Living Thankfully

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  Yet, I also find it troubling to my spirit.

On the one hand, I rejoice in a day when my attention is focused on my family and those I love without distraction.  I rejoice in cooking turkey and dressing using my grandmother’s recipe.  I rejoice in the relaxed pace.  I rejoice in the sense that, somehow, all is right with the world. 

But I am troubled because I know all is not right with the world.  More troubling still, I know that the standard of living I enjoy is denied to most because of inequitable systems of distribution.  I know the peace I enjoy is denied to many across the world.  I know that the attention I give to family on this day is diverted to the challenge to survive for many families in the world I share with them.

There have been years when I felt guilty about Thanksgiving.  I know that does no one any good, but I can’t help feeling that way sometimes.

The spiritual challenge of Thanksgiving for those of us with so much is first to come to terms with how much we do in fact have.  The second challenge is to get over feeling guilty about it.  And the third challenge is to channel freedom from guilt away from complacency and toward acting constructively to make what we enjoy available to all God’s children. 

The central spiritual challenge of Thanksgiving is to live thankfully, which is to accept that what we have received is what we have been given and not what we have earned.  Beyond that, it is to take what we have been given and give in turn to others.  The spiritual challenge of Thanksgiving is not about guilt about what we have.  It is about what we do with what we have. 

Among the many undeserved blessings for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving are all of you.  Thank you.  I can only hope that I will act thankfully on the great gift you are to me. 

I hope the same for you, a Thanksgiving of acting and living thankfully, of using all you have, of giving all you have. 

Ginger, Annie, and Georgia (the new puppy) join me in wishing you all the happiness that comes, not from what you have, but with how you use what you have.

Peace,

Thanksgiving is for Giving

I once brought a high school youth group to New York to work at the soup kitchen at Holy Apostles.  They saw a lot of things that opened their privileged, suburban eyes to life as much of the rest of the world knows it.  Before we left, I asked the group to reflect on what they had learned.  One girl, a high school senior who lived in a gated community with a house on the water and a large boat tied to the dock at the end of her back yard answered the question readily.  “I learned to be thankful for how much I have,” she said. 

On Thursday of last week, one week before Thanksgiving, I returned from a pilgrimage introducing bishops and other church leaders to the Episcopal Church’s ministry in Haiti.  They, too, saw a lot of things that were not part of their normal experience.  Now almost four years after the devastation of an earthquake, there are still tens of thousands living in tent cities, admittedly much fewer than before.  Many schools and churches, although there has been remarkable progress, are still in temporary open-air facilities.  Piles of rubble and garbage are largely, though not entirely, gone from the streets.  Cholera remains a problem.  So does hunger.  We witnessed some of the pent up frustration flow over in civil unrest.  I wondered about the question I had asked my youth group and if the church leaders I was with would answer the same way—“I learned to be thankful for how much I have.”

Is that what Thanksgiving has come to mean, being thankful for how much we have?  If that is so, thankfulness has gotten linked with keeping what we gave been given, which makes it antithetical, rather than receptive, to generosity.  If that is so, what have the people of Haiti to be thankful for?  Where are they left when it comes to our Thanksgiving holiday?

If Thanksgiving is about being thankful for how much we have, surely it must be being thankful for how much we have to give and not how much we have to keep.  When thankfulness gets mixed up with who has the right to keep what, that’s a problem.  Thankfulness is more properly linked to participating in the giving and not in being the recipient of the giving. 

Here’s what I learned in Haiti.  I’m thankful for how much I have to give.  I hope that’s what all of us on that trip may have learned, how much we have to give and the spirit to do so.  That’s what makes for Thanksgiving.

Of course, all that might at first glance leave one wondering again about the people of Haiti.  If Thanksgiving is properly linked to how much we have to give, what again have they to be thankful for?  The answer, I think, is what they taught me in the days leading up to Thanksgiving week.  They gave me a great gift indeed, which is to seeing being thankful differently than I may have been inclined to see it before. 

Some of us have material gifts to give.  Some of us have spiritual ones.  I am grateful for the material gifts I have been given to give away.  And I am even more grateful for the spiritual gifts the people of Haiti have been given and shared so generously with me now over many trips there.  Thanksgiving is for giving because giving begets more giving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Peace,
+Stacy