|
By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
November 22, 2009
Reading: The First Thanksgiving Pilgrim Edward Winslow
Thanksgiving is a holiday with multiple origins. It has roots in
fall harvest celebrations that were practiced throughout Europe,
dating back to pre-Christian times. But our American Thanksgiving
celebration is usually attributed to the Pilgrims and their first
celebration of plenty after the harvests of 1621. The only
contemporary account we have of that first Thanksgiving was written
by one of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow. He included a short
reference to the event in a letter sent to a friend in England.
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling,
that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we
had gathered the fruits of our labor. They four in one day killed as
much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a
week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our
arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest
their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three
days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five
deer, which we brought to the plantation and bestowed on our
governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not
always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the
goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you
partakers of our plenty.”
Sermon: Gratitude
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday among the big ones we observe in
this country. I have good memories of Thanksgivings past, I like the
stories and their themes, and I appreciate the values that are
institutionalized in this observance. It is good to pause,
appreciate what is all around, and give thanks. I also like the
food.
And so on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I would like to offer some
reflections about this holiday.
● ● ●
First of all, Thanksgiving is unique in that it brings us together.
The story of Pilgrims and Indians joining for a feast is a tale of
inclusion--while most other major American holidays divide us.
Take Christmas, for example. My wife, Amy, remembers growing up
Jewish in New York as Christmas burst forth around her. There was
all this glitter and all this fuss, but she was left out. On the big
day—Christmas itself—her family went to a movie, and the rest of the
day just slowly passed by. Or maybe they would go out to eat. Except
that on Christmas, remarkably, many of the Jewish deli’s close. (At
least, they do in Cleveland.) This is probably how the traditional
Jewish method of celebrating Christmas has evolved: going out for
Chinese food.
It’s the same for any non-Christian group. At Christmas, there’s a
big party going on, but you’re not included. And so it divides us.
As is the case also at Easter, an observance that separates the
nation—and the world—between those who believe that Jesus rose from
the dead—and those who don’t.
Thanksgiving is different. Everybody’s invited: Pilgrims and
Indians, Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and humanists
and pagans and people who don’t know what they believe—as well as
blacks and whites and Asians and Hispanics, relatives and friends
and strangers, young people and old people and even crabby Aunt Marg
who sometimes creates a scene over some imagined slight—she’ll be
there too. Everybody has a role in this story; everybody has a place
at the table.
Thanksgiving is also forgiving about how you celebrate it and where.
There’s no one right way to do it. I have had Thanksgivings with big
family gatherings, with small groups of friends, and with people
I’ve barely known. I have had Thanksgiving dinners in my home, at
other people’s homes, in church social halls, in college dining
halls, in restaurants, and on the road. There isn’t one right way.
We do what works that year. And if 90 Indians happen to show up with
5 freshly killed deer, well great, make room for them. We all have a
place.
It was this quality of gathering people together in unity that
brought Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to declare Thanksgiving a national
holiday, and he fixed the date on the last Thursday of November.
Before that, Thanksgiving had been a sporadic occurrence, observed
at different times in different places. But in the midst of the
devastation of the Civil War, President Lincoln was looking for ways
to unite this badly torn nation. One solution was this day
designated for all of us to pause together in thanks.
That intention continues to this day. At Thanksgiving we are
reminded of the dream that we be one nation, united, in gratitude.
● ● ●
So I like Thanksgiving for its inclusivity. I also like it for its
simplicity. Yes, I know, I’ve cooked many a Thanksgiving meal
myself, and it’s no easy task, particularly when lots of people are
involved. But, still, it’s just a meal. What we do at Thanksgiving
is sit together, have a meal, then maybe watch a football game or go
for a walk. That’s pretty much it.
Thanksgiving has resisted efforts to make it more than that. The
American retailing machine, try as it may, has not figured out how
to make Thanksgiving a major generator of spending. This was viewed
as a problem by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, as he sought
ways to encourage Americans to spend their way out of the Great
Depression. So he tried to move Thanksgiving a week earlier—to the
second to the last Thursday of November. At that time, it was
considered unseemly to promote Christmas before Thanksgiving: one
holiday at a time. So President Roosevelt figured that if he got
Thanksgiving out of the way a week earlier, then American consumers
would use that extra time for shopping, and the Great Depression
would be done.
