Notes of Concern…..
….Jackson Blair
“Thanks”
“Thanks Giving”
“Giving Thanks”
“Thanksgiving”
We are all familiar with the origin of this holiday.
People with very different histories, and complexions, and experiences joined in a common meal, to thank God for their delivery from the winter and other difficulties, and for their ability to share a harvest and look forward to the future.
If certain groups common to contemporary life were around then, I am not at all certain who would be thanked, but I am certain it would not be anyone called “God.”
Throughout our history we have examples of the people attributing good outcomes to a benevolent God. It is not my intention to get into an intellectual argument over this, just to state it as an historical fact. We unite around the idea of Godly goodness and generosity and love. I have a lot of difficulty finding fault with such a scheme.
As I was thinking about the Thanksgiving holiday I did something I often do, I tried to force myself to think of it in a different way.
Like you, I enjoyed family meals with an overabundance of food, a lazy afternoon watching football, and days of fabulous “leftovers” and I even watched the Macy’s Parade from time to time.
Over the years I have been thankful for a lot of things and I am pleased to have a special day to truly reflect on all the things for which I should be thankful. It is more than a little embarrassing to admit that we should be thankful every day but we are too busy to give that a lot of daily thought.
My thinking brought me to the idea not just of being thankful and giving thanks but to the idea of giving as a measure of gratitude.
One of the reasons this came to mind was that my wife returned from a trip to Walmart the other night with a lot of toys and trinkets. I immediately assumed she was getting ready for Christmas and planning gifts for the “Grands.” A little later I saw her fitting these items into a shoebox. My questioning brought a response I did not anticipate. She was putting together a shoebox of gifts for a deserving child and her box, along with lots of other boxes, would be given to unnamed persons sometime during the holiday season.
I cannot say this surprises me because my wife has been given over to these sorts of gifts for a long time. You cannot imagine my surprise when I found out one Christmas that she had given her mother a cow and her mother had given her a sheep. Not literally, of course, but figuratively. Instead of spending money on themselves they had each purchased livestock for some village in a far off land.
Of course, the kind men and women ringing the Salvation Army bell have been trying to tell us for years that we need to give not just thanks, but tangible resources, to those who have none.
So in the spirit of the first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims really needed to thank the Indians for the seeds and the Indians wanted to thank the Pilgrims for their help in the hunt, and the way they chose to do this was to share their bounty and enjoy one another’s company, lets think in 2009 of ways in which we can share our bounty, even if we cannot share our company, with a lot of people in the world who have so little for which to be thankful but who, in my experience, are generally very thankful for the little they have.
Whether it is a village in the far reaches of a jungle in Ecuador, the townships of South Africa known as Soweto and Khayelitsha, or the slums of India, the happy faces I have seen and the hope in the eyes of the people in these places remind me in very tangible ways that we in America should be giving thanks, and just giving, every day of our lives.
Open up your hearts and your wallets and really “give” thanks this year. Make it a real “thanks” giving. You can still eat all the great food, enjoy your family, watch a good football game, take in the Macy’s parade, but this year you will do so with the knowledge that someone, somewhere, is having a better day because of the manner in which you decided to give thanks.
