There’s a popular Thanksgiving exercise where you sort of mentally list all the things you’re thankful for. Some people have made this a public exercise on Facebook. Some people do it as a sort of countdown, focusing on one thing each day leading up to Thanksgiving. We even have a saying about “counting your blessings.” It’s a good thing to be grateful, not just in a vague overall way, but specifically, counting, listing things that are blessings in our lives. And of course no one’s ever finished the list. None of us, once we started, could ever finish listing every blessing in our lives. We can say “count your blessings,” and it’s a good project, but it’s also one that can’t be done. It would be easier, literally, to count the hairs on your head.
But as we look at the history of this holiday, at its origins and foundations, the most striking thing is not how many blessings were present, but how much hardship. Thanksgiving as a holiday did not develop when things were better than they’d ever been. It developed when things were worse than they’d ever been.
The Pilgrims of 1621 had been through trials that are hard to imagine. They’d embarked on a dangerous journey of 66 days at sea, and began to establish the Plymouth Colony. Through the winter most of them stayed on the ship; safer than exposure outside but still brutal conditions riddled with contagion and scurvy and bitter cold. At the end of winter, half of them survived. Imagine that. The famous story ensued, the aid of Squanto and the local Abenaki and Pawtuxet and Wampanoag Indians, the first harvest… it must have seemed like they finally caught a break, like something finally went their way, but not before they’d lost half of their family and friends. Out of that crucible of hardship, Thanksgiving was born.
Observed in various times and places all along, it developed into a national holiday in 1863, declared by President Lincoln. 1863… right in the midst of our nation’s darkest days. This is a judgment call but I don’t think there’d be much argument that the Civil War was the worst, the low point, of our history as a nation so far. And that’s when we decided to have a national Thanksgiving. You might expect Thanksgiving holiday to be born from the best times, from the most prosperous, but quite the opposite is true. Why is that?
Pope Francis just wrote the Church a fantastic letter, which you can read about in Sunday’s bulletin, about the joy of the Gospel. And something he wrote ties into this perfectly. The Pope wrote:
“Sometimes we are tempted to find excuses and complain, acting as if we could only be happy if a thousand conditions were met. To some extent this is because our “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”. I can say that the most beautiful and natural expressions of joy which I have seen in my life were in poor people who had little to hold on to.”
He’s noticed that same link, the same paradoxical pattern that marks the development of Thanksgiving. I can add my small witness to his. I lived for one single week just outside Juarez in Anapra village. Juarez is a city that suffers horribly from drug trafficking and all the horrible evils that come with it. Most of you would consider it a place of crushing poverty. Anapra is the outlying community that is much poorer than that. It is a place where old tires and sheets of tin are considered building materials for the family home. But the most utterly joyful, free-spirited music and dancing I’ve ever seen happened there, as kids and young people gathered one night around a single drum, which was a 5-gallon bucket being hit with sticks.
So my suggestion, this Thanksgiving, my challenge to you, is to go ahead and think about your list of blessings, go ahead and start naming the things in your life that are blessings, and get as far as seems right to you through that list that you could never finish. But also tap into something underneath that, a deeper gratitude, something that isn’t contingent on the things in your life that are going well. Find that place that was known to the Pilgrims in 1621 who’d lost half their families, the Americans in 1863 who could see no end in sight to the Civil War, the kids in Anapra who got all the joy in the infinite cosmos out of a bucket, even though they wouldn’t all get supper that night.
Jesus once said, “take heart, little flock, for it has pleased the Father to give you the Kingdom.” That’s the basis, the foundation, for a truly Christian thankfulness. Come what may. Or as the hymn says, “all things are mine while I am his.” Sometimes I feel guilty being so light-hearted and joyful when so many people have so little. Then I remember that the people I’ve actually known who had the least were some of the most light-hearted and joyful people themselves. This Thanksgiving maybe we can take a lesson from the people we know who show the deepest spirit of gratefulness.
There are no words to express the thanksgiving owed to our Father. Except for the Greek word for thanksgiving, that word is big enough, because God has filled that word with himself: Eucharist.
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