Some Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2012
First off I have to confess that I am not giving much thanks today. In my mind giving thanks would mean more than a passing glance heavenward and then devoting myself to diversions and over-consumption. Must it not mean that I acknowledge the great mercy I have received by obeying the one I received it from: to share that mercy with my fellows? I think giving thanks would require a reaching out to those who are suffering today: to the homeless, the sick, the brokenhearted, the lonely…. What am I doing of that? I’m just going to do my laundry, get caught up on some work, maybe go for a walk later, and then a small feast with my son. It’s all pretty self-centered actually.
I recently come to understand that there are those who really couldn’t care less about the scholarly and historical aspects of things and so if you are one of these and you happen to be reading you can stop now because I want to take a backward peek at the roots of our Thanksgiving celebration. The holiday of giving thanks has been celebrated in North America since 1621 when a group of the first Puritan settlers in New England celebrated a good harvest. I wonder what that must have been like. It must have been like being on another planet: left to your own devices, surrounded by danger on every side. For them life itself must have seemed miraculous, and so they paused in the midst of hardship to give thanks to God.
As a national holiday Thanksgiving has been celebrated at least since the beginning of the Republic. George Washington issued a proclamation for a national day of Thanksgiving in 1789. The date that we celebrate now, the fourth Thursday in November, was established by Presidential Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. That date was approximately four months after the Battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, when the tide of battle in the Civil War appeared to be turning to the favor of the Union.
I admit that I am not a scholar of the Civil War nor really of Thanksgiving, so I don’t know if the battlefield outlook in 1863 had anything to do with Lincoln’s decision to call for a day of Thanksgiving. It would be fully another year and a half before that conflict came to an end. But again, I wonder how the people of the United States then must have experienced Thanksgiving. The future of their Union was far from certain, and there was terrible loss on every side. And yet in the midst of their hardship they stopped to acknowledge the blessings they had received from God.
In the case of the so-called Pilgrims in 1621, they paused to give thanks while pursuing a larger vision. For them it was the “city on a hill,” the demonstration of what the Kingdom of God ought to look like on earth. In the case of Lincoln and the Union in the midst of the Civil War, the people paused to give thanks while looking ahead to a brighter future, albeit a more secular vision than that of the Pilgrims, but still striving to build a better world. In both cases we see people in the midst of hardship devoted to a vision of a better world.
What about us? There is plenty of hardship. There are many things wrong, from violent bloodshed overseas to sickness and hunger within blocks of where we sit reading this. But what is our vision? Do we even have a vision beyond filling our bellies and satisfying our material lusts, not even our needs but “spending money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like”?
How ironic that this morning in my meditation I read these words:
I did not understand duty very well. But how well I understood – precisely because I had come from a life of pleasure – that when a poor person, a suffering person, a sick person, could smile, that was the perfect sign that God existed, and that he was helping the poor person in his or her difficulties.
The social struggle in my day was lively and intense… Everywhere there arose groups professing poverty and preaching poverty in the Church and the renewal of society. But nothing changed, because these people did not change hearts….
No, brothers and sisters, it is not enough to change laws. You have to change hearts. Otherwise, when you have completed the journey of your social labors you shall find yourselves right back at the beginning –only this time it is you who will be the arrogant, the rich, and the exploiters of the poor.
That is why I took the Gospel path. For me the Gospel was the sign of liberation, yes, but of true liberation, the liberation of hearts. This was the thrust that lifted me out of the middle-class spirit, which is present to every age, and is known as selfishness, arrogance, pride, sensuality, idolatry, and slavery. – Carlo Carretto
I think we today may be faced with even greater danger than the Puritans or those who lived in the United States during the Civil War. Because for them the danger was easily recognizable. It was easy to sense a forbidding wilderness. It was easy to see the destruction on the battlefield and to count the dead. But for us, our danger lies precisely in those things we call blessings, made manifest in the means by which we claim to give thanks. It is because our lives are so easy that we are unable to really pause and give thanks to God. We have become Pharisees, so proud of our own accomplishments we can’t see the depths of our depravity and our gigantic need for restoration. And so we go on trying to fill our great emptiness, our need for forgiveness, with too much food, too many things, unsatisfying diversions.
I don’t mean everyone of course. I am looking in the mirror mostly. But if you can see yourself in my mirror then I pray for you on this Thanksgiving Day that you come to really experience your brokenness, so that the Gospel can pierce your heart. I end with the end of the passage quoted above:
You can reproach me, go ahead. But I saw, in the Gospel, a road beyond, a path that transcended all cultures, all human constructs, all civilizations and conventions.
I felt the Gospel to be eternal; I felt politics and culture, including Christian culture, to be in time.
I was made always to go beyond time.
No comments:
Post a Comment