My favourite most inspiring spiritual leader is the late Fr Henri Nouwen. Being of Dutch descent but having lived in Toronto area, and buried in Richmond hill, Fr Henri would have celebrated many a Canadian Thanksgiving Weekends. Here is one of his more potent and moving paragraphs on the necessity of gratitude in our lives.

Fr Henri, we miss your audible voice and passion.

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.
Fr Henri J.M. Nouwen