Thanksgiving Dinner with the Forebears: Questions I'd Love to Ask

A wild change of subject from my usual political-religious analysis (some might say rants): I don't want U.S. Thanksgiving to recede too far in the past without sharing some of my obsessions from another aspect of my life, researching my family tree. I offer this first tidbit because it amuses me, and will perhaps offer amusement to others. It shows how precise the focus of DNA research is becoming for those engaged in genealogical study — if, that is, you believe in the validity of this kind of analysis.

As Americans Celebrate Thanksgiving, Obligation to Remember Our Real History

Mural replica in Silverton, Oregon, of one of Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" paintings,  at Wikimedia Commons

It's not Thanksgiving the world over, of course. But for us Americans, who tend to be self-focused, in any case, this is a day on which I suspect many of us think the whole world stops along with us to revel in "memories" of an iconized, mythologized American past that never really existed — at least not in the way we want to recall it. And to the extent to which it did exist, it meant a heap of misery for a lot of people who were mere adjuncts to the main narrative celebrated in our national icons, a narrative of happy native Americans sitting peaceably with grateful colonists, genocide and plunder of land nowhere in the mythological picture. Our iconic picture of American Thanksgiving is an equally fabulous (emphasis on root word "fable") picture of happy (always white, white, white) families, grandparents, parents, children, sitting thankfully and amicably at a long table eating bland foods devoid of herbs, spice, garlic, chili, nary a quarrel or disagreement (or thought?) in sight.

A Note of Thanks to Those Who Make This Blog Possible — Above All, My Husband Steve

As a new year gets underway, I feel moved to make a statement of heartfelt thanks here — thanks to my husband Steve, who makes it possible for me to blog (and read and write) by assuming the responsibility of being the primary breadwinner of our household. As some of you know (but you may not all know this), I don't have a full-time job, while Steve does. 

Two Thanksgiving Videos: Brothers and Sisters Under the Skin, and Our Chance to Atone for the Holocaust

God's Mercy and Hate Rhetoric in the U.S. Public Square: A Thanksgiving Meditation

A little (American) Thanksgiving day meditation I shared this morning on Facebook. Since a friend there told me she thought it was valuable, I now think to share it with all of you here, too — and with greetings to many readers of this blog who aren't celebrating the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving today, but whom I don't intend to exclude by framing this as a Thanksgiving meditation. Here's what I wrote on Facebook: 

The Command to Open Our Hands and American Exceptionalism: Marilynne Robinson on the Real Roots of American Christianity

On this American holiday centered on giving thanks, Marilynne Robinson's words in her essay entitled "Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origin of American Liberalism" spring back to mind:

Thanksgiving As Giving: Recommending to You Today a Local Group Supporting LGBT Youth

You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be (Deuteronomy 15:8)

For those celebrating a holiday centered on thanksgiving today (and I realize that much of the world isn't in that category), here's a story that may be of some interest — since giving thanks is about giving first and foremost. It's by giving to others that we open the spaces in our hearts and lives that enable us to be thankful, it seems to me.

Gratitude: A Story from Our Recent Trip

Gratitude is the highest form of acceptance. Like patience, it is one of the catalytic agents, one of the alchemist's secrets, for turning dross to gold, hell to heaven, death to life (Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last [NY: Bell Tower, 1997).

Giving Thanks for . . . You

As the American Thanksgiving holiday nears, I want to issue a note of profound thanks to all the readers of this blog who contribute so much to Steve's and my life on an ongoing basis.  The supportive comments many of you made in response to my meditation yesterday about events in his home Catholic diocese of Crookston, Minnesota, mean a great deal to both of us.  I read them to Steve this morning, and he was very touched by the support.

Baking Bread, Leavening Dough: A Thanksgiving Meditation from Steve

Steve, as he and I walked this morning (we were talking about an essay I read yesterday by Michael Weingrad about why there's no Jewish Narnia): 

A Thanksgiving Open Letter to Catholics of the Crookston, Minnesota, Diocese

To the Catholic People of the Diocese of Crookston, Minnesota

Dear Fellow Catholics:

As you know, the day after tomorrow will be the Thanksgiving holiday.  This holiday has become in the American psyche a time to celebrate family, a time when family gathers from far and near to sit around the family table and share a meal of thanksgiving together.  

