For many people, this will be a difficult Thanksgiving. It seems more a time of lamentation than thanksgiving.
But hasn’t this often been the case? A half-century ago Thanksgiving came just a few days after President Kennedy was assassinated.
The holiday was born as a national day of remembrance on Oct. 3, 1863, three months after the battle of Gettysburg, in the midst of an existential struggle for the soul of this nation. President Lincoln proclaimed a day of thanksgiving. He asked (in words written by his secretary of state, William Seward) that we thank God for our blessings, but also humbly repent our “national perverseness and disobedience” that had brought on a terrible civil war.
Lincoln himself, in his second Inaugural Address, reckoned the costs and declared the meaning of the struggle in immortal words.
“Each (side) looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God. … It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
The war ended shortly after Lincoln spoke these words. A few days later, he was assassinated. We are still paying the price for slavery, still trying to understand God’s purposes.
So what are we thankful for today? So many of these blessings are tinged with tragedy.
I give thanks for Martin Rinkart, the poet who wrote “Nun Danket.” Here is how it is translated by Catherine Winkworth.
“Now thank we all our God,
“With heart and hands and voices …
“Who from our mother’s arms
“Hath blessed us on our way
“With countless gifts of love …
“O may this bounteous God
“Thro’ all our life be near us!
“With ever joyful hearts
“And blessed peace to cheer us …
“And free us from all ills
“In this world and the next.”
Set to music by Johann Crueger, this glorious hymn has become our anthem on Thanksgiving Day. From Pastor Rinkart, these were not facile words. His city, Eilenburg, had been sacked three times during the horrific Thirty Years’ War. Many of his family and those in his pastoral care lost their lives.
I thank God also for the witness of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who took the occasion of her congratulatory call to our newly elected president to remind him of the values we share as citizens of nations committed to liberal democracy. “Germany and America are bound by their values,” she said, which she then enumerated: “Democracy, freedom, respect for law and for the dignity of human beings, independent of their origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political beliefs.”
Was she casting “pearls before swine”? Let us hope not.
I am grateful as well for a good piece by my colleague on this page, Sara Weinberger, who wrote of her effort to understand those who supported a different candidate. And for an excellent new book about rural Louisiana by Arlie Russell Hochschild, entitled “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.”
I give thanks for Jim Wallis, a white evangelical preacher and editor of Sojourner magazine, who did not mince words in condemning the “racial bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia” that characterized much of the political discourse in our country in recent months. Wallis notes that a “vast majority of white voters on all levels, classes and genders” voted to elect a candidate whose basic appeal was to make America white again. Indeed a majority of white Christians voted for him, making whiteness “an idol that has separated white Christians from God. Nothing less than biblical repentance … is now required from all of us white people in America who call themselves Christian,” Wallis writes.
Wallis concludes by calling on Christians to renew their commitment to the “multiethnic body of Christ … that we celebrate round the world, to nurture our own children in a faith that unites and not divides, and to re-commit ourselves to love, care for, and sustain each other.”
Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. As we give thanks for our blessings, we must not make peace with oppression nor forget our solemn obligation to love our enemies.
Don Robinson, a retired professor of government at Smith College, writes a regular column for the Gazette which is published the fourth Thursday of the month. He can be reached at drobins@smith.edu.