THANKSGIVING TABLE

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This year we can learn some important and timely lessons from the image of the traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner table.

First, the purpose of the day's celebration is gratitude. In French, when you say "I'm grateful," you say "Je suis reconnaissant," from the verb that means "to recognize." The idea is that I recognize that you have given me a gift. Remember Luke's story of the ten lepers who were cured? One of them "seeing that he had been made clean" came back and thanked Jesus. 

Did you ever wonder what the other nine had felt? Whatever they were feeling, it certainly was not gratitude to the one who had healed them. They didn't "recognize" their healing as a gift, but  must have mindlessly accepted their new condition. Their cure had given them tons of new opportunities, and they'd suddenly become extremely busy.  They had to go to the mall to buy clothes and shoes, and then had to start looking for jobs. Life suddenly got so busy there was no time to reflect on how they'd suddenly been healed. We in the United States are fortunate that some wise leaders instituted Thanksgiving Day so that at least once a year we have a chance to pause and become reconnaissant, recognizing the countless gifts we've been given, and then thanking the one who has given them to us.. 

Second, around the table are assembled a variety of people; I may think that this one relative is a boor, and another one talks too much and a third is shallow, and another's political ideas are the opposite of mine. But here we all are together, a glorious variety of different characters, sitting and sharing at the same table. There's something good going on here. Something beautiful and deep and precious.

This leads to a third idea: there's only one table. (There are exceptions when there are too many people to fit around only a single table, but you get the idea.) This is a crucial symbol for us these days when some of our fellow Americans (and leaders) are encouraging us divide ourselves into different tables. We are being told to be afraid of people whose ideas are different from ours: they have to sit at a separate table, and are to be considered our enemies. No more of this "one table" business. We demand a table for "us" and another for "them." There's something sad about this. It plays into a basic instinct to divide ourselves into opposing tribes, but we need to consciously push back against that base instinct by consciously appealing to the nobler instincts of generosity and openness, instincts that call us to see all human beings as brothers and sisters of ours in the one family of God. That family itself is, after all a gift, too!

HAVE A BLESSED THANKSGIVING!