Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
Thanksgiving is a holiday full of emotional complexity. We associate it with families, gatherings, and big dinners.
It is also a holiday built on predictability: the same foods, the same football, the same parades…when life isn’t all that predictable. Families change—we move, age, adapt—and these traditions become points of aching and longing. If we don’t have the right food or can’t be with the right people, it can throw the whole thing off.
The one thing I don’t want to do is assume anyone has the same view of this holiday as I do. That everyone will be sitting around the same kind of table with the same exact foods. And that every one of us has been around that same table for always.
Isn’t it funny, though? That we get so engaged with these ideas of rootedness, sameness, and an intractable attachment to the past on the very day we celebrate a mass migration and a dinner spent entirely separated from our past?
A day we mark as the day for giving thanks. Giving thanks for what we have and what we have had.
And as people of faith, we give thanks to God for much more than food, shelter, or family. For the air we breathe and the community we live within. For our partners in the neighborhood and for the joys of gathering with anyone (or no one!) and being thankful for all beautiful and nourishing things.
May we honor all of it in our diverse ways this week.
With love,
Drew