Now, don't get me wrong. Natalie and I are happily jumping into a car on Sunday afternoon to begin the trek south to visit friends and family on the last Thursday of November, to eat way too much food, to enjoy dad's chocolate triffle and grammy's pecan pie, but I have to wonder...
Is it really "Christian" to celebrate Thanksgiving? I mean what are we really celebrating? Sure, people came to the Americas from Europe, looking for what they claimed was religious freedom in the "New World". But at what price? Was it not actually at the marginalization and oppression of Native Americans, of those who had already been here for centuries, if not millenia? Was it not a giving of thanks for personal privilege and personal gain, for the assertion of power over others so that we could claim our "freedom"? Of course, all of this created a trajectory of individualism in the church that is still haunting us to this day, for the assertion of individual rights, preferences, and desires as holding more import than communal good or the sacrifice of our "rights" for the sake of the other.
I don't know. I am glad to see family and to get some time to take off work (okay, let's be honest here, I already have three or four 'work' books I plan on reading during the week), but as Christians, how should we really view Thanksgiving?
9 comments:
This is an interesting problem: is it possible to redeem an event from its historical roots? Halloween, Thanksgiving, even Christmas with Roman/Pagan timing, began in questionable places. Can we celebrate and practice these moments in newness and fresh faith, without being tainted by the Druids, etc.?
We must. Giving thanks to God is a righteous need. Celebrating Christ's birth is beautiful. (I'm still not sure about Halloween, except at BoP's birthday). Thus, yes, Thanksgiving is Christian.
I appreciate the thought, JRB. Always do.
Of course, the question is, then, how do we disentangle our giving of thanks from the oppressive structures of empire, marginalization, and self-preservation that we often (blindly) associate with Thanksgiving and instead transform it into something more life giving and shalom bringing? How do we get Thanksgiving to be that which is more Christian? Likewise, how do we save Christmas from the trappings of capitalist consummerism and return to the Christian idea of Christ's coming in humility, of giving of gifts of offering to the God who takes on flesh first in a stable, and is visited by the least of these (shepherds)? As American Christians, have we so syncretized the Christian story with the American story that we cannot find way sto dissentangle the two? If not, then how can we redeem these "Holy Days" from their current trappings?
Eric,
Thanks for the challenging post.
Perhaps the most beautiful New Testament passage is Paul's exhortation to overflow with thankfulness (Col. 2:7). To overflow with gratitude is the hardest thing I attempt to do, daily, as I live this life. There is indeed much to be grateful for. And the holiday, Thanksgiving, is, at least for me, the greatest of all holidays. Why? Because it is the only holiday that is truly exempt from commercialization; the only gift I need to purchase and present is gratitude (which comes at no small cost); and the day is spent with a smile on the heart. I am grateful. Besides, the day permits me to be obvious and public about my gratitude; to do it "before men" so to speak. Yes, I am to be grateful everyday, but this holiday offers us all a public display and confession of Paul's great exhortation.
But, I am afraid that your kind of thinking might lead one down a path of frozen ingratitude. You mention, for instance, the Native Americans who were living in America before the arrival of the European explorers. Why do you grieve (so to speak) the development of America, and not the development of Europe, or the mid-East, or Israel, or the Tigris-Euphrates valley? Should we never be thankful at all because there was, in fact, strife before each of our births? Should we also curtail thankfulness when we realize that the Native Americans were themselves not natives; that they had "invaded" the land as well, traveling by sea or ice or land-bridge from the north, west and south?
I have a Bible near me, constructed of paper. That paper is produced by the death of a tree, perhaps many trees. Death, as far as Christians are concerned, is always associated with fallenness, with original or native sin. All of creation groans under the weight of that fallenness, the very weight of death. Thus, should I not be grateful that––though my Bible is made up of dead trees, is manufactured, printed, and shipped with all the harmful machinery and energy resources available to mankind––should I not be grateful for that book? And should I not be grateful for the vegetables in my garden, fed as they are on the death of countless organisms lost through millennia of fallenness; and should I not be grateful for the meat I receive, since it too was dependent on the topsoil and death of other things?
Please, don't get me wrong, I am not making light of your concerns. I have struggled aloud about this very issue.
