THANKSGIVING CELEBRATIONS?
Oct. 29, 1997
GIVING THANKS and LIVING THANKS are to be discussed more.
The sophistication of cosmopolitan life which now extends to rural areas by TV,
radio and world wide web makes gratitude seem like the compromised state of
someone inadequate. the perspective on GIVING THANKS with which we were
raised says. “its something one is reduced to doing when one cannot do or get
their own goods”. help from others is seen as embarrassing, degrading and undesirable… then, thanking someone for help is only done when there is a
desperate hope for more help, to survive.
it is no wonder that in 1997 there is not much thanks planned for
THANKSGIVING CELEBRATIONS. it is only another holiday to show off
what we can get and do by ourselves…..
into this imperceptible arrogance I will continue to carve out more essential meaning
for gratefulness in ordinary life…. and even introduce its generation of continued good, for all of our lives.
I intend to speak about what gratitude generates for us, with us
and in us…..as an INQUIRY….something we could wonder about this THANKSGIVING.
unless there is the merest hint that gratitude is not a dumb subject, there will be
no listening for the quintessential power of gratitude…how it causes more good…
how it moves the immoveable… how it regenerates the possibility of anything
it is difficult today to interest anyone in the STUDY OF THANKS…
they say “why should we thank anyone, we got everything ourselves, we did it alone!” THANKSGIVING is the time to reevaluate and appreciate how much has been received, from those, who are our ancestors. we’ve got to establish a new relation to all the goals we have already achieved. we’ve got to tell the truth about who helped.
we’ve got to confess, what has been accomplished, is profound and wonderful…
and that really, we are surprised by it!
in a conversation, weeks ago, we discussed ancestors. it gave me pause, to consider
all my ancestors who came across the ocean, from europe on boats. if I think of
packing up to go somewhere I never saw and live there forever and die there
never coming back here, I get very nervous. it would be like going to a space station
because getting back would have been another expensive remote boatride too….
not something you could set sail on, so easy. I would not be thrilled to do that
for a future unlike the past. coming to live in Vermont was difficult, but highway 89
was always lurking nearbye. I could drive my own car right over to it and be gone back very easily. you see?
it is not nearly like what my ancestors did. I must confess I cannot really arrive at what sacrifice it was for them.
I know the difficulty of all the self-change that happened to negotiate living further north here in Vermont but,
these folks speak english and my own family is down the highway 300 miles and
a phone call away, day or night.
last night on public radio, we heard a story of two granola parents in Manhattan
during the 1970’s. the daughter was telling about her parents who wanted to leave
the New York rat race behind. she told how they purchased land in Maine too far up
a mountain to be any kind of accessible… at the time they had no idea what that would cost them.
cars could not get up the drive in the winter. groceries had to be hauled up by hand. children had to climb the hill after school
to get home in storms, ice and drifting snow.
before they left the big city, the mother wrote a romantic 87 page story
of what fun it would all be living under the stars-on-a-mountain-side but it did not much turn out to be that way.
the father rolled the car over a pet. the children cried and got sick. they lived two years in a tent. they got an apartment downtown.
the mother divorced the father. the children as adults returned to New York City. twenty years later the walls are not boarded.
stairs are not finished. some rooms still have no doors. if its that way to move a few states north, one can only imagine
the shocks and surprises that awaited ancestors from across the ocean.
I am considering these things.
I am grateful in a new octave for what has been given me, by people I knew so little of…
there is a modesty of spirit when thoughts like these are allowed….
slight discernments about what I do not know, have begun a new inquiry for me.
