Thanksgiving – Gratitude for Life

November 18, 1984
Lakeland

Harvest Home – that touches us at depth – for Harvest Home is the assurance that there will be food to eat.

We no longer, most of us, live on the land where our own crops mean ample food if the harvest is bountiful, or near-starvation if the harvest is lean. Corn, beans, meat, we buy at the super-market. But other places in our world, men, women, and children starve.

In our affluent nation, the prospect for actual starvation is non-existent for most of us. There are many people living in poverty in the U.S., but their despair and need is remote and abstract for most of us.

Our fears are of a different order – the razor’s edge of nuclear war, the possibility of chemical waste and pollution out-of-control, the threat to so many workers that their occupational usefulness to society is being permanently lost because technology develops machines to replace men and women. In our nation, these dispossessed may not starve physically, there will be a dole, but the damage to their spirit will deprive their lives of taste and tang.

The ceremonies of Harvest Home are older than history. Even in the worst of times, gratitude is evoked for the land and sky which sustain us.

Governor William Bradford, in his HISTORY OF THE PLYMOUTH PLANTATION writes of Thanksgiving of 1923. There had been fears of crop failure. Wrote Governor Bradford, “I may not here omit how, notwithstanding all their great pains and industrie, and the hopes of a great crop, the Lord seemed to blast, and take away the same, and to threaten further and more sore famine unto them by a great drought which continued from the third week in May till about the middle of July, without any rain, and with great heat insomuch as the corn began to wither away, though it was set with fish, the moisture whereof helped it much.”

Then after the Pilgrims set aside a full day for prayers for rain, showers came and came often enough to ensure a good crop. This apparent consequence of prayer astonished the Indians. Bradford notes “for which mercie (in time convenient) they also set apart a day of Thanksgiving.”

[CJW note: overlooked that harvest corn ceremony – before the Europeans invaded and possessed the land]

The landing of the Pilgrims is part of the fibre of the celebrations of Americans. After all, the Pilgrims were pioneers, seeking religious freedom in a new world. When I was young, I thought the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving, not knowing then how far more ancient is the feeling of gratitude that human life will persist through the cold winter and barren fields. Perhaps you, like I did, had to memorize Felicia Hemans’ poem “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England.” All I can recall now is the first stanza:

“The breaking of waves dashed high
On a stern and rockbound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed....”

Felecia Hemans was an English poet who had never seen Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. When an American told her that the shores of Massachusetts Bay on the South Shore were not stern or rock-bound, but sandy beaches, tidal marshes, and gentle inlets, Felicia Hemans cried.

[CJW note: forget it was a feast for the whole community – of neighbors of a different color invited - “guest at our table”]

But apart from all the romance of the Mayflower Compact, the Courtship of Myles Standish, the friendly Indians – Squanto, Massasoit, and all, there is something basic and mysterious about the vegetables, fruits, nuts, and fibers bestowed by the Good Earth. Better than church prayers, stilted by dogma, I like a Thanksgiving prayer of the American Indian:

“We give thanks for the corn and beans and squash which give us life;
We give thanks for the wind which moves the air and blows away diseases;
We give thanks for the sun which has looked on us with a kindly eye;
We give thanks for the moon and stars which give us light when the sun is gone;
We give thanks to the Great Spirit, who is all goodness and directs all things for the good of his children.”

(STORIES OF INDIAN CHILDREN, Mary Hall Husted)

The American Indians gave thanks, but they knew hunger, disease, disaster, and violence, too. The Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth were able to do so because disease or a plague had entirely wiped out the tribe which had been there – other tribes feared to re-occupy that tract.

Still, the Indians could give thanks to the Great Spirit for his goodness. Strange? There is a dogged persistence to life. We struggle to survive – and when we are honest with ourselves – we are pleased to be among the survivors, in spite of all woe and travail. We humans share more than brain, heart, lungs, intestines. [CJW note: we share resilience against disaster, and hope even when we are bruised and bleeding from terrible circumstances] Carl Sandburg grasped this in his gathering of folk-wisdom in THE PEOPLE, YES. You know the lines:

“We’ll see what we’ll see.
Time is a great teacher.
Today me and tomorrow maybe you.
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
What is bitter to stand against today may be
sweet to remember tomorrow.

Whether the stone bumps the jug or the jug
bumps the stone it is bad for the jug.
We all belong to the same big family and have
the same smell.
Handling honey, tar or dung some of it sticks
to the fingers.
The liar comes to believe his own lies.
He who burns himself must sit on the blisters.
God alone understands fools.
To work hard, live hard, to die hard,
and then to go to hell after all would be too
damned hard.

You can fool all of the people some of the time
and some of the people all of the time but
you can’t fool all of the people all of
the time.
It takes all kinds of people to make a world.

What is bred in the bone will tell.
Between the inbreds and the cross-breeds the
argument goes on.
You can breed them up as easy as you can breed
them down.
“I don’t know who my ancestors were,” said a
mongrel, “but we’ve been descending for
a long time.”
“My ancestors,” said the Cherokee-blooded
Oklahoman, “Didn’t come over in the
Mayflower, but we were there to meet the
boat.”
“Why,” said the Denver Irish policeman as he
arrested a Pawnee Indian IWW soapboxer,
“Why don’t you go back where you came
from.”

We are strange creatures. Yet we are conscious of gratitude at Thanksgiving. Something deep and primal within us resonates to Harvest Home, even when we are far removed from ploughing, planting, and praying for rain. We reap no corn, grind no grain, hunt no deer or turkey, most of us. But we respond.

The ancient feelings still stir within us – we are bound to the Earth, nourished and warmed by the sun, the heirs of rain, frost moon, and tides. Even when one is among those (as I am) who perceive flaws in the intellectual and theological arguments for God or gods, there is still some deep empathy to that who or what that the ancients named Lord of Harvest. The path to full knowing is guarded and barricaded, but sometimes there is the feeling that the path is not long and far distant, even though the barrier is impenetrable in our minds.

But there is that in the bounty of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, which stirs us to be glad for life, no matter how difficult the journey and how sore the wounds we suffer along the way.