I recall after the murder of a friend of mine (she was really the parent of my classmate) that I was perplexed how we all could go on living our lives with gaiety, frivolity, buoyancy. Should we not all be in protest with the world; should we not be screaming about the injustice, the inhumanity, the horror of so much living? Shouldn't we just all stop doing whatever it is we're doing and get to the serious part of life?
Odd, but a few years later I heard something like a voice that said, "You've got it wrong. The greatest protest is thankfulness. Live! Live life to the fullest! Rescue it from the naysayers, the party-poopers, the pessimists! Redeem it from those who idolize life; and redeem it from those who idolize some dream of what life should be like; or what it should have been like."
You see, I'd rather live with a bouncing step in a fallen world, than with a sullen heart waiting for that world to fix itself. It ain't ever going to be right. And the best way to honor my dead friend is to laugh, live, love, to the fullest, precisely because it was the lack of those things, even the resentment of them, that compelled her killer to blast her in the chest with a shotgun. He did not fully live life; he did not overflow with thanksgiving. He was angry over the injustices, the sorrows, the resentments. He was frozen by his inability to be grateful in the midst of all that is difficult. He wanted life to be better than it was; he thought it should be different; and that life should even be made, perhaps, in his own image.
Was Noah unable to dance when his ark fell on dry land? Think of all that death around him. Alas, we are all on that ark right now, hurling through space. I am grateful for the ride, yet eager for landfall.
Also, I am grateful that Christianity is not Buddhistic in its anthropology. Buddhism, that great emptiness, places the collective over the individual. Wondrously, Christianity places the individual over the collective: The one lost sheep is worth finding. God wants to have a PERSONAL and direct relationship with every one of us; even the very hairs are on our heads are numbered by the obsessiveness of a loving father. Individualism in Christ is wonderful; it is the individualism without him that is idolatrous, empty and damnable (and is what is killing secular America today, in part). Christianity is glorious precisely because it puts each of us in the center of the Universe. But we are put there by love, in love, for love. We are not put there for conceit or idolatry.
Anyhow, I offer these thoughts as a thank-you note for prompting me to reflect on this holy season.
May peace always adorn you,
BG
BG:
I dig this discussion and appreciate your thoughts. I have but one, dispositive, critical observation of your premise. Indeed, new life, full, salvific transformation and ascendancy almost always requires destruction and death to give way to new birth. In Christ's teaching and example, however, we learn that that death is our own, not the destruction of others for our own well being. We can and must be grateful for our blessings, salvation, God's grace and provision, but must not revel or celebrate the destruction of those who came before us. We should confess the remarkable sins that gave way to our affluence and repent. We may live in a Darwinian reality, but we don't have to like it.
As to Mag's other question. I don't know how we do it, but it must be done. I think our work should be to re-transform these holy holidays first in our own hearts, then within our families, then within the church, then let society be leavened by our presence as the Kingdom. I don't think ending commercialism in American Christmas should be our goal, just ending it in the Kingdom, by our families.
JRB,
Of course, I am not calling for the celebration of our progenitors' deaths. I am all for redemption, restoration, remembrance. But we do eat and drink the past; the dust in the air is replete with particles of dead skin. I am indeed grateful that others lived -- and died -- that I might live (and perhaps never die).
My point is something like this: Those of us who love the game of baseball, have a very curious sort of passion. For baseball is naught other than hitting a piece of dead skin with a dead tree; all in an effort to round a set of bases before someone scoops up the batted bit of dead skin with a larger piece of dead skin into which they've stuck their hand. In fact, there was a time when even the bases were covered in skin, and not just the balls and gloves. And what of leather cleats?
You see, I am grateful for the opportunity to live in a world, even fallen, wherein I can honor God by at least trying to love the movement of my body, and the physics of a batted ball. Yes, I could see baseball for what it ACTUALLY is, on one level: a dead stick, a dead ball, a dead glove, with dead and dying things in the innards of each player. Of course, the dead and dying things keep the players alive, which is no petty fact.
But I can also choose to see it as something else: men and women making a noble effort to sacramentalize the struggles and victories of life.
