Thanksgiving is a major family holiday in America. I mean major! Christmas, Mother’s Day and Easter are undoubtedly right up there, but I remember really hearing and having it sink in for the first time, on Thanksgiving eve in1984 on WCBS radio, as Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker and I were traveling back from JFK Airport, that “the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the most heavily traveled day of the year.” I think it still is.
Wherever we are in the world, most of us are doing what we can to make our way back to mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen. There, with family, we for just a day reconnect with what makes us human, over the most delectable comfort food we will ever eat. Not that we like turkey and the trimmings all that much, but there is something about its familiarity that anchors our spirits and allows us to enjoy the simple pleasures of fellowship and unvarnished conversation. Man, if every day could be like that. But that Friday, or certainly by Sunday afternoon, we go rushing back to our daily grind, having been refreshed for a minute as if retooled to dive back into the wilderness of our daily lives. But thank God for Thanksgiving Day, when our ordinary cares felt as if they had taken a back seat to the things that really matter.
The whole Pilgrim thing doesn’t really enter the picture very much any more, if it ever did. The day has been hijacked for equally noble purposes. And yes, some ignoble purposes too, like becoming Black Friday eve! (I read that some stores over my way will open at 5:00 a.m.!). For me, it opens the door to Advent, a sense of new beginning---a time of harvest, of reflection on what the year, now ending, has wrought.
Yet, like most special days, days that test the bonds of family, or maybe leave us exposed for not having the close-knit family the season seems to require, Thanksgiving for some can be a stressful day, a day of regret, a day of reminiscing about missed opportunities and losses. At our church, we often say as a customary farewell to folk we won’t see again until after the holiday, “Don’t eat too much,” Perhaps without remembering there will be those among us, our neighbors, who will hardly eat at all.
Bethany will restock its Food Pantry for Thanksgiving Week, where last week 377 persons were supplied with food. Those who contribute non-perishable items to the needy will receive the reward of having been of help to someone other than themselves, while the people who are hungry will experience the love of a caring community. Because of the way our society is constructed, too few people ever know the joy of selfless service, but are forced to witness instead the endless quest for self-gratification.
Food Pantry volunteers experience weekly the perennial quandary over the persistence of hunger in this land of plenty. Why are there so many hungry people? Is it because, as some simplistic ideologues would have us believe, they are lazy or without marketable skills? Or is the reason more unnerving and more rooted in structural inequities than we would like to admit?
As Fugitive Safe Surrender taught us just a year ago, many people in the line for food this holiday will be people who struggle to do the right thing, but no matter how hard they try, it is never enough.
