have been an oversight or perhaps it was left in case there were extra donations. But as I reflected more on it throughout the week, that empty box seemed to me as though it might contain some deeper significance. For starters, it contrasted with the cornucopia or horn of plenty that traditionally symbolizes the Thanksgiving holiday. The question of what this empty box might symbolize at Thanksgiving pulled at me.

Many cultures and faith traditions use emptiness as a powerful symbol—an empty chair at a family table for a loved one who has passed, an unlit candle in a ritual, or a vacant space in a ceremony. These gestures remind us of what matters most: gratitude for what we’ve had and hope for what is yet to come.

At the Thanksgiving celebrations held at Mercy Home this year, we read the story of the ten lepers from St. Luke’s Gospel. Jesus healed ten of this horrible affliction, but only one returned to express gratitude for his new life. I sometimes wonder what Jesus felt when the one came back to thank him. Gratitude, even when unexpected, changes us and deepens who we are. This is true for both the giver and receiver of gratitude.

As part of the celebrations, we invited our young people to write down on note cards who and what they were thankful for and how they planned to pay that gratitude forward. Those notes were to be placed into an empty box. That box would ultimately be filled not with food, but with gratitude.

And that’s when the meaning of the empty box finally became clear to me—a life without gratitude is an empty one. That empty box reminds us that to be fully, spiritually nourished, we need to fill our hearts with thankfulness and share it with others. Gratitude is more than a way of feeling, it’s a way of living. It is an experience. It is the act of giving back. Of paying forward. Of making others whole.

I pray that we all find ways to fill the empty spaces with gratitude for God’s love for us, with kindness and kinship toward one another, and with hope for a brighter future for humanity.