395 Years and Counting

            In 1621 Pilgrims and Native Americans sat down together and joined in a pot luck meal together.  You know what a pot luck meal is like – a little of this from one person and a little of that from another and first thing you know everyone is satisfied. 

            That “First Thanksgiving” has become a seasonal staple now.  Although there is some variety,  the meal usually includes a turkey (roasted or now deep-fried) along with plenty of side dishes heavy on the starches and carbohydrates.  Many families get out the “best” china and encourage everyone to sit around a table to eat at least this one meal a year.  The timing of the meal varies across the country to fit into travel schedules, parades, football games and early shopping.   Conversation around the table is somewhere on the spectrum of polite and restrained to open hostility.  It has become the embodiment of our American experience.

                                                

                                                   

            This year has the potential to be particularly trying because so much that has become common is antithetical to peaceful quiet celebrations.  Our dietary habits (or restrictions because of disease) place restraints on the possible menu.  Many families are so busy they rarely sit down together for a daily meal.  Our electronic devices have consumed our interest, replacing  real conversation.  Our recent political season has been full of negativity, offensive language, and destructive rhetoric.  Happy Thanksgiving.  Let’s all get together.  Groan.

            Yet this, of all years, is a time calling us to rewrite the narrative into something that includes us all as persons fortunate enough to live in this great country.

            We cannot even rely on the history of that feast to show us how harmony and unity played out almost four centuries ago.  The colonists and the Native Americans would shortly be engaged in open warfare and the local tribes would be pushed out of their native habitat to make room for more settlers.

            What does offer a possibility is how Thanksgiving became a national holiday.  In 1846 Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an influential magazine of the period, decided the nation needed a national Thanksgiving holiday.  She began this project during a time of great divisions and conflicts in our nation.  She perceived that there was a need to rewrite the national narrative beyond the divisions.  A spirit of unity would not erase the sin and suffering of slavery practiced over the  years in both northern and southern states.  A spirit of unity would not ease the regional divides where distance precluded contact and conversation.  A spirit of unity in the name of remembering the experience of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native Peoples would not result in a narrative free of potential conflict and exertion of power.

            I suspect that what Sarah Joseph Hale sensed was that setting apart a day of national remembrance might make people think ever so briefly, but ever so importantly, about the things that bind us together even if those things are not identical.  The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native Peoples, along with the handful of non-Pilgrim Mayflower travelers, all had a faith story that directed their lives.  The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Native Peoples had found ways to accommodate to one another.  The Pilgrims would not have survived, and the Puritans would not have had a “destination” port for the Massachusetts Bay Colony had the colonists not received life-giving lessons in gardening, planting, harvesting and hunting.  Stories of faith belief and shared need helped them get through the winter and the growing season to reach harvest time.  The Harvest Festival (the National Pot Luck Extravaganza) was a time to celebrate what could be and what had been experienced.

            We come to another time of deep divisions in our country.  We are in a time when hateful and destructive epitaphs are being heaped on some people because of who they are or for whom they voted.  Thanksgiving 2016 is a time to celebrate our faith stories (and may I suggest Psalms 111, 100, 8) and it is a time to  remember we are all created by God and beloved by God.

            Five hundred years ago the Aztecs of the Southern Hemisphere of what we call the Americas had this prayer:

Lord most giving and resourceful,

I implore you;

make it be your will

that this people enjoy

the goods and riches you naturally give,

that naturally issue from you,

that are pleasing and savory,

that delight and comfort,

though lasting but briefly,

passing away as if in a dream.

May it be so.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Grace and Peace

Rev. Clara