Martin :
Thanksgiving is my favorite
holiday.
The holiday is the centerpiece
of my favorite season, our Texas fall. That
glorious season that delivers us from heat and drought.
Thanksgiving comes at autumns’ finest moment – often before the cold
rains start – not this year! – but after the first freeze. Usually the danger of tornado and hurricane are
over and the days are chilly in the morning and sunny in the afternoon.
Even in suburbia all wildlife
are more active as they move to warmer climes or store up in burrows or fat for the
freezes they know are coming.
Some nights you have reason to
make coffee in the evening and you can stand in the yard, wearing a sweater, among falling
leaves and hear the distant roar of drums and bands from the High School stadium. The moon seems somehow bigger, welcoming you back
to a world that includes a healthy share of night.
Mary K:
What we think of as the first Thanksgiving, every school-age child knows, is the celebration the Pilgrims shared with the native Americans who had with great generosity and compassion helped the newcomers survive in their new, challenging surroundings.
The story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth is a fine one.
They were not only grateful in their faith, but actively grateful to a neighboring
people who sustained them in their hour of need.
The
food, knowledge, and guidance offered by the native Americans was amazingly generous given
their own situation: the natives along the eastern seaboard had in only two years been
wiped out by an epidemic that only 1 in 20 survived;
only 5,000 of them were left when the Pilgrims arrived. Perhaps it was part of their philosophy or
religion to help all those who needed it; perhaps their own difficulties prompted them to
react with compassion to the suffering of others. Whatever the reasons, the native
Americans reached out to help the settlers in spite of overwhelming problems of their own.
The Pilgrims, still symbols for us of America’s religious freedom, attempted
to repay the natives’ generosity with a feast of Thanksgiving. And the native Americans who attended that feast
were an early model of how culturally diverse people might live in harmony.
Thanksgiving has always been PC. Ecumenical,
multiethnic, and multicultural in its very first observance! And they knew its power: within a very few years, communities all up and
down the eastern seaboard had annual Thanksgiving celebrations. In fact, by the time George Washington called the
first national day of Thanksgiving for the new United States after the Revolutionary War,
Plymouth had been giving thanks for more than 150 years.
(And the Pilgrims were truly grateful. They starkly realized they would not have
survived without the help of these startling-looking strangers, and when eventually the
newcomers reaped their first harvest, the miraculousness of their survival was in the
forefront of their thoughts. The Pilgrims freely expressed their deep gratitude and joy,
they spread a glorious feast, the groups broke bread and celebrated together. How pure and
lovely: no wonder it has endured.)
Martin:
Of course a celebration of the
last harvest before winter is much older than the New World, perhaps as old as any ritual
or celebration in the Northern climes. Whether
hunter and gatherer, or early farmer, humankind setting aside food for the winter and
celebrating that bounty on the eve of known scarcity has been a communal celebration of
hope beyond recorded history.
Of course, most major holidays
have their origins in humankind's essential relationship with nature. Christmas has origin in the solstice, Easter in
the ubiquitous rebirth and fertility rituals of spring.
But as we'll discuss later, the meanings of these holidays have become complicated
and abstracted. Only Thanksgiving
remains grounded in its season - and the season's last harvest.
The harvest. Although most of us
don't participate in the literal harvest anymore, most of us here have a bountiful
harvest. Thanksgiving is not only a time of
gratitude for our bounty, it can serve as a reminder of our spiritual practice of sharing
that harvest, as the pilgrims did, with others whose harvest may have not gone quite as
well.
Mary K: And of
course, there’s the food. It’s no
accident that all our holidays and important occasions include food. And I don’t have to tell y’all about
that: Live Oak has always known the power of
food for connection, celebration, and comfort. Everyday
food or special food, there’s something deeply important about sharing it with other
people.
The food itself is wonderful, and reminds us of the connection we all have with the
land, but forgot. It’s nice to be
reminded, at least once a year anyway. And,
of course, part of our food legacy at Thanksgiving is the recognition of the last fresh
foods from the summer crops combined with baked goods and the sturdy crops of fall.
At Thanksgiving, as on other very special occasions, we’re
often more aware of what we’re doing … there’s intentionality and presence. Thich Naht Hahn, the Buddhist monk, teacher, and
author, writes that the most mundane tasks can be spiritually enriching, not by getting
them over with or figuring out how to do them faster, but by being fully with them. Wash the dishes to be washing the dishes, not to
have clean dishes. Be only where you are. The cooking for Thanksgiving is often more complex
(and of course there’s more of it): it
requires planning and attention. Then
there’s gathering everyone, and making room for all the food, and saying a blessing
or prayer. It’s all special, and all
that focus and presence, together with the added bonus of outspoken gratitude, elevates us
… it reconnects us not only to each other, but to the divine.
(It’s returning to the beginning, and seeing it for the first
time…)
Martin:
Pilgrims. A term with religious connotation. Pilgrims are not running from something, they are
going deliberately to something. The pilgrims
of America’s founding were not “fleeing religious persecution”, so much as
going to a place of freedom and opportunity. And
not unlike the meccas for pilgrims of faith in other parts of the world, freedom and
opportunity have a religious status in America. In
a sense, all Americans, including Native Americans, though it’s hard to glean ancient
motives, are pilgrims – and remain pilgrims. Pilgrims
deliberately moving to a place of freedom.
The collective pilgrimage to
freedom has been the hallmark of America’s story.
Much remains to be done of course, but Americans have consistently sacrificed not
just lives, but economic advantage, and their religious doctrines in the interest of the
American faith in freedom. It has not always
been easy, but America is a more free place today than it has been at any time in its
history and it may be yet be the “shining city on the hill” of freedom that so
many immigrate here to find. Modern pilgrims
who have found our faith in freedom.
