Richard Bollman, S.J.

THANKSGIVING DAY, 2009

Colossians 3:12-17; Matthew 6:25-34

"A Thanksgiving Day Reflection"

Thanksgiving Day in my brother’s family will be different.

He’s now in a nursing home, Mercy St. Teresa.

He’s more or less deciding not to work with physical therapy,

deciding not to eat much, he’s getting tired.

He’s 83, and has a combination of ailments that don’t sit well together.

So I stopped by yesterday and his two daughters and his wife,

they were talking about today, who will make the pies,

the timing of the turkey, the shopping yet to do.

They plan a lunch with him today at the nursing center,

which I think they know he will not eat much of.

He wasn’t much involved in that conversation.

But I was glad to have a few exchanges with him, closer to the bed.

"Doing all right," he said.

There was the funny air of indifference about him,

not judging anybody, but being somewhere else.

A certain dignity, occasional smiles, not much to say.

I think of this about the great family feasts, yours and mine,

there’s often someone present who is not fully present anymore,

or maybe a presence of someone who has already died and gone on,

but they linger there because this day is so important,

and thanksgiving, just for living and dying, is so important.

The shadows at the feast: important presence!

I drove home thinking of grateful days when my brother, sister and I

lived at home with our folks, the five of us,

and celebrated this day at our own table with a few older aunts and uncles,

and celebrated many evenings too, with popcorn in front of I Love Lucy,

celebrating our new house near Deer Park,

and my brother’s black and tan Buick.

A lot of memories naturally flooded in, and I found that gratitude

is not necessarily a feeling of joyful enthusiasm,

but just a way of being true about one’s own existence,

and the life path we’ve all been given to follow.

It felt like a holy afternoon yesterday, seeing life more closely.

So whenever we gather to give thanks,

we have to appreciate that we stand with the people of our own past,

and stand on their achievements too, their simple acceptance of us,

and even their limits and failures.

I stand on the shoulders of immigrant grandparents

and my own parents, who survived the depression

and the stress of their own illnesses, to provide a life for me.

The more I appreciate them, I discover a love for them

not just for what they did, but for who they were,

and even the mistakes they made,

and the limitations they had to put up with:

older notions of medical care, harsh working hours,

so little space in their houses!

And as you give thanks for these roots,

don’t you find that you have more respect for your own struggles.

You find it’s okay to sit at table with your mistakes and half-formed dreams.

I say this because often the notion of Thanksgiving Day

raises a list of happy memories and the pleasant side of life.

But a more holistic view of who we are

requires that we know the shadows around the table,

and how the gains and advancement we might feel

are connected to a loss somewhere, the loss of the old ways.

the dignity of those old homes,

those lives without cell phones and televised football,

this nation of ours once covered with forests and plains

before the interstate highway system.

Our abundance here is often connected to low wages elsewhere,

and the world struggle over oil to keep our highways useful.

Remember too that the first Thanksgiving

was connected to a struggle with native culture

about the future use of land:

for farming or grazing, for herding, or hunting?

The Europeans sat at table thanking God

and the native people sat there thanking the spirits of the pheasants

and wild turkeys who were once living birds.

Eventually, 9 million native people, scholars claim,

would die in the centuries of European expansion here.

We grow in spirit by appreciating the sacrifices of others,

and by giving back from our own energy and gifts

so we can help the larger community now.

That’s the spiritual meaning of the table you set today.

As you sit down with the family, small or extended, that is yours,

recall how each person comes with many moments of gift,

and also some struggle, some pain or alienation.

If we count up only the happy hours,

we will never be able to be thankful for our lives.

We just get invested in our likes and dislikes,

neither joyful, nor even very sensible

about what human life requires of anyone who lives it.

Paul’s letters to the early church dwell with this kind of truth.

He wrote to communities where the differences of class and talent were vivid.

They were not like-minded neighborhoods,

but people who had only their faith and trust in common.

The leaders at the their tables,

whether Paul or Barnabas or Aquila or Lydia or Peter himself,

they would remember the power of the one Lord who has called us all,

and who unleashed this Spirit among us for the sake of life and peace.

"Always be thankful," he wrote to them:

"turn to one another in mercy and humility and patience,

forgiving all grievances."

There it is: turn to each other in mercy, humility, patience.

I would like to say these things to my nieces and my nephews,

my sister in law, as they coax my brother to eat what he is losing interest in.

Here is the moment now. For mercy, humility, patience.

No need to worry about anything,

what we eat or drink. Every moment has its depth and mystery.

"Let the word of Christ, rich as it is,

dwell in you, giving thanks to God through Christ, dying and rising,

whose body we come here to share."