Thanksgiving is an imperfect holiday.
Sure, we get to feast with our closest friends and family. We watch giant balloons floating through the sky and a taut pigskin hurtling down the field. We go for a post-dinner walk or play flag football or collapse on the sofa in a food coma. And sometimes that can feel pretty perfect.
But Thanksgiving is inherently imperfect.
Easter and Christmas, the biggest, most celebrated holidays in America, focus on what a perfect God did to provide for us.
Thanksgiving, in contrast, is uniquely human, commemorating what imperfect peopledid to thank God for His provision.
The Pilgrims themselves were refugee immigrants, grasping at any new opportunity to flee the life they had known (hence the moniker Pilgrim). After they had escaped the unyielding, punitive religious dogma of England for Holland in their quest for religious liberty, they found themselves impoverished in the Dutch Republic, with low wages, child labor, a lack of community integration, and poor living conditions.
They dreamed of a new life that offered both economic security, and the ability to practice their religion freely and pass it down to their children without the secular influences permitted by Dutch religious pluralism. So they boarded a boat and crossed the ocean, hoping for a better, holier, more prosperous life for their families.
The Pilgrims didn’t always handle life in their new land well. Instead of assimilating into the established Wampanoag Nation culture or finding a way to blend in, they were resolute about retaining their English identity—even after having fled from the land and church they found oppressive. Instead of learning the local language, most of them relied on interpreters—even as they learned from the Wampanoag how to farm their new land. Instead of integrating with and living alongside their new neighbors, they set up an enclave in an abandoned village—even though this was only made possible by the “Great Dying,” when disease brought by previous European explorers killed tens of thousands of Wampanoag, a two-thirds population decimation.
As the Pilgrims’ enclave expanded and increasingly encroached into Wampanoag Nation territory, tensions would simmer and erupt into war.
Not exactly the story we learned in Kindergarten as we made our construction-paper pilgrim hats and Wampanoag feathers. But it is a tale as old as time, of people risking all to get to a new land and secure a brighter future for themselves and their children.
The Pilgrims had a need. They had a plan. They just needed to follow Christ’s lead towards humility, gratitude for other people not solely God, and respect for those who may look or dress or live differently.
In the end, the Pilgrims were people who were just grateful to have made it across the ocean and survived—barely—through another season, another night. They were people who mourned the loss of half their friends and families, infants to elders, in that first winter, even as they celebrated their own survival.
Did they feel survivor’s guilt? Did they talk by the fire about how scared they were as they watched so many of their number perish? We’ll never know.
We do know that what we call the first Thanksgiving was not a one-time deal; the Pilgrims and other refugee immigrants of the day regularly set aside time for prayer: either for humiliation and fasting to ask for God’s forgiveness and protection, or for thankful prayer and feasting to worship God and express gratitude.
And we know that on that day, the Pilgrims shot their guns into the air to celebrate the harvest that would alo low them to survive the coming winter. The Wampanoag came to investigate the gunfire, and they were then invited to share in the bountiful harvest with the Pilgrims they had welcomed to their land, and coached and trained to survive.
For a moment, they feasted together, and it wasn’t about what had been or what was to come. It wasn’t about the pain; it was about the gratitude.
That Thanksgiving was for the ones who had a past, the ones who left something behind, and the ones who still had hope for the future despite it all. It was even for the ones who left a swath of destruction in their wake as they forged their new path.
It was for the ones who welcomed strangers to their land and loved them as best they could, innocent to the devastation to come. The ones who came to check out a noise, and once they were invited to the feast, went out and killed five deer to contribute…like a colonial version of bringing the mac and cheese.
Thanksgiving is a holiday for the broken.
It’s a moment to come together in all our deception and betrayal and shame and all the rights and wrongs we have yet to do, and look up, not out.
Thanksgiving promises that even when we mess up, even when our motives aren’t pure, God will provide…
…except sometimes He doesn’t.
Sometimes you get to your new land and then more than half of you die in the first winter, two or three a day for a while. Sometimes you dig a lot of graves. Sometimes that grave is for your dad or your daughter.
Sometimes the little match girl doesn’t sell any matches. Sometimes the orphan doesn’t make it to the UN food distribution centre. Sometimes the mother and her boy don’t escape the vicious rebel forces that snatched them up.
Sometimes we are attacked or betrayed. Sometimes the persecution doesn’t stop. Sometimes we aren’t healed, we are wracked with pain, and it’s all we can do to just keep breathing…until that moment comes when we can’t, and don’t.
And sometimes we, the “good guys,” attack others, whether or not we really meant to.
So what is Thanksgiving really about?
Even in a fallen world with far too much misery, of all types and kinds and perpetrated on and by us, sometimes we have just enough food and friendship and unity to share a meal, be it feast or scraps. And that is something to celebrate.
Thanksgiving is a time to look beyond and above ourselves, and love a little more.
So maybe it is the perfect holiday.
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