Our freedom has had other prices
though. Today, the freedom of each to choose
a livelihood of their own, and not be tied to the trade or land or their ancestors, has
scattered our families from sea to shining sea. Our
freedom to have the families we wish, have further scattered us across sometimes
complicated relationships.
And so, we have a new tradition
of spiritual pilgrimage: at Thanksgiving, we go home.
No holiday, not even Christmas, is more identified with "going home for the
holidays". Anybody who’s been in
any airport on Thanksgiving weekend knows this is true.
We think of spending Christmas with the ones we love, and we think of spending
Thanksgiving "back home" - though these may not be exactly the same thing, they
both have essential value.
We may not travel over
the river and through the woods in a horse-pulled sleigh; but we travel "home"
wherever that is, to the parents or grandparents or siblings. This pilgrimage is an annual reminder of the value
of family, of how we should not let our freedom exact too high a price in our lives.
Mary K:
It’s possible that Thanksgiving has survived as a holy-day because of its semi-secular roots. The day has deep spiritual content, and it’s amazing it has survived church-and-state-separation zealots whose relentless scrutiny has blasted the real content of Christmas, Easter, and Halloween right out of the public arena. But everybody can understand celebrating with food, and everybody can understand being joyous and grateful to be alive.
And maybe being nondenominational and multicultural from the beginning has also disarmed revisionist historians who otherwise would have pounced on it for hypocrisy, in the same way they’ve gone after so many people admired as heroes …We can’t exactly call the Puritans a Welcoming Congregation, but they were doing pretty well for 1621!
Thanksgiving’s political survival also might, unfortunately, have something to do with pride, since, after all, it began as purely ours. Lots of people celebrate the births and deaths of various saviors, and have some kind of recognition of the dead and death, but Thanksgiving was our idea. Lots of countries have a national day of thanksgiving now, but we did it first (so far as we know).
Martin:
Thanksgiving remains now,
hundreds of years later, an almost uncorrupted legacy of the American founders. A legacy in which freedom and
gratitude were inextricably intertwined in the thinking of this country's earliest
settlers.
Halloween, Christmas and Easter
are besieged, almost overwhelmed by the "gimme" spirit: cute ghosts, Santa, the
Easter Bunny, even the baby Jesus all sometimes seem to be trying to sell us something.
The deeply religious and contemplative foundations of Christmas and Easter and the
spiritual roots of Halloween have been undermined, in some cases almost to oblivion, by
commercialism.
It is odd, but even though the
Halloween displays begin in mid-September, pushing candy, costumes, and much more... and
the Christmas displays start immediately after Halloween, selling literally everything
that can be wrapped in red and green or pointed at by a grinning Santa, the stores haven't
managed to make too much of Thanksgiving Day.
And that is because Thanksgiving
is about doing - traveling, cooking, eating, talking, playing cards, even watching
football, and not about acquiring. There is a
zen-like simplicity around its being about "that day", without long preparation
or extensive acquisition that is something we appreciate, perhaps crave.
Now the day after Thanksgiving
is another thing entirely. The biggest
shopping day of the year is a celebration of consumerism.
It has gone so far that one national group has made the anarchist suggestion that
folks should buy absolutely nothing on that day – not even a coke or a newspaper --
out of protest against rampant commercialism in our culture.
The other holidays have also
been undermined by their religious and cultural identities in our pluralistic, secular
society. Everywhere it’s Santa instead
of the baby Jesus, "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas",
"sale" signs instead of stars of Bethlehem, Easter baskets, bunnies. What began as myths, survive as euphemistic
apologies and successful marketing icons.
Thanksgiving has been challenged
- it wasn’t always the case that the celebration was only complete with a turkey. This image is a highly successful fabrication of
the poultry industry. But the attempts by
Macy’s and the turkey producers to profit from Thanksgiving haven't really scratched
it. Thanksgiving, perhaps because only the
one pure spirit of gratitude, common to all religions, remains at its core, stands strong.
These other holidays all have
complex cultural roles which involve folklore, popular custom, specific religious meaning,
and commercialism. The witches and ghosts of
Halloween offend Fundamentalists. The focus
on Jesus in birth and death at Christmas and Easter offends others. The focus on candy at Halloween and Easter and
marketing at Christmas should maybe offend more of us.
However, like the original pilgrim’s table hundreds of years ago, all of our
culturally diverse people can sit at the table of Thanksgiving. It is a table set with gratitude for the bounty of
freedom and opportunity.
Mary K:
We have so much to be thankful for, including Thanksgiving, the yearly reminder to
be grateful. Its name reminds us of its
simple, sacred purpose and its simplest observance: Give
Thanks. The holy-day of Thanksgiving reminds
us that we don’t have to be in an alien land, threatened with starvation, despair,
and death and then miraculously saved, to be grateful.
Furthermore, to observe this holy day doesn’t require a church, or anybody
preaching a sermon … usually people celebrate where their greatest blessings are, and
for most people, that’s at home. Many
members of the wonderful extended family at Live Oak will celebrate Thanksgiving as
they’ve celebrated so much through the years, with togetherness, deep gratitude, and
food.
A ritual is fundamentally different from other celebrations and observances: a ritual seeks to change us, so we emerge transformed in some way … it can be small or large, but the change is meaningful and permanent. It doesn’t matter that the primary vehicle for the ritual of Thanksgiving is food; in fact, the day is deepened by that. Other holidays have detritus, leftover junk that distracts and eventually burdens us. But the feast of Thanksgiving is eaten and gone (at least eventually). The meaning has to be elsewhere. Thanksgiving leaves its mark only on our hearts.
May we all keep it holy.