Thanksgiving Meh
Truth be told, Thanksgiving, for me, is kinda a ‘Meh’ holiday.
The holiday season with Thanksgiving as its ‘gateway’, evokes a plethora of feelings in many of us. Are we questioning the value of celebrating in the face of world suffering? Are we reminded of the factions and patterns of behavior in our own families?
So what is it, I ask myself?
The Old Story
I guess Thanksgiving does not really have antecedent in some deeper ancient meaning. It is a much later, distinctly American tradition… an add-on.
We know the mythology of the natives & pilgrims having a feast to celebrate their harvest. There was a historical moment where the Wampanoags & pilgrims did gather, but was quickly subsumed by the history of descent into colonization and destruction.
New Perspective
This I did not know, (thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, a historian & author who writes ‘Letters from an American’, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history) that Thanksgiving was instituted by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 in the midst of the horrendous turmoil & struggle of the Civil War. It was his initiative to bring some form of union to the enormous polarity, sacrifice & bloodshed of that time in our nation’s history.
Thanksgiving as ritual of union in the face of the horror and extremity of division in our nation, indeed, in the world! Yes, this gives a most potent contemporary significance to our gathering together.
Holding the Center
I am reminded of Jung’s great teaching on ‘holding the tension of the opposites’ as we reach for a transcendent third, a union borne of holding the center in the face of the terrible pulling apart we experience both within the microcosm of our psyches as well as in the macrocosm of the outer reality of the world.
At historical moments such as these, I can, at least, hold my hand on my heart and feel the right & left ventricles pumping in a synergistic rhythm of union.
May we hold the center as we begin the journey to the end of the year.