Being thankful together

Thanksgiving is Thursday. Feasts will take place at dining tables across the country as family and friends gather in celebration and care for each other. There will be few masks and little social distancing. Everyone wants the coronavirus pandemic to be over and most Americans are acting like it is, not paying attention to the almost 100 million cases and over one million deaths the past three years.

Our small individual gatherings bind families together. That is not the reason that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863. In the midst of our great Civil War Lincoln sought collective healing, going to the well of humility:

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, …to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving ... And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him …, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

Secretary of State William Seward wrote those words for the president that October.

That call was for a national day of Thanksgiving for all of us to be in Union “to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it.”

A Thanksgiving of friends and family is personal. In the ecosystem of any community, family takes a small place by definition. A capital-T Thanksgiving must stretch open hands into the wider world to clasp and grasp humanity. For the nation to reach “the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union” today, the Blue tribe and the Red tribe must sit down together. And sitting down together is just the start, the beginning, not the goal.

How do we get to a shared table and how can we stay together for more than one meal?

Locally, as a family, congregation or club, everyone is thankful for their survival and prosperity. The challenge is to recognize and maintain that thankfulness for a survival and prosperity that has always been tenuous for the collective “we” as we aggregate into large communities of towns, counties, regions and states. The truth is, we have a common struggle. We need to want to define a shared, necessary path toward a solution.

Our struggle is not with our fellow humans, not with the great unwashed or those who are “woke” and imposing their version of reality on others. However we choose to gather, coming together with allies alone will be a smaller communion, not a Thanksgiving with the purpose Lincoln called for.

Across the land there is “lamentable civil strife.” Too many are fully engaged in it, taking sustenance and strength in the enjoyment of pushing conflict forward, of finding the enemy among their fellow citizens. We are a wounded nation. All our wounds are self-inflicted. While we are thus divided no larger Thanksgiving is possible.

Thanksgiving is Thursday. How do we carry a national Thanksgiving forward into the weekend, the new year, an ongoing future of sitting down at a common table to share the bounty that is all around us?

If we do not offer thanks that way we are not truly giving thanks to all who make this world possible.