The spirit of Thanksgiving!
The true spirit of thanksgiving has run through this nation almost since the first settlers arrived at Plymouth in what was to become the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1620! About half of them starved during the first harsh winter that they spent on what was to be come America’s shores. Friendly Indians befriended them and helped the survivors to learn how to raise a crop. That next fall, the Indians and the saints and sinners gathered together to celebrate and break bread together in what was to be the first thanksgiving. Perhaps no people who have lived on this continent had more to be thankful for than these.
George Washington proclaimed the first official thanksgiving in 1789 during his first year as president of the newly created United States of America and it has been a tradition that has carried through ever since that time.
Americans usually have much to be thankful for and we are no exception to that statement. Thanksgiving came gradually to us as we reached the ages of consciousness and memory in our early youth. We usually took thanksgiving at our parents house where the turkey and the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes and the giblet gravy flowed like the proverbial cornucopia. After my brother married we often ate alone as he split time between our house and his new spouses parents. After we left home and established a residence of our own, my new wife and I would often travel back to Vienna to have thanksgiving with my parents as they had probably done with their parents when they were newly married so long before us. Sometimes, we would have close friends come down for thanksgiving and we would celebrate with them.
We were married and divorced three separate times and thanksgiving changed with the situations that we were involved in. My second wife was a home economics education major in college and she had had the additional experience of being taught how to cook by her grandmother, which established a tradition for a time that enhanced the thanksgiving experience because my parents started coming up to eat at our table on some thanksgiving days, making a sort of full circle. My second wife truly loved to cook!
We only took one thanksgiving day alone in the year following my second divorce and Lucy the cat and I enjoyed a fine repast that we had purchased at the frozen food section of our local favorite grocery store.
It was not until after we moved to Marion, Illinois that we began to experience the true and deepest meaning of the thanksgiving experience. It was in Marion that we began to take thanksgiving at the table set by the Marion Ministerial Alliance. At this gathering, people of all stripes of life would sit together at the Alliance building and partake of a meal served to them by the youth of the local Catholic church who sacrificed their time with family each and every year to come over and become servants to those who were mainly of the most basic class of people that any community could put forth. Some were of the elderly poor, while others were of the poor of all ages from toddlers still in their cribs through teenagers and on up to adults who simply had no where else or no other means to celebrate the beginning of the holiday season.
No one in Marion ever went away hungry from this holiday feast! And, everyone felt equal and welcome there. And we know that one is supposed to always remember ones mother as cooking the best holiday feast. However, we have never had a better meal nor better companionship that we get there at this common table with so many so uncommon people at hand. And, so, another thanksgiving in upon us and we look forward to going over to partake and be served by some of the finest and most awe inspiring young people that can be found on this planet, at least as far as we are concerned. And the tradition has been going on long enough now that they are led by adults who once themselves were servants and helped to feed others in their stead on this very gracious day.
We remember the words of Jesus Christ as spoken in the Christian Bible when he told the apostle Peter that if Peter expected to follow in his master’s footsteps he would first have to learn how to be a servant, and to be served by those who were so much greater than himself. And we remember the words from the book of Matthew as spoken by the Christ in the twenty fifth chapter when he said simply that “as yea treat the least of these, yea also treat me!
Have a blessed thanksgiving!
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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