It didn’t work quite as he had planned. Twenty-three states went
along with the plan, twenty-two states did not. Texas, doing
everybody better, established two official Thanksgivings: one on the
second to the last Thursday of November, another on the last
Thursday of November. This state of affairs was not sorted out until
1941 when Congress restored Thanksgiving to the final Thursday of
November.
Between then and now, Thanksgiving has stayed where Abraham Lincoln
put it, and American retailers have dealt with that inconvenience by
annexing Thanksgiving to Christmas. Thanksgiving has become kind of
a Christmas suburb, an outlier that feeds into the main event with
parades and days off for shopping. The idea that it’s inappropriate
to promote Christmas before Thanksgiving is long gone, and Christmas
decorations begin to appear before Halloween. So Thanksgiving has
developed into a time to pause and catch one’s breath before the
onslaught of the Big One: Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Solstice/New
Years and whatever else.
Yet despite all of this, Thanksgiving’s essential simplicity
endures. What you do on this day is get together and have a meal.
● ● ●
I also like the emphasis on giving thanks, though the history on
this is a little complicated. We are accustomed to images of the
first Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Indians gathered together
reverently. But it seems like that’s not how it really was.
The Unitarian Universalist minister, Jane Rzepka, who currently is
minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, offered these
observations about the first Thanksgiving. She wrote,
“Apparently Pilgrim Edward Winslow wrote the only eye-witness
description of the first Thanksgiving. In his brief letter to a
friend in England, Winslow described the joy, the celebration, and
the carousing that followed the harvest of 1621. That first to-do
seems to have been like (the) “Harvest Home” (celebration) back in
England: “cakes and ale and hang the cost.”
“Pilgrim Winslow makes no mention of thanks!
“Uh-oh. We find out that the religious component of Thanksgiving,
and even the act of giving thanks, are later additions. Isn’t that
the way?
“At any given time, we’re busy with our cakes and ale and turkey
feathers. It’s only later, looking back, that we understand the
gravity of our harsh winters, the fragility of daily life, the
preciousness of hopes for years to come. We get through it, we
celebrate, and then, finally, the thanksgiving comes.”
That first Thanksgiving appears to have been a week-long party,
modeled after an English autumn festival called “Harvest Home.” It
was a celebration of plenty, and in his letter back home to England,
Pilgrim Edward Winslow couldn’t keep from bragging. As he put it,
“We are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our
plenty.” Sometimes we hear Thanksgiving criticized for the sheer
volume of food at the typical Thanksgiving dinner—that it’s become a
festival of gluttony. But that seems more historically accurate than
the reverent and sedate Thanksgiving we like to imagine.
Is this a problem? Does it undermine the message of thanks?
No. Because that’s how life works. We get involved in something and
don’t fully comprehend what’s going on—until later when we remember
and realize, oh, now I understand what that was about. When I am
involved in an activity or an event or a specific phase of my life,
I only get it in bits and pieces. I have to look back to experience
it in more of its fullness.
I have been remembering Thanksgivings of years past.
There was the year I spent part of November hitchhiking from Chicago
to California because that’s just what one did back then. I
hitchhiked to California, got a drive-away car and drove to
Louisville, Kentucky. Then, after visiting friends, I took an all
night bus from Louisville to Indianapolis, then from Indianapolis to
St. Louis, them from St. Louis to my home in Illinois. That bus trip
was notable because it coincided with Greyhound’s brief attempt to
compete with the airlines by featuring the bus equivalent of flight
attendants. As the sun rose over the Midwestern fields, we were
served orange juice and pastries by the bus stewardess who took this
trip with us. In early afternoon on Thanksgiving day, I arrived in
my home town, dusty from the road, feeling like Pigpen from the
Peanuts comic strip looks—like I was kicking up a cloud of dust
wherever I walked. But when I arrived home, they took me in and set
a place at the table.
Or another Thanksgiving: the first Amy and I shared after we were
married. It was just the two of us at Thanksgiving, staying in a
town way past its prime in an odd old hotel, and we had Thanksgiving
dinner at its smorgasbord in a half-empty room where I think several
of the other diners were ghosts. It was kind of a weird weekend, but
looking back, it is a fond memory.