To Readers: A Thank-You for Ideas for Postings

As I continue posting repeatedly about the Komen-Planned Parenthood events, the HHS guidelines on contraceptive coverage, and the Catholic involvement with these issues, I'd like to write a quick thank-you note to several readers who have sent me very good suggestions for postings in the past several weeks.  I always appreciate any and all such suggestions, and I want any readers who have sent these to me to know I'm not ignoring you.  And that I value you and your interest in the blog.

Bill Scher Is Thankful Conservatives No Longer Pretending

Here's what Bill Scher is thankful for this Thanksgiving season: 

Give Thanks and Shop Till You Drop: Coleen Rowley on Culture of Spiritual Death Dominating American Life

Post-Thanksgiving Shoppers 2010

While the American right is furious that President Obama didn't mention God in his brief Thanksgiving address, many of us did our patriotic-religious duty à la George W. Bush yesterday and shopped till we dropped.  Or we shopped till we had pepper-sprayed our fellow shoppers into submission as we lunged for video games at Wal-Mart.

Happy Thanksgiving

Edward Hicks, "Peaceable Kingdom"

For any American readers who may be logging in to read as you prepare to travel for today's holiday, or as you prepare for the family gathering (and I dearly hope holiday-makers aren't wasting time reading this), a pre-gathering reflection I find helpful from Patricia Volk's book Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family (NY: Vintage, 2001):

Thanksgiving, the Occupy Movement, and Jesus's Practice of Open Commensality

As American Thanksgiving approaches and many people expect to gather tomorrow around family tables or tables of chosen families, I'm thinking of something John Dominic Crossan says in his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (NY: HarperCollins, 1994).  Crossan notes that Jesus's practice of open commensality--of inviting anyone and everyone to his table, and, above all, those considered outcasts in his religious and social world--forms the historical basis of the Christian eucharist.  

Gratitude: My Five Points

My family never did Thanksgiving when I was growing up.  So I'm unaccustomed to the practice that now seems embedded in American culture, of listing things for which I'm grateful as Thanksgiving day arrives.

When I say that we didn't do Thanksgiving, I don't mean to say that we ignored the holiday.  We did have a traditional family meal, though, as my mother often told me, in her childhood Thanksgiving was hardly marked at all, and the traditional Christmas table was far more likely to feature chicken baked with dressing and ham than turkey.  So "tradition" is a slippery term when it comes to this particular holiday, as it so often when people think they know precisely what their traditions stipulate and have always maintained.

On Giving

“The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation,” Lewis Hyde, The Gift (NY: Random House, 1979), p. xix.

I’m reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift with great interest these days, and thinking about the application of his insights to organized religion. When religions lose sight of the giftedness of everything—of all existence, which comes to us without our reckoning or beckoning—they depart from the root that gives life to the religious impulse.

Who we are, what we have, comes to us despite ourselves, from beyond ourselves. How we name the giver of the gift of existence, or whether we even think the giver should be personalized, is not my interest here. What attracts my attention instead is how everything we have, including “our”selves, is gift, something passing through our hands to be crafted into gifts for others, and then handed on.

Glimpsing this makes life profoundly different. It’s what communities of faith claim to glimpse when they induct people into their various mysteries, train them to live lives normed by faith, hope and love.

And yet how profoundly alien these insights about our inability to own or control anything, including “our”selves—ultimately to own or control anything—seem, from the religious vantage point of many churches in 21st-century America. We devote a single day a year to a maudlin, sentimental “remembrance” of our need to give thanks.

In the very act of giving thanks, we drive the wedge deeper between ourselves and those we imagine as the ungifted. We remind ourselves to give a turkey, a few cans of cranberry sauce.

And then we forget. For a year. We forget that we are implicated in the lives these others live. We are implicated in their homelessness, their lack of healthcare, their inability to find good educations and fulfilling, productive jobs.

We talk about being thankful and about giving, but we do not view our lives and all that passes through our hands as gift. And so we lose sight of our connectedness to others, and our responsibility for what others lack. Until we “remember” again the following Thanksgiving.

Only to forget as quickly as we have remembered.

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And a Thanksgiving poem:


I watch the philodendron leaf
Unfurl
As my heart
Lightgreedy and hungrylove.


What I really want to say
Is not my heart
But you, and you, and you.


Look for springing forth
As irontight buds disband
And fistclosed leaves let loose their clutch.


Yet not release from heartroot.


I gaze in as lightest lashes of a catseye
Because I tend to my own garden
Hoping that you may grow.


Look for my soil's greening.
Take my ferns' fronds,
And heartsease,


For your pallets,
Dear ones.