An editorial reflection - Thankful for the water and land, first and last

Start with the Salish Sea. The sea came first. That is how Genesis starts: “In the beginning … the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.” Science coheres: for billions of years this was the water planet.

And then there is the Skagit Valley. Basically at sea level. Claimed from the sea by blood, sweat, hard work and dikes.

We can all agree on the beauty and bounty – historically – of the water and the land. I am thankful to be in this amazingly beautiful and bountiful place. It is awe inspiring.

I just don’t know how to get to capital-T Thanksgiving as a Disney movie or a Hallmark card. I love being thankful and am grateful for rituals of communal thanks. And for the blessing of being with family and friends. Personally, I am blessed.

But a time of celebration, of coming together, can be an opportunity for communal compassion, justice, and reconciliation. Our culture is opening up to some hard truths regarding the power of men over women in the workplace. Any discussion of power necessitates a consideration of the powerless. Examining those who rule opens up the question of how and why the rules got made.

Who wants to hear that their facts aren’t true, that they are on the wrong side of history? Not me. Do I have to grow, get better by swallowing that bitter medicine?

Here is a way in, a possible way through: One sentence from a sermon I heard over 20 years ago has stayed with me. The minister told us “All of our stories are true.” She was giving her parishioners permission to claim their individual truths, to honor and fight for core beliefs, no matter what the larger culture claimed. She was offering critical, essential validation at a time, like this time, when the truths told by the majority culture allowed no dissent for those not fitting that mold.

But what happens when two sets of ancestors have lived through the same history and carry the results of all the generations since, including very different outcomes, different hurts and different hopes?

Here is a very personal lesson I learned in my life, from a very painful end-of-marriage: holding on to true stories without hard effort to align those stories makes for rigid, intractable and not to be crossed boundaries and barriers – and for loneliness.

The only way to get to together, I discovered, is to take individual and separate true stories and do the hard work of getting to a jointly agreed upon shared true story. If we take the hurt and even the hate and find the role each of us has in having made that fact, that wound, and claim our part and responsibility and express a shared desire to get past that pain, then there are possibilities.

Someone wrote “together is the path walked by the brave.” I heard another minister say from the pulpit that “sharing is hard.” Either we are going to share and walk together or we are not. But we have to be honest with ourselves as well as each other.

In a year when we have once again struggled with “knowing” our nation’s history and identifying the bad guys in the story, a time when a few powerful men have been brought low for misuse of power, I am hopeful that we, the people, will be truthful with ourselves and thus able to offer the hand of true friendship to our neighbors.

That is what Thanksgiving is truly about. That is the table and the people I want to sit down to and with.