With all of the pain and death in the news, it is appropriate -- on this day that seems sometimes to be devoted to gluttony -- it is especially appropriate to remember that Thanksgiving began as a celebration of gratitude to God for the incredible bounty of this land. In a world where most people belonged to the land, rather than the other way around, North America was something out of dreams and legends, where land was there to be occupied by anyone who wanted to be there, where streams ran clean and teemed with fish, where the air was sweet, and where wild game and birds were so plentiful they were actually dangerous. Still, the Pilgrims almost did not survive, and would not have, without the help and fellowship of the Native American tribes.
We repaid that fellowship with betrayal and death, we have befouled most of the streams, most of the animals we eat are more a product of the laboratory and heartless factory farms than nature, and the air is sometimes brown with filth. Still, this land gives us more than we should expect, more than any other land. Even so, there are today in this land, thousands of hungry, homeless and despairing people. We are only now starting to treat the earth with the reverence we should; we still take human life for granted, a commodity to be used and discarded. Even our expressed reverence for human life is more often a political slogan than real priniciple.
And yet, today is still a day to give thanks: for the continuing bounty of this land, for the science which is now giving us ways to heal some of the damage we have done (if not completely, significantly), for an electorate that has recently shown that there are limits to our greed and jingoism, and for a God that gives second -- and third, and fourth -- chances.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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