And I remember a Thanksgiving with a new-born baby who, precisely
when the meal was ready, decided to start crying and didn’t stop for
the next hour and a half. By the time we got to our turkey, it was
cold and rubbery, but it didn’t matter.
While actually experiencing those occasions, I was probably just
trying to get through, one moment to the next, not altogether
present to what was going on. But now, looking back, I remember each
as a time of thanksgiving. The welcome of home after traveling, the
fun of sharing Thanksgiving for the first time with one’s wife, the
joy of Thanksgiving with a baby—a new person in this world who
hadn’t been around the previous year.
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he observes, “For now we
see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in
part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
In the present moment, we see through “a glass darkly.” Only later
comes the thanksgiving.
● ● ●
So you’re sitting at a Thanksgiving table, enjoying your meal and
the conversation. And somebody comes up with the idea: “Let’s go
around and each of us tell what we’re thankful for this year.” That
happens in our family, and it makes me squirm. First of all, you
have to quick think through the year and come up with something
appropriate to be thankful for. Then the exercise so easily
escalates into competitive thanksgiving. That is, who’s got the most
noteworthy things to be thankful for.
And it strikes me that the things we name as we go around the
Thanksgiving table aren’t always what’s most important. Yes, we’re
thankful for family and friends and the food in front of us and
maybe something nice that happened to us in the past year or an
achievement or something like that.
But what about: just being?
You know the odds against any of us being here? It’s too many
numbers; I can’t think that far. The odds against life happening on
this planet when so many others appear to be barren. And the odds
against our own species developing. And the odds against our
millions of ancestors—from the smallest organisms to us—surviving
long enough to reproduce. And the odds against each of being
conceived and the twists and turns of each person’s life leading us
here to this particular place on this day.
Think about that, and it’s hard to avoid feeling awe. And gratitude.
Awe and gratitude at just being here. Every once in a while a line
from an old Pogo cartoon pops into my head. In this scene, the
turtle named Churchy La Femme has picked up a newspaper with a
headline that screams, “Sun to Burn Out in 30 Billion Years, Ending
All Life on Earth.” Faced with that bad news, Churchy weeps
copiously and complains about the unfairness of it all to his
friend, Porky the Porcupine. Porky cuts off the whining with a
terse, “Shaddup, you’re lucky to be here in the first place.”
That’s about it: we’re lucky to be here in the first place. Which
is why some spiritual teachers state that the essential religious
attitude is thanks. Gratitude. Not gratitude for something good that
happened yesterday or last week or last year but gratitude at the
fact of being. The opportunity to be here in this place in this
moment. As the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel put it, "Just
to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."
I don’t recommend that you go into all this if somebody at
Thanksgiving asks you to say what you’re thankful for. Just do the
usual: I’m thankful that the car’s still running, the kids are doing
well, I made it through another year with my job, our health has
been pretty good—because certainly those are all things worthy of
lifting up and being thankful for.
But under the surface, there’s more. Ordinary things that really
aren’t so ordinary.
Smiles of recognition when we see people we know and who know us.
Strands of connection that relate us to each other and to life
itself.
The freshness of dawn, the gifts of a new morning. The hours of a
day that offer challenges and possibilities. And the dusk that comes
hours later, offering the promise of rest and renewal.
The beauty of this season. The remaining leaves that still cling to
their branches. The majesty of trees whose structure is revealed to
us as the leaves finally fall. The shades of brown and orange and
yellow that surround us at this time of year.
Moments of insight when a new idea or a new thought or a new
perception appears that changes the way we see the world. The
feeling of hope that sometimes lifts our souls--even when we have no
idea why or where it comes from. The gift of laughter that heals and
refreshes.
The example of others who help light our own paths and show us a
way. The sacrifices of those known and unknown who have given of
themselves to strengthen the life of the community. The miracle of
friendship.
The chill of the cool fall air, the shock of rain on our skin that
awakens us to the realization that, in the words of Monty Python,
“I’m not dead yet.” Gratitude for life itself, that comes to us
without our doing anything to earn it.
I’ll close with the words of the 12th century mystic, Meister
Eckhart, ,who said, “The most important prayer in the world is just
two words—thank you.”
So be it.
|
