A Thanksgiving Love Letter

How is your heart this week as you prepare for Thanksgiving? I want to recognize that while it is a day intended for joy and celebration and a collective giving of thanks, it also comes, for many of us, with a unique mix of joy and trepidation. Gathering with our loved ones, while delightful in theory, is not always smooth sailing in practice. Those we love the most are also often the ones who hurt us the most. This time of celebration can often be tinged with hurt, resentment, grief, or bitterness. What’s more, many of us have become estranged from those closest to us in the last couple of years because of increasing ideological divides. This Thanksgiving, I can’t help but wonder, how do we find our way back to one another amid what divides us?

In reflecting on gratitude this year, not only for you, but in my own life, I felt stumped about how to write about Thanksgiving that might meet you where you are, especially amid any hurt, dysfunction, or division that can invade our holidays like an elephant in the room. So naturally, I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about the origins of this holiday and what if anything it might teach us for today. Though I read about what my public school education already taught me about the feast of the Pilgrims and Native Americans, I was surprised to learn that Thanksgiving wasn’t instituted as a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. And in fact, there were many versions of Thanksgiving feasts before that, often invoked amid times of division and strife. I realized that throughout our history, God always seems to draw us back to Thanksgiving, offering us a way back home to one another and our common humanity.

Thanksgiving then, it seems to me, is not simply a day to eat turkey and make a superficial list of what we’re thankful for. It can be, if we let it, a way home to love. Thanksgiving challenges us to rewire our natural inclination towards finding the speck in our brother’s eye, to the beauty and goodness in the work of art that is our brother, our sister. It can train us to look past that which divides us, and find common ground. It wants to give us eyes to see. We need Thanksgiving if we are to be people of love.

Recently, I have marveled about how Jesus did not give into bitterness, hate, or rejection on the cross. As much as was done to Jesus, he never let it turn him towards hate. Instead, he forgave. How in the world?

He hung on that cross and looked beyond the cruelty that was done to him, beyond the differences of Roman or Jew and who was to blame, beyond the religious misunderstanding and envy, and saw those whom he loved and made. He saw right through to the human heart and he was able to forgive and extend himself in an embodied Eucharist.

Eucharist comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving.

And so, this Thanksgiving, may we gather around the table, to lay down our lives, our ideologies, our political beefs, to break our hearts open in love. To eat and drink with friends, family, and maybe even enemies. We pray to see past the externals, to the heart and the gift of one another. May we practice forgiveness, and give thanks together.

Whatever you hold in your hands today, with whatever lot you have been given, may you find the reasons to give thanks, even in the midst of suffering and pain and the reality of what is true in your life.

May you experience the peace and thanksgiving of Christ this Thanksgiving!