Come ye fearful people come
Cast your sighs to highest heav’n
Yet—though terror’s harvest spread,
Casting sorrow in its stead
Still the Promise doth endure
Life abounding to secure
Come, ye thankful hearts, confess
Mercy’s lien o’er earth’s distress.
—Ken Sehested, new verse to “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come”
Gratitude has become a marketing trend in publishing over the past decade.
This is exemplified in Diana Butler Bass’ best-selling “Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks,” not to mention a score of books written by and for the “positive psychology” school of authors and readers. Recently, I read an article titled “Neuroscience Reveals: How Gratitude Rewires Your Brain to be Happier.”
I just did a web search for “gratitude” and got 491,00,000 results in .20 seconds.
Yet the history of formal Thanksgiving declarations in the U.S. has a dark side.
The first official declaration of Thanksgiving Day did not come until 1621, when the Plymouth Puritans shared an impromptu feast with the local Wampanoag natives. The Wampanoag had taught these undocumented immigrants to fish, farm and generally fend for themselves.
But it wasn’t until 1637 that Plymouth colony Governor William Bradford officially declared an annual day of thanks. He did so in direct response to the Pilgrims’ massacre of some 500 men, women and children of the Pequot tribe along the Mystic River.
Pequot survivors were sold into slavery.
He wrote, “the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
He then went on to record details of the event that was to be annually commemorated.
“It was a fearful sight to see [the Pequot] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and [we] gave the praise thereof to God.”
In his first term, President George Washington declared a “day of thanksgiving and prayer” in 1789, months after the U.S. Constitution was formally approved.
In October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared an annual observance of the holiday on the last Thursday of November, weeks after the Union’s pivotal victory at Gettysburg during the Civil War.
Public thanks for blessings can be a disguise for gloating and triumphalism—a kind of God-loves-you-but-thinks-I’m-special assertion.
Nevertheless, Thanksgiving ritual meals remain the calendar’s most common occasion for gathering scattered families.
In a highly mobile culture with weakened familial bonds and even the threat of contentious political conversations during the slathering of giblet gravy, this cultural habit is no small thing.
Scientists continue to confirm things mystics have promoted for eons:
Singing is good for personal and communal health.
A cultivated devotional life extends life expectancy.
Wealth is not neutral but actually diminishes the capacity for empathy.
Ecologists, cosmologists, and quantum physicists are even confirming the spiritual hunch that “everything is connected.”
Such concurrence reminds me of the time, many moons ago, when I fled midway through college from my parochial Southern upbringing to the urbane sophistication of New York City. I arrived just in time to discover that pointy-toed cowboy boots were the fashion rage in my newly adopted Greenwich Village neighborhood, and Hank Williams Jr. was the headliner at the Bitter End nightclub.
Go figure.
I have to resist the temptation to cynically roll my eyes when old stuff becomes swank among the trendy, upscale crowd.
The stubborn truth, however, is that every abiding element of wisdom has to be renewed and reenergized from time to time. It must be claimed and fortified and announced anew in every succeeding age.
So, yes, read books, listen to podcasts, have conversations, and perform new-old rituals that buoy the cultivation of gratitude, the practice of thanksgiving—with or without traditional holiday fare of turkey and sage-soaked dressing (my Mama’s favorite).
And do so not as a bartered arrangement for future profit but simply as the response of the loved to the Beloved.
The Black Friday gods and their fashionista agents are relentless in their assurance that you need more—more goods, second helpings, esteem and recognition. Surround yourself with a community that says otherwise.
Curator of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action, and author of, most recently, In the Land of the Willing: Litanies, Prayers, Poems, and Benedictions. He was the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation in Asheville, North Carolina.