By the time we stood to sing Let There Be Peace On Earth (And Let It Begin With Me), I already had a lump in my throat and a fullness in my heart.

Mecklenburg Ministries’ interfaith Thanksgiving service always gets to me – a celebration of unity that inaugurates the season of gratitude. Our church, of course, has long been active in the association of congregations. But there was something about this year’s gathering that struck a deeper chord within me, and within many of the 1,500 others who worshiped Tuesday evening at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.

The venue enhanced the experience. The spectacular sanctuary that our friends at the Beatties Ford Road church opened recently is large, for sure, but it’s also simple and reverential. And Good Lord does the organ sound magnificent!

The procession of clergy was moving – priests, rabbis, pastors, wearing the different robes of their religion, yet forming an alliance of friends in a world that could use a few more folks who get along.

The music stirred souls. Our own Dr. Thomas Moore leads the interfaith choir each year that includes several from Myers Park United Methodist Church. It’s annually awesome to hear dozens of singers from nearly 30 houses of faith using their voices to try to bring harmony to the times.

Sacred readings from the Christian, Hindu and other faiths, shared by teenagers, served as prelude to a pitch-perfect sermon from the Rev. Jay Leach of the Unitarian Universalist Church Of Charlotte. Meeting On The Common Ground Of Gratitude, he called his message, and he painted a vivid portrait. In New Orleans, he explained, the grassy area that divides one side of the street from the other is known as neutral ground: “The neutral ground, a place open to all. The neutral ground, a place where strangers can meet. A place where even those with differences can come together in peace and common purpose.”

Like I said, by the time we started singing about peace, I was warmed by the hope that perhaps, one day, it might be so.

But it wasn’t just the magnificence of the service that lifted us from our pews. It was the harsh cold outside that drove us at Thanksgiving into the sanctuary of this church called Friendship.

We came at a time of conflict all over the earth. We came when the economy has left so many jobless, homeless, hungry or terrified. It was right that the offering went to Crisis Assistance Ministry and its work to help people pay for food, rent and heat. We came in the days of transition, when we are optimistic about our next leader but realistic about the daunting job that awaits him.

And so the service this year was our blanket in the chill, a place where we could come to warm our worried souls together. That explains the lump in my throat and the fullness in my heart.