Thanksgiving (Part II)

Well, it's that time of year again. This time it seems so typical for everyone to be "thankful" (I wonder why) and "united", whatever that might mean. I can't say I feel that way - or at least not the same way.

The holiday season has become corporate. Even the real, true, heartfelt "meaning" of Christmas and Thanksgiving has become something gridlocked into picture-perfect family dinners, frame-by-frame cathartic realisations of the "joy of giving", captured by none other than the American cinematic imagination. It seems that people quit being so damn greedy and self-interested for this meager month and a half, then resume their lives as quietly as if nothing had ever happened - only to replay that same amnesiac recreation every year on end. If people really cared so much, you'd think they would at least pretend as much the rest of the year round. Though I guess in a sense that is really that fabled holiday cheer. Good thing we can all, for a little while, shut up and at least pretend not to be so damn insincere.

Though in true Thanksgiving spirit, I really do admit that I haven't been very thankful. I'm not even used to being thankful - which, I guess, is why we have a week off and a special meal designated for such a purpose. But I realise, in a kind of lightly ironic way, that we don't need to be thankful for everything all the time. We've only got so much in the end. I mean, in a sense, all I really have is myself - if only I weren't so unreliable. And I'm undeniably certain that I don't deserve most or any of what I have, or what, by God's mercies, I've come to have. I guess my thanksgiving is less about giving thanks (in the traditional sense) and really just looking at my life and being glad that I can never be thankful enough.

Next year I'm sure there will be another post remarkably similar to this one, and the year after that, and who knows for how long after. The repetition is only half the deal, though - and God fills it up with so much more. When I said I was thankful for struggle, it was true - but only in the sense that God brings me through struggle and in how well He's sustained me so far. When I said I was thankful for struggle, it was true - but infinitely more, just as God is so much infinitely higher and infinitely stronger than us. And I'll be damned if I'm not thankful for that.


So again, I suppose, it all goes back to God. That's something to be thankful for in itself.

Thank God for Life; thank God for the Truth. Thank God there's a Way.


Amen.