Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

November 18, 2007

“Thanking the Other Ones”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

Thanksgiving is a marvelous American holiday, not grounded in any religion, but based upon one of the deepest, most spiritual practices which we all share – gratitude, giving thanks. Because Thanksgiving developed from a historical event that involves the harvest and the beginnings of our nation, we tend to be reminded of particular gratitudes - being thankful for food, fellowship, and our freedom. And because Thanksgiving has evolved into a national pastime of epic proportions, we may be reminded of other gratitudes – being thankful for family, friends, festivities, fantastic feasting, and, for many, football. We begin the holiday on the most traveled upon day of the year, and so let us be thankful for vacation time. And some of us end Thanksgiving with the most shopping of the year, and we can be grateful for the ability to give and to get, for our abundance, and probably, for some, for the sport of bargain-hunting. All these gratitudes are good, and yet there are other thanksgivings we need to remember.

We just heard a little account about our Thanksgiving history that you probably did not know. Most of us were not raised with the idea that the first settlers in this New World, the Europeans, behaved at times despicably toward the first peoples, the Native Americans. We might have learned that Squanto helped the Pilgrims survive – remember the schoolbook scene depicting aid with the planting of corn? – but we didn’t know that Squanto, or Tisquantum, spoke English because he had previously been captured as a slave and taken to Europe.

Tisquantum was sold in Spain, but escaped with the help of abolitionist Spanish priests to England and managed to return to New England on board a ship for a company, the year before the Pilgrims landed. He found that his people, the Patuxet tribe, had all, or most, died of illness, brought by contact with Europeans.

Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims learn to fish and hunt, and to raise corn and other vegetables, and to build shelters. He acted as their interpreter in the Treaty of Plymouth between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. The next year, 1622, as he led some of the settlers on an expedition around Cape Cod, Tisquantum became sick and died.

Tisquantum was not the first Native American to greet the Pilgrims in English – that was Samoset, who introduced Tisquantum to them. Samoset knew English from his journeys North into Maine, where he had come into contact with fishermen. We tend to remember the early colonizing of our nation, in Massachusetts and Virginia, as a freedom seeking, adventurous, exploratory process. Actually, the first journeys to this land, including just before and during the Pilgrim’s time, were for making money, pure and simple. Big companies were the ones who sponsored the voyages, in hopes of enriching themselves. They stole the wealth and they stole the people, and brought these treasures back to Europe.

Tisquantum was kind and generous, as he had been taught in his culture. I have been reading several pieces about Native Americans recently, and they universally agree that the Native peoples of North America were very giving people, and most lived in harmonious, egalitarian societies. Before the European invasion, that is. When we are thankful for the beginnings of this country at Thanksgiving time, we should be especially grateful to the Native Americans who sustained us, and who suffered at our founding fathers’ hands, and maybe our founding mothers’ hands as well.

Those of us who have been together reading David Korten’s book, The Great Turning, have learned that this continent was densely populated with peoples who had creative cultures and lived mostly as an Earth Community, something we are trying to return to nowadays, for our very survival. Many of these first nation peoples were wiped out by disease; others by violence. Korten talks about the enslaving of Native Americans, and gives, as an example, a 1708 South Carolina census count. There were 3900 free whites, 4100 African slaves, 1400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured whites. So when we give thanks for our freedom, part of what is being celebrated at Thanksgiving, we remember that only the minority were free in the early days. When the Declaration of Independence was written, 75 % of the people who lived in three colonies – Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, were or had been slaves or indentured servants. When we are thankful for our beginnings, let us remember to be thankful to those who were not free, upon whose labor and backs our beginnings as a nation relied. We thank the other ones, the Native Americans, the African Americans, the ones who gave us our sustenance while suffering, that we might have abundance.

Now, I want to lift up a very different set of people to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. We are grateful to three presidents, who each proclaimed Thanksgiving celebrations, and also to a very determined woman. Thanksgiving had been very sporadically celebrated until President George Washington declared a day of prayer and thanksgiving for all religions in 1789. He must have been striving for unity in the nation at the time, following a period of struggle, just after Shay’s Rebellion and the Constitutional Convention. President Washington probably realized that giving thanks is something that everyone can unite around, and we can be grateful for his leadership in unity and gratitude.

This quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving, was still not firmly established as an annual observation until a woman, Sarah Josepha Hale, decided to promote its acceptance as a national holiday. She began her campaign in 1827, and kept at it doggedly for decades, through several presidencies. Finally, her cause was boosted in 1854 by a historical find, a document that had been missing, William Bradford’s history, called Of the Plimouth Plantation. His description of the Pilgrims’ lives and that early Thanksgiving celebration was a great reminder.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was convinced by Sarah to proclaim a national holiday to celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, probably trying to correspond with the landing of the Mayflower on November 21, 1620. It is unclear when the actual days of the first Thanksgiving were, which the Pilgrims celebrated with the Native Americans in the fall of 1621, but they were likely in early October, and certainly not late November.

Like George Washington before him, Abraham Lincoln knew that giving thanks was a way to be together, despite all our differences, and he faced the deepest divide in this country, prior to our present time, the Civil War. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, President Lincoln notices first that there are still many blessings in the midst of the war, including that we were not at war with other countries, that we were still farming and fishing and building, and that we were still a nation of laws. He concluded the proclamation:

“And I recommend to them [Americans] that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him [God] for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it … to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

Abraham Lincoln went deep into the spiritual quest and realized that, while thanksgiving unites, it does not stand alone. When we are grateful together, he reminded the nation, we need to humbly recognize that we have done much to cause suffering; we must realize that many need our tender care; and we should hope that healing can begin and peace be enjoyed. How can we be thankful unless we are penitent, compassionate, and peace-making? We are grateful for our blessings, yes, but that has to serve to remind us of how much we fall short, of how we have squandered our abundance.

The last president to proclaim Thanksgiving in a significant way was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he changed the timing of it slightly. From the last Thursday, it became the fourth Thursday, apparently to always leave enough time for Christmas shopping, since when it fell on the fifth Thursday, at the very end of November, it was hard on the merchants and shoppers alike – a different, practical concern about Thanksgiving, the holiday. Franklin’s proclamation was in 1939, a time when the nation was emerging triumphantly from the Great Depression and did not know yet of the coming World War.

Roosevelt named gratitude for the great progress made in economic and social problems. He noticed that “in a world of turmoil” we should rejoice that we are at peace with all nations. And he finished by calling “for the hope that lives within us of the coming of a day when peace and the productive activities of peace shall reign on every continent.”

President Roosevelt, therefore, noticed that thanksgiving does not stand alone either, even in the best of times. At the height of personal and national blessing, we still are called to live with the hope that peace and abundance will be extended to everyone. Our thanksgiving is not complete until all have reason to be as thankful as we.

Thanksgiving, giving thanks, unites us in a common spiritual practice, reminds us of our need for penitence, compassion and hope for peace, and calls us to go forward as one world. We thank the others who came before, who sustained us and gave us our very lives, and the ones who led us in ways of thanksgiving. So may we thankful be, blessed, and at one with the world. Amen.