Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Deuteronomy 8:1-3,6-10 (17-20)Remember the long way the Lord
God has led you.
Psalm 65. Te decet hymnus
James 1: 17-18, 21-27 Obras, no palabras - deeds, not words.
Matthew 6:25-33 Consider the lilies.
I was surprised as a child to learn that Canadians had a Thanksgiving day, and it was not the day in late November that we kept. It was like learning that Eastern Orthodox Christmas was in January. How odd, I thought, how did they get so mixed up? It was a while before I learned that every nation, every civilization, at least every one based on its food sources being primarily from agricultural cycles, has had a harvest festival, to give thanks for the gifts of the gods.
It's part of our national narcissism that we don't know or care much about how the rest of the world gives thanks. All of Europe celebrated Harvest Home long before the New England Puritans had their three day thanksgiving in 1621. The Bible's elaborate rules governing the offering of firstfruits and harvest sacrifices reflect the universal practice in ancient religion, acknowledging the source of the community's life.
The promise of land was not to be taken for granted, any more than the "land of promise" was to be treated so. "You shall remember"-- what is to be remembrered today? All our blessings, surely. The Deuteronomy reading lists them as good land, water sources, mountains, valleys, hills, agricultural abundance. The point of the reading is that you shall rememer all the way the Lord God has led you through wilderness, deprivation, testing, humbling, that God has also given hunger and sometimes feeds only with a subsistence diet of manna, which is not in our Me First World cookbooks. This is what Americans have forgotten: we have no deprivation cook books. What humbling? What is to be remembered of a desert pilgrimage? Is it like a dessert pilgrimage--a bit of pumpkin pie at one openhouse, a cherry cobbler at the next? "All good things around us are sent from heaven above,"we sing, and think of our ritual foods of turkey and stuffing, potato pure‚ and mushroom gravy--and probably also include our privileged consumption of fine automobiles, sound systems, VCRs, designer clothing. Our privileged consumption of fossil fuels? Most of the world's medical attention, education, leisure time?
"You shall remember" in the Bible means more than nostalgia. As in the eucharist itself, the anamnesis command is to call up into the present, to forego amnesia for anamnesia: for re-living, the great event of our liberation. "Do this in remembrance" does not mean get sentimental, pull down he shades and have a candle light service as a nostalgia trip. It means to bring now to our tables the stuff of our struggle, the bloody mess of carnage and Calvary that brought us thus far, to our fair linen and Portugese tapestry frontal and our sterling silver communion chalice.
George Washington proclaimed November 26, 1789 as a day of thanksgiving for the newly adopted constitution of the States, but most of what it stands for is not remembered now upon this annual feast day in its honor. We think instead of pumpkins and feathered fowl more than of rights and responsibilities fought for in the constitution. The constitution is a continuing struggle, and the Bill of Rights an ongoing battle ground. The "land" we are entering into in the era of Clinton, Gore, and Bush, is a land forgetful of derechos humanos--human rights. A land that is forgetful of the centuries of struggle for the freedoms most citizens don't know they have, or have forgotten that they have lost. Most of the time we do not know we had here once the dream of "a city set upon a hill", and most Americans polled on the Bill of rights find them unnecessary or dangerous.
Jesus calls us to be more ready to take pumpkins for granted, but not our liberation. The human project of justice in the earth, of a bill of rights for all humanity--this is to be central in our strategy, and not the acquisition of more pie. Goodies are goods, not The Good. For us in solidarity and partnership with Jesus, goods cannot be central to our priorities. We can and perhaps should be able to take them for granted, as birds do their feathers and flowers their fancy faces and perfumed petals. But we should assume that they are gifts of God to all and not a special favor for gringos who can read the BCP. What we cannot take for granted, and what we must remember, call up and make present on our tables at Thanksgiving is the struggle for human liberation, the struggle for human rights, the struggle for land, promised to all, that God has made central for us in the Coming Reign, a communal paradise.
The nation celebrates the anniversary of the martyrdom of a saint: the news, the TV, radio programs -- all of our vehicles of culture cooperate to thold the image up, the ikon of the man whom most Americans (who don't study history) believe to be the greatest of our presidents, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. St. Cecelia and Benjamin Britten's birthday will be mentioned on WFMT and classical music stations. It's important to look at the calendar not only to see what day of the week it is, but also what day of the culture. Who gets canonized where? Who is remembered.
