Thanksgiving Day
November 24, 2016
Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday but I have always thought of it as
our one-and-only national holy day, unique among our national observances in
the way that it puts God squarely in the picture. After all, if we’re
giving thanks, we must be giving thanks to someone!
Thanksgiving, as we know, got its start in the
Massachusetts Bay colony in November of 1621 – more than a year after a
group of religious separatists had made a particularly treacherous crossing
of the Atlantic in their search for a place where they could freely practice
their religion. After a harrowing crossing of the Atlantic, they
arrived at Plymouth where they endured a bitterly cold and brutally long
winter. Then came a spring and summer that, with the help of the local,
friendly natives, allowed them to grow crops that they could eat, and catch
fish and hunt game, as well. By fall, they had something to celebrate
and celebrate they did. Being a God-fearing people, it was natural for them
to turn to God to give thanks for survival, freedom, friends, and hope.
That was the first Thanksgiving. The idea
caught on and continued but it took almost 250 years before Thanksgiving was
officially and permanently enshrined in the life of the nation. That
didn’t happen until 1863 during the terrible throes of the Civil War, when
President Abraham Lincoln’s good instincts led him to make a formal
proclamation of Thanksgiving as a recurring national holiday to (and here I
quote) “commend to God’s tender care all those who have become widows,
orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife (of this war)
and to heal the wounds of the nation.”
President Lincoln unabashedly put God in the
Thanksgiving picture so we are in good company, we who have chosen to begin
this day in prayer, and not just any prayer, but the Church’s great Prayer
of Thanksgiving, the Eucharist.
And wouldn’t you agree that Lincoln’s words of more
than 150 years ago carry a message we need to hear again at this particular
moment in our national history? In its 240 years, our nation has had
its ups and downs, its moments of glory and moments of shame, its times of
violence and times of peace, its pitched battles and its quiet harbors of
unity and harmony. And then there is this moment. This moment -
in the wake of a bitter, seemingly endless election that was probably unlike
any other in our nation’s history, when the demons of our nature seemed to
suffocate the angels, when honesty and decency, respectful dialogue, civil
discourse and mutual respect all but faded from the national scene.
It’s almost as if we forgot who we were, forgot how to be Americans.
In light of this, Lincoln’s reference to “lamentable civil strife” has an
uncanny, contemporary ring to it, and his call “to heal the wounds of the
nation” is as much a call to us at this moment as it was to the people of
his time, torn asunder by civil war.
After all we have been through, we need to be
together today, and we need to give thanks. We do! But before we
give thanks, I think we need to first stop and ask God’s forgiveness and the
forgiveness of one another for any ways we may have contributed to what
Lincoln called, “the wounds of the nation”: any fear or hatred we may have
stirred up or bought into, any credence we may have given to fabrications or
deliberate misrepresentations, any laziness we may have evidenced by not
carefully studying the issues and getting to the facts, any prejudices we
may have perpetuated, any walls we may have built, any bridges we may have
breached. Only when we own our own sins and repent of them can the
sins of others be addressed -- sins like hate-talk, fear-mongering, the
cavalier disregard of those who feel left behind, the wholesale defaming of
entire ethnic and religious groups, and all the other sins that
characterized this most miserable of election seasons.
I realize, my friends, that this is heavy stuff for
Thanksgiving Day – very heavy stuff - but this Thanksgiving Day comes at a
time quite unlike any we have ever known. And thanksgiving should come from
consciences that are clear and hearts that are open, not closed or clenched.
With that in mind, we open our hearts during this
Mass – first, to the God who loves us and always challenges us to be our
best selves, our noblest selves, the God of Jesus Christ who shows us like
no one else how to love, to reconcile, to forgive and, yes, to hope.
And we open our hearts to each other, too, knowing that, for all our
differences, there is far more that unites than divides us: our common
humanity, our faith, our love for God and for our beloved country. And
lastly, we open our hearts to the poor and to all who are on the margins of
our society – to all who have far less to be thankful for than we do.
Our coming forward to the altar in a few minutes with our gifts of food for
the poor will be a small but real acknowledgement of our solidarity with
them as well as our concern for them. And our reaching out to them can bring
us together and help to blur the lines that divide us.
We should be thankful for the opportunity this great
national holiday gives us to reach out to the poor in love. And
the gifts we bring - the food, the money – we call them our own, but deep
down we know that they are first of all God’s gifts to us, no more meant to
be hoarded than God hoards from us the divine gifts.
Dear friends in Christ, when we leave the Cathedral
this morning, we will go from this altar table to our family tables.
As we do, let us recommit ourselves to build strong links between those two
tables, and also to reach out to those who have no table at all. And
let us leave this place today with one thing in our minds and hearts – a
prayer of thanksgiving to the God who in his mercy has done great things for
us and calls us to do – if not great things - at least loving, caring,
forgiving things. “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” for “it is
right and just!”
Father Michael G. Ryan
