The Deep Thanksgiving of Our Souls
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I have wonderful neighbors who delight in garish inflatable yard decorations. We love these neighbors, but would question their taste if they did not question it for us.
One day, as we walked past their front yard and saw them plugging in the rotating Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Piglet inflatable Christmas globe, they turned to us, grinned, and said, “That’s right—we’re THOSE kind of neighbors.” They also told us that they might have held off on the Christmas decorations if they’d only been able to find anything for Thanksgiving.
Thus began a curious odyssey in holiday schlock. Wondering if we might be able to help in these efforts, I began to research Thanksgiving decorations. I found an eight-foot-tall inflatable turkey dressed as a Pilgrim. I found Pilgrim turkey windsocks and turkey-shaped hats. I found a set of four Thanksgiving rubber duckies—two Pilgrims, a turkey and an Indian. And I found something called an Autumn Jiggler Turkey Wobble Bobble—dressed, of course, as a Pilgrim.
The truth is that these images of Thanksgiving—happy Pilgrims and happy Indians feasting together on turkey after a bountiful harvest, and possibly playing touch football afterward—are largely mythical. To be sure, they have become the symbols of the day, but they tell only part—and a dubious part—of the real story.
What we think of as “the first Thanksgiving” was really more of a harvest festival than a religious observance, and there was little to be thankful for. Dozens of colonists had lost their lives to cold, disease and malnutrition, and most of the crops brought from England had failed. The deprivation was so severe that the Wampanoag guests had to return home and bring food to the pilgrims. The peace between the Wampanoag and the colonists did not last, and although various Presidents in times of war had declared days of Thanksgiving, the regular observance of the holiday was spotty until the time of the Civil War.
It was Abraham Lincoln who created the Thanksgiving tradition we know today, and he did it during one of the worst years of American history. In 1863, the nation had been rent in two by civil war, and violence had already claimed the lives of half a million people—nearly 15% of the U.S. population. Even if the North managed to win this terrible war, nobody knew what victory would look like, or if the country would ever be whole again.
This was the backdrop against which Lincoln made his famous proclamation:
I do…invite my fellow citizens…to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving…. And I recommend…they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to [God’s] tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers…
The real Thanksgiving has its origins not in plenty but in deprivation; not in peace but in hardship. The real spiritual discipline of thanksgiving is not to ignore suffering, but to fully acknowledge it, work to alleviate it, and yet still give thanks. It is to find reason for gratitude even in pain or chaos. It is to look deeper into the fabric of our world and see blessings where we thought none could exist.
True thanksgiving is born of hardship as much as of joy, for it is in hardship that we realize and appreciate the foundations of our lives—the community and spirit that keep us going, the smallest blessings now thrown into relief, the tiniest seeds of hope that unfold in us when we thought all hope to have fled. True thanksgiving looks at life in its fullness and finds reason for gratitude.
During my chaplain residency I prayed with hundreds of families—many of whom were dealing with the death or imminent death of their loved ones. At first I wasn’t sure how to pray, or to whom. So I muddled through the best I could, and then invited the families to pray in their own words. Sometimes they would pray to Jesus, sometimes to God, occasionally they would dispense with the address and just pray, but almost always their prayers were of thanksgiving.
Thank you, God, for our mother’s life. Thank you for this hospital and its caring doctors and nurses. Thank you for the family that has gathered in this waiting room. Thank you for our pastor who came all the way from Roanoke to sit with us here. Thank you for every good thing about my husband. Thank you for sixty-three years of marriage. Thank you for the love that we shared. Thank you for bringing our family back together after so long. Thank you for that presence we cannot describe but yet can feel. Thank you.
Time after time, in the moment of the tenderest loss, families would give thanks.
Most were Baptist or Pentecostal or African Methodist Episcopal, and I stand here today as a Unitarian Universalist humanist who readily admits that these are the people who taught me how to pray. It didn’t matter that I did not believe in the God to whom they prayed. It didn’t matter what we thought about Jesus or God or evolution or gay rights. All that mattered was that we stood together in some of the worst moments of their lives holding hands and giving thanks.
We Unitarian Universalists have much to learn from families like these. We, who sometimes hesitate in our gratitude because we don’t know who to thank, or how to thank a divinity that is amorphous or complicated or non-existent, nevertheless can find and feel gratitude in our hearts. We need that gratitude; we need that seed of hope found in the giving of thanks. We need the perspective that gratitude gives—and not just any gratitude. We need to allow ourselves to feel grateful for that which we cannot control, which cannot be controlled by any person or group of people. We need to be able to feel gratitude in a universe that is as chaotic as it is ordered. We need that sense of thankfulness to the larger reality that is.
We need such thanksgiving not only because it gives us cause for humility, but also because it gives us perspective that we might otherwise miss. It is thankfulness for a good meal, even when food is scarce. It is thankfulness for small steps toward peace even in a time of war. It is thankfulness for the distance our society has journeyed toward justice and freedom for all, even when there are many miles of that journey before us. It is thankfulness for the good in one with whom we have quarreled. It is thankfulness for the grass that grows through cracks in the sidewalk, for the robin that sings in the city slums, for the sun that yet shines, the sky that is yet blue, for the resilience of life, for the beauty of a child.
When I lived in New Hampshire I had the privilege of getting to know the Unitarian Universalist author Phil Simmons, who lived in the next town over. Phil had been a college professor until he was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease—and returned to live with his family in the White Mountains. Phil died a few years back, after nine years of living with the disease, but his book, Learning to Fall, is still in print and remains one of my favorites.
Toward the end of his life Phil began to receive a fair amount of attention for his book, and he frequently gave talks and interviews. He told the story of one radio interviewer who asked him to describe the highlights of his life since being diagnosed with ALS. “Highlights,” thought Phil. “You’ve got to be kidding.” But he answered as best he could, realizing later what he should have said: “Getting my fingernails cut this morning.”
“Here was Susan,” he said, “my friend and nurse, trimming my nails as I sat warmed by the morning sun reflecting off snow covered fields, my wife beside me writing postcards and sipping coffee. If we’re looking for what’s sacred, what’s holy—why look any further? The sacred world is before our eyes and in our nostrils and beneath our feet. What I should have told the radio interviewer is, ‘If you’re looking for highlights, you’ll miss your life.’”
President Lincoln found reason for gratitude in bountiful fields and “healthful skies,” in the productivity of the nation’s mines and farms, in the keeping of peace with other nations, even as brutal war raged in our own. Phil Simmons found it in the simplicity of a moment when he was not looking ahead or behind, but simply existing as he was. Henry David Thoreau once expressed his gratitude that he did not know the species of the birds that sang in the morning: “The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.”
Our gratitude will be no less if it is given to an anonymous universe or to a loving God. The recipient of gratitude is not what we need to worry about. Who we thank is not as important as that we thank.
There are as many ways to express our gratitude and our grace as there are human souls and human thoughts. Words are unnecessary. We do not have to say anything or do anything, although there is much that we could say and do. All that we need is the calmness of gratitude, the wonder of a moment, and the deep thanksgiving of our souls.
- Politics and Religion - March 1, 2020
- The Deep Thanksgiving of Our Souls - November 11, 2011
