Thanksgiving Before we get to our customary open mic when everyone has a chance to say what

Transcription

1 Thanksgiving 2011 Before we get to our customary open mic when everyone has a chance to say what they are thankful for over this past year, I would like to reflect briefly on the place of memory and history for us Christians. The Thanksgiving holiday provides the perfect opportunity for doing this, because of the ambiguities surrounding the historic origins of the celebration. How we remember the past is extremely important, because it has a tremendous impact on how we understand who we are and how we need to live today. Just at this moment in both our political and ecclesiastical worlds, there are strong pushes to create narratives, stories, that are simple, clean and suggestive of times past when life was supposedly less riven by strife, less troubled by conflict, less riddled by ambiguity, less divided by racial, ethnic and gender issues. During the past few years there has been more rhetoric and more appeals to our Founding Fathers, to Tea Parties and to the real meaning of Latin liturgical texts than I can recall in all the preceding years that I have lived. The Thanksgiving festival can then very easily become enmeshed in this as an embodiment of that nostalgia and yearning for a simpler, more pure past which can be seen as standing as a bulwark against a divided present and as a comfort against an uncertain future. For Christians, history is certainly vital, because, unlike for our Buddhist brothers and sisters who look forward to time when we will be rescued from history, Christians are convinced that at the end of history, God, who took on our very human limits in Jesus Christ, will make our fragile flesh imperishable. This means that the world and its history will not be swallowed up into emptiness, but will be changed and transformed. 1

2 Our past, our history, is part of not only our present, but of our future, and it too needs to be redeemed. The challenge which this, then, poses is for us to remember the past well. To remember the past well, we have to remember it truthfully- at least as truthfully as we can. That, of course, is not always easy, nor is it always comfortable. When we want a simple, uncomplicated narrative about the past, as many people increasingly do, we end up, often inadvertently, telling lies not only about the past, but about the present as well. The idea of a national day of thanksgiving is certainly a good thing, but it has always struck me as just slightly odd that we would associate such a festival with the Puritans of the 17 th century. The tradition of keeping Thanksgiving as a remembrance of their meal with members of the Wampanoag tribe of Native Americans on a cold November day in 1621 on the shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts had largely died out by the 19 th century. It was Abraham Lincoln who in 1863 in the midst of the American Civil War revived it by a Presidential decree. Even our official Catholic Book of Blessings explicitly makes this connection between the Thanksgiving festival and the Plymouth Puritans. That event of 1621 has been glorified throughout the years as a sort of shining example of religious and ethnic pluralism and the pioneering American spirit. The Puritans, however, were anything but freedom-loving or religiously tolerant. And what they subsequently did to the Native Americans tribes, if the historians are correct, was nothing less than genocide. We also have to remember that the Puritans had left 2

3 England because they despised Anglicanism, which they regarded as only marginally better than popery- Catholicism- us! The Puritans hated things like organs and musical instruments of all kinds in church, surplices and vestments, crosses, the Book of Common Prayer, the use of the sign of the cross in baptism and rings in weddings, and worst of all, beautiful churches and especially stained glass windows. The traditions of Thanksgiving associated with that 1621 event should, I would suggest, create a certain uneasiness in us. There is a wonderful story about an old, retired bishop of the Episcopal Church which illustrates this quite well. One Thanksgiving he and his wife went to visit their children and grandchildren. Preparations were being made around the kitchen table and the house was filled with the smells and the clamor associated with the festival. The old bishop sat down in a nice comfortable recliner and cracked open the newspaper. His pipe was full, and just as he was about to light it, his five-year-old grandson leapt in front of him dressed in a Puritan costume he had made the day before in school. Construction paper, brown fabric, Emer s glue, and some paper- mache were the makings of a black belt with a huge buckle, a blunderbuss gun, and an enormous hat with the same large buckle. Grandpa, Grandpa, look at me!, the boy yelled. The old bishop let out a grunt, with his pipe clinched between his teeth. Why are you dressed like the enemy? he said. 3

4 That story in a gentle way reminds us precisely of the ambiguities and the ambivalences of the past and of how we understand it. How do we remember the past well and how do we remember it truthfully, so that we do not fall into either a kind of false nostalgia for a mythical past- at either a political or ecclesiastical level- or a gloomy skepticism which leaves us rootless? The key, I think, is what we are doing as we gather on this Thanksgiving Day, and what occurred in 1619, three years before the Puritan event at Plymouth. On the 4 th of December, 1619, members of the Stanford Company arrived in Berkeley, Virginia, where their first official act was to celebrate the Holy Eucharist according to the rites prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer- Popish superstition as far as the Puritans were concerned.. That event was intended by the members of the Stanford Company to be commemorated every year thereafter as a day of thanksgiving. Unfortunately, however, everyone in that little community died of typhoid the following year, and as the saying goes, the victors- in this case, the survivors, the Puritans, lived to write the story and create the narrative. But it was that Eucharistic celebration of the Stanford Company, more than any other episode during that period, that, to my mind, provides us with the lens through which we need to read the past, as well as the present and the future. The Great Thanksgiving, the Eucharist of the Lord, is our key. It is our key because it is the memory and the Memorial which is truthful, which tells us the truth about God and about ourselves, and about our world. It tells us what God really is like, and it challenges us to face our past honestly. When we read our history and bring it to the 4

5 foot of the Crucified One, we are freed to remember it well. We are freed to acknowledge our successes and our failures. We are freed from the mythologies about ourselves that we would like to create, and we are freed to live into the truth of things. We are freed from the lies about how exceptional we think we are and have always been. We are freed to give thanks for life, for one another, for blessings that, as Abraham Lincoln so aptly pointed out in his Presidential decree establishing this Thanksgiving holiday, blessings we are prone to forget. At every Eucharist, our thanksgiving for what God has done for us in Jesus Christ can work- it can work to purify our memories and it can work to lead us into the future with hope. 5