Double-Minded Gratitude
Thanksgiving EveDeuteronomy 26:1-11
November 25, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Thanksgiving doesn’t come easily to me. Whether it is a matter of genetics or of upbringing, I see the dark side more easily than the light. I find Lent easier to cope with than Easter, Advent easier than Christmas.
I am well-described by the old word: jeremiad. In fact I take any resemblance of mine to the prophet Jeremiah as a compliment. I see hope, but always on the other side of loss and struggle. I see the answer to prayer, but always on the other side of God’s silence. I pray the Lord’s Prayer conscious that, as yet, it is largely unanswered. Not that I intend to quit praying it; I’m not about to let God off the hook.
I come to Thanksgiving with a sense of double-mindedness. There are things about the celebration that I embrace. I love the food. I am fond of turkey gravy poured generously over turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing. Stuffing! We start with the Better Homes and Gardens traditional bread and sage stuffing, but where it calls for a teaspoon of sage, I add three tablespoons. Where it says poultry seasoning or sage, I use both. And the leftovers are, if anything, better than the first servings. The day after Thanksgiving we take a couple of cups of leftover mashed potatoes, add an egg, shape them into four thick pancakes, and fry them in butter until they are heated through and have a nice crisp brown crust on both sides. Then we pour gravy with shredded turkey over them. I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure that this is what manna tasted like.
I enjoy playing emcee for the Community Thanksgiving Dinner. I enjoy seeing the people come who are as hungry for company as they are for turkey. I’m glad when they get enough of both. I enjoy Thanksgiving.
But at the same time I am aware of its darker side. The myth of Thanksgiving has worn thin for me. A myth I define as a story that we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. Myths can be true or false, but the myth of Thanksgiving is a story we tell to obscure the past rather than illuminate it, a story we tell ourselves about ourselves to explain ourselves away.
Maybe you can understand, if you haven’t lost all patience with me yet, why I read the story from Deuteronomy 26 with misgivings. It is a marvelous text in many ways. It is one of the oldest passages in the Bible, far older than most of the Torah, for instance. The way that it plays with its own past and present as the celebrants of the Festival of First Fruits present their harvests at the altar of Yahweh and announce before the priest and God that they are themselves and at the same time descended from the Aramaeans who went to Egypt and became a mighty and populous nation, is a wonderful example of how liturgy functions at its best. But for all of its beauty and power, this text papers over and sanitizes the story of how it is that this land became their in the first place. It was not, as the text suggests, simply a gift. |It is not as if the land had been empty before the arrival of the Israelite refugees from slavery in Egypt. To be given to them it had to be taken from someone else. They celebrate the figs and olives from the orchards, the wine from the vineyards, the barley from the sown fields; but all of that land is blood-soaked. They give thanks to God, but everything for which they give thanks grows only thanks to theft and displacement. What happens to thanksgiving when it is used to hide the theft, the displacement, and the bloodshed.
Okay, so the world is not as it should be. We admit as much every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. We pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” but unless our notion of “us” and “our” is selfishly small, we know that this petition describes what we hope for, not what is. I will go to bed tomorrow evening with my belly uncomfortably full, dreaming of potato pancakes and turkey gravy. Others will go to bed not sure where Friday’s food will come from. Still others will not eat at all tomorrow or the day after that. When I pray “give us” I mean, or at least I want to mean, them too.
Someone has said, “In a world in which some people go hungry, you can eat well or you can sleep well, but you can’t do both.” And I get that, even if I’d rather not. I’ve probably followed this trail too far already. You are ready to tell me to shake it off or at least to shut up about it and not spoil your Thanksgiving. I can hardly blame you.
I don’t see things this way on purpose or because it’s fun. But I am unable to not see what I see. I realize that you’re cool with Thanksgiving. I’m the one who’s uncomfortable. I’m the one with the problem. I carry these two aspects of Thanksgiving with me and am unable to put either of them down. I carry both valuations, both valences; I am ambi-valent, ambivalent.
My proposal is to go on carrying them as the cost of being human. I am glad that, for instance, our dog Angus doesn’t have to carry them. I don’t expect Angus to be aware that some dogs don’t eat as well as he does. (In fact a good number of humans don’t eat as well as he does.) He simply enjoys eating. He throws himself into eating whole-heartedly and without reservation. I’m glad he does.
But I’m a human being and blessed or cursed with awareness of the bigger picture. I can eat whole-heartedly, too, but sooner or later I will come around to remembering that there are others who cannot feast with me simply because they do not have enough food to eat normally, let alone to feast.
This is my double-bind: to be aware of the plenty I enjoy through no particular virtue or deserving of mine and to be grateful for it while at the same time grieving because many of God’s children do not have to plenty to enjoy. For me to be human is for grief and gratitude to flow alongside one another, to get mixed up in each other, without any possibility of eliminating either of them. I am grateful for plenty and I grieve for scarcity.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Yes.
This is how it will be for now. It is the human condition as it is.
But how it is for now is not how it is for always. The human condition as it is is not the human condition as it will always be. I circle around to the Lord’s Prayer again. We pray for the day when all of us will receive our daily bread today and tomorrow and the day after that. It isn’t here yet, but we pray for it. And, if we aren’t just flapping our lips and making pious gestures, we work for that day, too. We contribute to the Food Pantry. We give through our own denominations to programs that work to eliminate hunger. We can go further than that, too, and work for changes to policies so that food is seen as something more than just another commodity and source of profit, but as life for all of us to share.
In the meantime, I intend to give thanks whole-heartedly and I intend to grieve whole-heartedly. I intend not to let the one temper or diminish the other, but to let grief and gratitude each have their way in my heart, and to live within the exquisite tension that being human entails, the same tension out of which the cry of our hearts arises: “Marana tha!—Lord, come!” Marana tha, indeed! Amen.
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