KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 October
One turned back … giving him thanks
The Headmaster often says that Thanksgiving is his favourite festival of the year. I think I know what he means. It is so simple and pure, uncluttered and unencumbered by commercialisation. Already in the stores there is merchandise for Halloween and even for Christmas! Thanksgiving seems blessedly free of such hype.
Thanksgiving is profoundly spiritual and counters explicitly the narcissisms of contemporary culture. How? Because thanksgiving requires an acknowledgment of what is other than you; in short a kind of reflection and thoughtfulness about God, nature, and other people. It is actually universal to human culture and civilization on several different levels. The oldest and most common sense of thanksgiving has to do with harvest festivals, a recognition that the fruits of the earth and human labour cannot be taken for granted and that human labour requires our working with the order of nature. This is a profound kind of wisdom. It counters the tendency to take things for granted or, even worse, the idea of entitlement. It checks the assumptions, too, of our technocratic mastery of nature which has shown itself to be so destructive both of nature and of one another.
But beyond the wonder of harvest, there are other kinds of thanksgivings such as social and political thanksgivings, like national thanksgiving days or times in human history when a nation has a particular reason to pronounce a day of national thanksgiving whether it is for deliverance from some natural catastrophe or some political act of intended destruction, such as the Gunpowder Plot of November 5th, 1605, the attempt to blow up King and Parliament in England. The plot was foiled but the sense of the enormity of the attempt and the thought of the devastation and chaos it would have occasioned had a strong hold on the imaginations of the peoples of England in the 17th century such that it remained a national day of thanksgiving for deliverance for a very, very long time. In Canada, the Thanksgiving weekend precedes the Monday holiday which is Canada’s national day of Thanksgiving. In the United States, it occurs much later, in November. Different nations have different days of national commemoration. So thanksgiving embraces a range of concerns.
In every case, thanksgiving is essentially reflective and helps us to think about our relation to the created order and our engagement with one another. It is in that sense profoundly spiritual and is an essential feature of the religions and philosophies of the world. It is central to the Christian understanding as well as to Judaism and Islam because at the heart of thanksgiving is an active openness to God and to what comes from God in terms of creation and providence; an openness to the goodness of creation which is such a powerful idea in our times of negativity and fear about the world and about one another. The central act of worship for Christians is the Eucharist, a word meaning thanksgiving.