A New/Old Thanksgiving

We do love our origin stories - our cultural "creation myths"; Columbus "discovering" America, freedom-fighting "heroes" dying at the Alamo, the defense of "states rights" that birthed the Confederacy - never mind that common tellings and classroom teachings of all these "histories" are, at best, "Disney-fied" caricatures and at worst egregious contortions of much more complicated truths. 

That tension is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than at Thanksgiving. At the very least, perhaps we can acknowledge that there are decidedly different interpretations of that bucolic banquet of brotherly love shared by big-buckled Pilgrims and generously benevolent native peoples that elementary schools love to reenact this time of year. 

Interpretations and, of course, implications. Routinely overlooked is the fact that those hungry Pilgrims repaid the kindness of their saviors with a determined campaign of genocide. In that hotter light, reenactments of the scene ring a little hollow. 

Such an acknowledgement, however, need not dampen our collective, albeit annualized, enthusiasm for giving thanks. The truth is that the quaint tale of that happy cross-cultural meal is something of a newcomer to the celebration. Which is to say that the idea for a national day of thanksgiving wasn't originally centered around colonists and Indians. Whatever happened around Plymouth Rock in 1620, its association with the national holiday we celebrate this week wasn't cemented until John F. Kennedy's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1963, and then only by illustrative allusion. George Washington, in the first official "suggestion" in 1789 that a day be set aside for giving thanks calls attention only to the existential reality of our collective indebtedness to that which is beyond ourselves and our resources - specifically, that it is the "duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor..."

Duty. Obedience. Gratitude. Humble supplication. The recognition that we are indebted to something outside of ourselves.  Whether or not we are the religious type, at the very least we could take a moment to acknowledge that we have had thirsts that others have quenched, hungers that others have fed, ignorances that the wisdom of others informed.  We neither conceived nor birthed nor reared ourselves.  Someone else discerned gravity, split the atom, invented toothpaste.  Few of us grow our own food, build our own houses, make our own clothes or generate the fuel to power our homes or vehicles.  We receive.  Instead of one more day celebrating and occasioning over-indulgence, an annual holiday set aside to cast aside the persistent but laughable fantasy of self-sufficiency - to concede that there are no "self-made" people - could be nourishing, indeed.  President Washington's Proclamation wouldn't be a bad precedent to remember as we gather on Thursday with our families or at least our thoughts. But there is more.

For years the idea of giving thanks as a part of our national ethos was kicked around regionally and voluntarily, until things began to fall apart. 

Literally. 

Civil War pitted us against each other - South against North, states against states, neighbors against neighbors, parents against children. Siblings against each other. Cats, no doubt, against dogs. It was a mess. And in the midst of it all, Abraham Lincoln, the elected little boy with his finger in the cohering dam, took the advice of a 74-year-old magazine editor who wrote to the President urging him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival." His subsequent 1863 declaration was the first national establishment of Thanksgiving Day, and was devoted to reconciling a country actively dismembering itself in Civil War.

Readers and students will note the absence of any mention of Pilgrims or Indians or turkeys, green bean casseroles or marshmallowed sweet potatoes. What is powerfully present is the confessional acknowledgement of division, and the grateful amazement that somehow, and despite ourselves, we are surviving. 

In these present days of our own civil war - of deep division among neighbors and families and partisans - that sounds like the kind of Thanksgiving observance we would do well to recover. Gratitude that, despite our concerted effort, despite the corrosive effervescence of our collective acrimony and inability to agree on quite literally anything, somehow and inexplicably - save by the determined and sustaining interventions of an over-benevolent Power - we haven't yet annihilated ourselves or each other or the world we live in.  Yet.  Despite the worst of our inclinations, obsessions, addictions, denials, prejudices, extravagances and apathies.  

Life wills to live.  The earth wills to flourish.  Individuals will to relate - yes, debate, but also congregate; yes, wound in the process, but also forgive and heal and hope.  Together.  Despite ourselves.  Sometimes - oftentimes - around a table, carving an entree instead of each other.

Thank God.

I know, that sort of observance is harder for kindergartners to reenact, but I'm thinking they are up to the challenge. I'm only hoping the rest of us are up to it as well.

Happy, Healing Thanksgiving.