Thanksgiving A.D. 1620/1863/60-70
Thanksgiving 1620
Who were the Founding Fathers and Mothers? Refugees and immigrants, fleeing persecution (at the hands of the Anglicans no less!) And how did they survive that first Massachusetts winter? By the provision, of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance by the indigenous People they met, at Plymouth among other places. We now live in a political scene where the perspective of some might be described as ‘nativist’, but we would do well to recall our story, in a manner that leads to humility and self-knowledge. So the holiday can become a distant mirror on our time.
Thanksgiving 1863
Our national holiday was established during the Civil War. While leading the struggle against slavery, Abraham Lincoln also wanted citizens to “implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.” Our shared ‘mystic chords of memory’, our being ‘not enemies but friends,’ as he would say toward the end of the war, lay at the heart of the day’s purpose. Such a goal seems no less urgent in our own day.
Thanksgiving 60-70 A.D.
Thanksgiving is about just that, gratitude for God’s blessing bestowed on us. But the Scriptures help us to articulate this virtue in the whole of our lives. We too were once sojourners, says Exodus. And as such are to be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable. Matthew 25 reminds that the needy, our neighbors, are our alter Christus. And we are an Eucharistic people, whose worship is to be inseparable from self-offering in every domain of our life, as Romans 12 reminds us. Finally the ‘new world’ we are to discover is the Kingdom, in whose dress rehearsal we share, gathered with ‘every family, language, people, and nation’ (Revelation 7).
Peace, +GRS