The calendar of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. lists Clement of Rome for today. Why should he be canonized? According to tradition, he was a disciple of the apostle and the third bishop of Rome, the author of a letter called First Clement, to the church in Corinth, in the midst of a dispute about who were to be legitimate pastors of that church. Clement insisted that deposed ministers be reinstated, that the hierarchical model of church government be re-instated at once. Thus he was the first great defender of the notion of Apostolic Succession. One would not expect Clement of Rome to be given a day in the calendar of Anabaptists, or of Congregationalists.
The Roman Catholic Calendar for tomorrow lists Saint John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic of the 16th century whom the Carmelite order trated so miserbly with harrassment and torture in his own lifetime, but who was later declared with Teresa of Avila (also a Carmelite) to be a doctor (that is, a teacher) of the church. Segundo Galilea, the Chilean theologin, finds in John of the Cross a fierce devotion to the Jesus of the earthly crucifixion, a liberator from suffering who is himself the greatest of all sufferers. This is, Galilea says, "the future of our past," a spirituality that enlightens and adumbrates the suffering of the poor of Latin America and of all the oppressed. John of the Cross is not yet remembered in the calendar of comfortable north American Anglicans; he's an out-of-place ikon. But in our calendar later this week is James Otis Sargent Huntington, a patrician name if ever there ws one. He's the 19th century founder of the first American religious order for men in the Episcopal church. The ascendancy of the Catholic movement in our church has made it OKAY to celebrate him, and the culture of private schools for boys, monastic retreats for the middle clases, and overseas missions complete with leper colonies, that were the piety of not-so-many decades ago. A saint not included in our western calendars at all, but real big in Russia, is Alexander Nevsky. His feast day you won't hear about, but here it is. You remember maybe the Eisenstein movie made in 1938 in Russia, with music by Prokofiev--it is said the movie was made to warn Hitler of what might happen to him should he invade Russia. He must have missed seeing it. It tells the sory of the saint who saved Russia from the Germans in the yar 1240 at a great battle on the ice of the river Neva, from which he got his name. In the subway in Moscow, the first of the bautiful mosaics in honor of the heroes of Russian history is one of him. The Russian Orthodox church canonized the soldier prince in 1547, and Joseph Stalin called on him in July of 1942 to save the nation once again. In the midst of the German invasion, unbelieving Stalin proclaimed him a national hero and established a military order in his name. Who is to be remembered, and why? Who decides? This week also is the anniverary of the death of that great heart of Chicago, Harold Washington. Was he a saint? The only time I met him was in church--and once at a fund-raising party given by the gay community at the Bismarck hotel. The community buried him at Thanksgiving, practically canonizing him on the spot.
Who it is we remember at Thanksgiving? Depends on where we're coming from and where we're going. The pilgrims of 1620 only? Or those who came Before the Mayflower--as Lerone Bennett, the Black historian, has chronicled for us--those who came in slave ships. For whom are we to thank the Lord at Thanksgiving?
What will make the day EUCHARIST DAY, the Greek word for Thanksgiving. Who are the holy, the saints, the worthies of our own family calendars? Our grandparents? An angel face that smiles that we have loved long since, and lost a while? John Kennedy? Dr. King? Each of us can canonize a day, we do it all the time, so we need to be aware of what goes on in the calendar, and who goes into it, and who decides.
Here in Managua, el Dia de Accion de Gracias is puro gringo, 'though the wannabee Nicas will get a Butterball and roast it, too. The day of thanksgiving binds our expatriate community together, and we pray we will remember more than Chompipe, as the indigenous called it, or Pavo, as the Spaniards did. It's a native bird here, too, as it was in the U.S. when Benjamin Franklin chose it as the national bird, for its peaceful character, and its timidity. Our antepasados preferred the raptor, as did the Romans of the Empire, and set an eagle upon the standard as an abomination of desolation. Hitler liked it, too.
GRANT M. GALLUP CASA AVE MARIA MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C. A.
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