Nurturing Thanks, Giving All Year Long

On Thanksgiving, we celebrated the most American of holidays--pluralistic, inclusive and observable by all. This is a holiday for Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and every religious group in our society and also for those of no formal faith. For Thanksgiving is a day that is fully spiritual and yet thoroughly nonsectarian, a day that reveals the genius and the uniqueness of America.

On Thanksgiving, we marked not only history, but also promise. We remembered the past, and yet we also challenge America to embrace not only ideals once lived--but even more, values and dreams not yet realized.

On Thanksgiving, we moved beyond our ordinary satisfactions to the peak of gratitude. We do not celebrate this day because we are merely better off than our ancestors, or free from their worst fears for survival. We celebrate Thanksgiving because we realize that we, as Americans, need to cultivate gratitude, to remind ourselves and teach our children that gratitude is an expression of both humility and appreciation in a world that, too often, is filled with hubris and narcissism.

On Thanksgiving, we thought of the founders of this country--beginning with Native Americans--and we atoned for our inhumanity. No honest celebration of our gratitude would be complete without our sorrow and regret for what we perpetrated in the name of “God” or “mission” or “manifest destiny.” Our country--like every country, like every religion and political system--was founded partly on myth. Myth, like history, can bind a people, but it can also distort a nation’s conduct. Of this danger, we must be eternally aware and vigilant.

On Thanksgiving, we rejoiced in our ancestors. Some were Pilgrims and Puritans, but more were recent immigrants, and we honored their courage. They faced a new land, a new language, unknown fears and formidable challenges, as all immigrants do, then and today. And yet, they survived and thrived, as those arriving today will. As a nation of immigrants, we must never forget its past.

We rejoiced in our freedom--to live, believe, read, think and speak as we wish, to join in community or to be alone, and most of all, to experience a life beyond the dreams of history or most of the world today.

We rejoiced in all that we have. And yet, we know that to be possessed by our possessions may be to be dispossessed of our souls. We want to enjoy life, but we know that it can become an opiate that dulls us to the real pain of others.

Thanksgiving comes but once a year, but gratitude is a necessary daily stance toward our reality. May we cultivate it, nurture it and live it each day.