Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Now that the shutdown is done and air travel has returned to something resembling normal, I - like so many of my fellow Americans - have flown across the country to celebrate with family and friends this most American of holidays Thanksgiving Day. 

Increasingly, I hate air travel, hate traveling cross-country, and do it less and les. Last year, I was so worn out from two major official trips that I skipped Thanksgiving travel altogether. In the end, I think I regretted that and was resolved not to repeat that mistake again this year. Travel may be a pain, but it is the only way to be with what little natural family I have left, which makes it worth the effort - especially on Thanksgiving.

As a pastor, of course, I had liturgical responsibilities on Christmas, but Thanksgiving is not that kind of holiday. Despite its origins in an explicitly Protestant American sensibility (or perhaps precisely because of that), for those of us outside that historic tradition, Thanksgiving has always been a more secular celebration of family and community, especially when family was much more accessible - just over the river and through the wood. The fact that everyone celebrated it made Thanksgiving a truly national celebration. Smaller and fewer families and the contemporary fraying of our national bonds have diminished communities to the detriment even of Thanksgiving. Hence the somewhat silly annual anxiety about how to talk to people about politics at Thanksgiving. The very question (1) implies that we do not talk much to each other the rest of the year (a problem in itself), and (2) it highlights the perversely disproportionate importance of politics in our contemporary life. Why talk about politics on Thanksgiving, when we ought ideally to share so much else that we can talk about?

Long before "post-liberalism" became an academic meal ticket, the corrosive effects of liberal modernity on family, community, and country were already obvious. Inevitably, the effect would also be felt on Thanksgiving, which liberal modernity has increasingly degraded into "Black Friday Eve." Back in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day holiday, he mentioned "our national perverseness and disobedience." Try talking about that at any Thanksgiving table!

Thanksgiving Day has always been a celebration of plenty, of American abundance. But it also painfully highlights the absence thereof. One parish I know has had a 50% increase in the number of turkeys distributed to needy families in anticipation of the holiday. While such sharing is and ought to be a characteristic of Thanksgiving's observance, it also points to the deepening distress that is endemic in our society at this time, which no Thanksgiving festivities can completely cover over. This increasing inequality and the deepening distress that has accompanied it - not some real or imagined squeamishness about political polarization - is the real challenge that overshadows and darkens ourThanksgiving holiday.