Look. My favorite sport is downhill skiing. I KNOW what that means: the destruction of hillsides, the installation of chairlifts, and skis that have a half-life of a million years. But I stand atop a mountain, I breathe the air that bites my very soul; I look down upon valleys and north toward other peaks, and I let gravity take me away. God knows, I tell him everytime, that I know that so much of it is about destruction, toxicity, even the rape of Eden. But I also tell him that I am thankful that He created a world with gravity and snow and friction and moments of frictionlessness. I offer my bliss as praise; I tell him that even a fallen world, initially crafted by him, is better than no world at all. Thank you, Oh Lord, for the fallen pleasures that are sacraments and portents of the pleasures in Your Kingdom that is to come!!
(According to several reports I've read and/or heard, the computer industry, particularly the manufacture of computers, is the most toxic, energy consuming industry on the planet. Wow! Look at us. And yet we try to offer praise to God with a tool we know is a cancer; a tool perhaps destined to do all humanity great harm. It is our little effort to give life to dying things.)
Peace to you,
Gnade
Hmmm, Gnostic Baseball. . . .
I am sorry if I have led anyone to believe that I equate a dead tree with "the abuse of a people." I am saying that our lives are built on death, and life, and that we must celebrate life in spite of the death and guilt that preceded us. I didn't exploit native American Indians; my family didn't (they were all in Europe); my wife's family didn't either. If I stand in Jerusalem, davening at the Wailing Wall, shall I stop and feel guilt that I am standing on a city built on death, destruction and yes, the abuse of a people? I didn't abuse those people; my family didn't abuse those people. Why am I feeling guilt, shame?
I have enough sins to carry to the cross without also carrying the fact that Pilgrims, who thanked God for deliverance from religious persecution, their safe sea-travel, and the favorable conditions they found in New England, were unwittingly on the verge of massive conflicts between Europe and North America's indigenous peoples. The sins I carry are more akin to this: I thank God knowing that I have food, while I also know that my tax dollars have gone to killing babies and wounding women in abortion clinics or Iraqi streets. I don't thank God for those sorrows; I thank Him in spite of them, all the while pleading with Him to have mercy, grace, victory. When I celebrate America, or anything earthly, I celebrate what I know to be the good; and I try to consecrate what need not forever be bad.
I am not guilty "as an American" for the plight of Native Americans. I won't take that burden. But I will take the guilt for which I have quite transparently described in my posts here: I am a fallen man through and through.
I just wonder whether JRB's quip about "Gnostic Baseball" suggests that he considers me heretical. Egads, I've never been considered anything but orthodox, too orthodox.
I hope each of you finds happiness in giving thanks this week and forever more,
BG
No, BG, it was a joke. Every once in a while, I try once again to quip in cyber-space, and it only rarely works out.
I don't think you're heretical. It was a joke.
I should have said, "HA! Gnostic Baseball by Gnade!"
I think that we do, in some ways, bear the burden of responsibility for the sins of those in the past. Part of the legacy of European descendants is the idea that we are only responsible for our own actions and not for those of any others. Many other cultures though, African American and Native American for example, tend to view the world not as much through the lens of the individual as through the lens of family, community, or tribe. That means that the people as a whole bear some responsibility for the actions of those like them. You definitely see that tendency in Israel's ethic as well. What about the New Testament? Well, the letters of Paul often address individual problems as though they affect the corporate body. For example, look at the issues in Corinth or Philemon's treatment of Onesimus (the short letter was written to the whole community, not just Philemon, hinting that their were corporate implications of the actions of the individual).
Recently I was a part of a dialogue on racial diversity here in Detroit. The two keynoters, one Caucasian, one African-American, addressed White Apathy and Black Anger respectively. When sepaking of white apathy, the speaker rightly asserted that a part of the problem is the tendency of Caucasians to separate ourselves from the institutional affects of the actions of our forebears. Now, as far as I know, none of my ancestors were slave owners either, they were still in Iceland at the time. (Now, don't ask about their role in victimizing mainland Europe during the 10-13th centuries, that is a different story. HA!) But I still feel that I bear some of the burden to answer for the problems of racism that still pervade the church institutionally, but of which I have not directly been a part. I do not want to develop an historical amnesia that allows me to consider only my personal sins (though that is important) to the exclusion of my consideration of Sin as a power that works against God for human allegiance and has been revealed most clearly in the oppressive structures propagated by those like myself in the past. I feel that attempting to find some way to answer for or counter the trajectory set in our country through the enslavement to Sin may help to bring about God's new creation in the world. But then, those are only my simple minded, humble conclusions at present...
Post a Comment