The forgotten feast

I was hurrying past on an errand at the local shopping mall until a still life arrested me. There, in the middle of the atrium for all to see were the not-yet-assembled pieces of Christmas—Santa’s workshop with an assortment of plastic reindeer parts, fake greenery, gauzy pieces of snow, and faux presents—lying in a heap. And it was mid-October.

Have you noticed? Halloween costumes and candy, stores decked in spider webs, and sales clerks gone goth now transition seamlessly into Christmas. The trees and snowmen go up before the pumpkins and scarecrows come down.

Lost in that retail equivalent of a Dagwood holiday sandwich is a little American novelty called Thanksgiving. You may remember it, a day to celebrate the blessings of harvest and a fruitful land, to remember the persecuted Pilgrims who crossed from Delfthaven “the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles,” as William Bradford put it, to find “but a hideous and desolate wilderness.” They and other settlers, by God’s grace, made something of this once-desolate place.

Let our feasting on Thanksgiving be bountiful, because as Christians and as Americans we have so much to thank God for. But let’s feast on more than food.

In one sense you could argue the issues of the day assail us because of the plenitude our forefathers began to collect around 1610 (I’m a Virginia girl, so I date the first Thanksgiving to Jamestown, not the 1621 celebration at Plymouth). Our immigration woes are the result of being a land—no, actually the land—the downtrodden dream of. Economic doldrums stand in contrast to our decades—no, centuries—of dependable material prosperity. Faraway atrocities—frightening Ebola deaths, Middle East beheadings—shock and buffet us because somewhere along the way Americans got the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with rights to lives of liberty. In other words, we have a keener sense of where the world is off kilter because we have something solid beneath us. And in 2014, as in 1610 or 1621, we have so much to be thankful for.

I’m glad Thanksgiving hasn’t morphed into a branded commodity, that it’s lost to most commercializers. But there’s a reason: For many the purpose of celebrating has evaporated. Without recognition of a Creator, who’s to thank?

“America is a mixed marriage of biblical and Enlightenment ideas, but the bad news is mom and pop are getting a divorce,” Charles Chaput, the Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia, said in a lecture last month. The separation will be bad, Chaput noted, “because religious faith has a key role in sustaining America and moderating democracy, which otherwise lacks a higher authority.”

Chaput titled his lecture “Strangers in a Strange Land,” admitting that religious believers who once felt rooted in American society now feel “like strangers, out of place and out of sync in the land of their birth.” There’s perhaps no better time to feel this way than that fourth Thursday in November when you gather at home with family and friends, and perhaps attend a Thanksgiving service at church while everyone else lines up for Black Friday shopping.

Let our feasting on Thanksgiving be bountiful, because as Christians and as Americans we have so much to thank God for. But let’s feast on more than food. We continue a tradition started in my husband’s family, beginning the Thanksgiving meal with a reading of “The Desolate Wilderness,” William Bradford’s chronicle of Plymouth Colony in 1620 that since 1961 has appeared each Thanksgiving in The Wall Street Journal. The food won’t get cold, and its conclusion never fails to arrest me, especially looking over a table laden with food:

… for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

We sometimes cap Thanksgiving night with singing from Handel’s Messiah, moving not to the retailers’ rhythm but filling up on gratefulness as we move into Advent season.

Email mbelz@wng.org