Ivette’s recipe for Banana Pie: You buy some bananas and crust. Then you mash them up and put them in the pie. Then you eat it. Russell’s recipe for turkey You cut the turkey up and put it in the oven for ten minutes and 300 degrees. You put gravy on it and eat it. Evidently thinking ten minutes to cook a turkey was a little short, Geremy came up with his own turkey recipe: You buy the turkey and take the paper off. Then you put it in the refrigerator and take it back out and cut it with a knife and make sure all the wires are out and take out the neck and heart. Then you put it in a big pan and cook it for half an hour at 80 degrees. Then you invite people over and eat. 1 But perhaps my favorite is from little Wai, who has this rather minimalist recipe for another Thanksgiving favorite, pumpkin pie: “Get a pumpkin. Cook it. Eat it.”

I must warn you, I wouldn’t try those recipes, at least not before consulting your doctor!

But, no matter what’s on the menu, on Thanksgiving Day all over America, families sit down to dinner at the same moment. That moment is called “halftime.”

And it’s not just families sitting down together. For some of us, friends are family. Canadians, from what I’ve been told, view their Thanksgiving (in October) as a time more for friends than family.

But eating together seems to be the basic obligation of the holiday. On Thanksgiving, even the homeless are expected to partake of a festive meal. Thanksgiving is one day in the year soup kitchens are assured of an adequate number of volunteers.

But there’s, of course, more to the holiday than food, more than even football! It’s a time for giving thanks.

What does that mean? What I would say is that Thanksgiving, like every holiday in one way or another, is a stop sign. That is, it’s a time for reorienting ourselves, reconnecting with what our Meditation Hymn says are our roots and our wings. We look toward the past with pride and toward the future with hope, as Robert Frost might say.

Billy Joel sings a haunting song called “Summer, Highland Falls.” The lyric begins, “They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known. And I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own.” Any holiday, when it is truly celebrated, is a time for reexamining our lives.

Thanksgiving is a time for appreciating all the good around us. The good is always there, no matter how obscured by the dust or drowned in the tears of this “world of sweets and sours.” 2

Finding the good in life seems to get harder as we grow older. “[A] child smiles 300 times a day, a teenager 30 [times] and an adult merely 21 times a day.” 3 Adults and children live in the same world, and yet the youngest among us seem to derive more than ten times as much pleasure from it….

Perhaps this disparity has something to do with our human proclivity toward disappointment. We expect things to turn out a certain way. When life presents a different scenario from the one we’d desired, we can ignore what good there may be in the way things are. As we get older, the possibilities of our futures get narrower and narrower. In our hearts and minds, we can lose what is for what might have been.

It makes me think of a fascinating book by C.S. Lewis. Lewis is best known for his Narnia series for children, but he also wrote science fiction and fantasy for adults. One of these books is Perelandra, the middle work of his “space trilogy.” There’s a dialogue in the book between the hero, Ransom, and the Green Lady, one of only two residents of her planet. The Green Lady lives in a state of complete innocence, like Eve in the Garden of Eden. She is perfectly at home and satisfied in her environment. The Lady says,

“One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”

Beyond competing goods, though, if we had only pleasure in our lives and no pain, would we appreciate the pleasure half as much?

They say, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” To express it in terms of the visual arts, our sorrows and premonitions of sorrow are the “negative spaces” around our joys, without which they would not be “readable,” or intelligible to us.

In this vein, it strikes me that there is a beautiful contrast between the joys of feasting and of spending time with those we love and the fact that we spend much of this holiday in darkness. We are approaching the longest night of the year. Both the Jews and the Celts begin new year in the growing darkness of the fall. Perhaps we can best appreciate the abundant produce of the fall, which owes it’s existence to the sun, in a time when the precious sun is retreating.

But how much we often take for granted the most basic goods in our lives, even the sun, is made clear by an unusual day 120 years ago.

In 1883, It is said that in New England the Sun didn't rise! The people awoke to an eerie darkness. They went outside to do their chores in stony silence. No rooster crowed, no birds chirping, none of the usual sounds of a new day. At the very start, people began to gather in small groups to question what was happening, to wonder and discuss what was taking place. Slowly, people began to make their way to the Churches. They say that by twelve noon every Church in New England was filled to overflowing with people on their knees crying out to God. There were cries for mercy, people begging for forgiveness and others confessing their sins. They say that there were few people who didn't pray the day the sun didn't rise. The Churches were full late into the night.

As the next morning neared, great crowds began to gather on the hilltops and the high places near their homes and churches. People were staring toward the eastern horizon. Every eye was fixed on that point where the sky touched the land. Every eye watching, hoping to catch a glimmer of the first rays of the Sun. As the sun began to come up over the horizon, people began to shout and yell praise to God, they clapped, danced and rejoiced because the Sun shined on the land again.

They had no idea that on the island nation of Indonesia, the sleeping giant of a volcano, Krakatoa, had come to life. They had no idea that this great mountain exploded sent a huge cloud of dust and ash into the upper atmosphere. This black cloud would be carried around the world by the jet stream. It was said to cover whole regions, covering the sky from horizon to horizon. Few people had any idea that a volcano, half way around the world, could create such a cloud that could block out the sun. Yet for most of those people that the very first time they ever thanked God for the warmth and wonder of the sun.

We don’t have to look to the new England of a century ago to know how absence makes what we cherish most seem all the more valuable. How many of the sons and daughters of New England are away at war this Thanksgiving? How many families are separated now by distance and danger? Not all of us agree with the reasons they are there, but all of us wish their safe return.

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman worked as an army nurse. One night, while sitting by the campfire, he thought of home and penned these lines:

O tender and wondrous thoughts, Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away; A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground, By the bivouac’s fitful flame. What a gift this life is! Sensations, hopes, emotions, kinships, simple joys. Jim Morrison’s poem, “An American Prayer,” contains the line, “O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art & perfect our lives.”

What are you thankful for this holiday season? What do you pay attention to? Are they worthwhile, or would your time and energy be better devoted elsewhere? If you really acted from of the most valuable parts of your life, the people you love, the thoughts that open your mind, the places that bring you peace, how would you live? If you were really tuned in to how utterly amazing and lucky it is to have been born on a planet that not only has leaves but leaves that change color and fall driftingly through the crisp air, if you paid attention to the hidden, embarrassed goodwill of strangers, if you really tasted the sweet potatoes instead of fretting about what she did 15 years ago, how would you live?

Would you enjoy life more? Would you give more generously of your time and money? Would you want others to know the joy you know? (Joy’s not a limited resource, after all). How will you celebrate Thanksgiving? How will you turn Thanksgiving into “thanks living” this year? How will you make this an earth better able to provide something to be thankful for?

The late comedic author Erma Bombeck knew how to find joy both in success and in struggle. Several years before her death, she wrote,

“An estimated 1.5 million people are living today after bouts with breast cancer. Every time I forget to feel grateful to be among them, I hear the voice of an eight-year-old named Christina, who had cancer of the nervous system. When asked what she wanted for her birthday, she thought long and hard and finally said, "I don't know. I have two sticker books and a Cabbage Patch doll. I have everything!" [To which Emma Bombeck responds,] The kid is right.”

So may it be with us!

Notes:

1	Both emphases mine.
2	Edgar Allen Poe, “Israfel”
3	According to the Indian Behavioural Department of Human Sciences, Mid-Day Communications: “Back to School” by Pooja Bedi, October 13, 2003 (http://web.mid-day.com/columns/poojabedi/2003/october/66107.htm)