Biblical Thanksgiving and the American National Holiday

 

 

Biblical Thanksgiving and the American National Holiday

 Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

November 25, 2020

Lincoln initiated a communal day of Thanksgiving during the pit of the Civil War to interrupt the nation’s lament at the carnage and destruction. He called for a day of gratitude and communal renewal for the people to put aside its focus on national catastrophe and its sense of communal dispersion resulting from defeats. In this, Lincoln enacted a program from the Thanksgiving Psalms, including Pss. 44:9–11 and 106:47.

תּוֹדָה tôḏâ is the Hebrew word for a sacrificial confession of thanksgiving that subordinates individual initiative to that of God’s mighty deeds:

Praise is actually expressed in the tôḏâ (Neh. 12:27; Ps. 26:7; 42:5[4]; 69:31[30]; 95:2; 100:1, 4; 147:7; Isa. 51:3; Jer. 30:19; Jon. 2:10[9]). It is a joyful song in which exultation over God’s mercy makes itself heard (Ps. 42:5[4]); it is among the messages of rejoicing that will be heard concerning the “new salvation,” the renewed favor of God. It can have the sense of:

(1) praise or thanksgiving, offering of praise or thanksgiving, the choir (that sings the hymn of praise); (2) confession.

A vow of praise concludes individual [and communal] laments (Pss. 7:17; 28:7; 35:18; 42:6, 12[5, 11]; 43:4f.; 52:11[9]; 54:8[6]; 57:10; 71:22; 86:12; 109:30; 119:7)

--Mayer, G., Bergman, J., & von Soden, W. (1986). ידה. G. J. Botterweck & H. Ringgren (Eds.), D. E. Green (Trans.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Revised Edition, Vol. 5, p. 428-32). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Connecting these two senses is the Thanksgiving Psalms’ sacrifice of praise, the sung confession of God’s goodness and power to renew the community.

Repetition of expressions of Thanksgiving—the tôḏâ of scripture—can build the virtues of recollection of God’s victory over death and displacement, and of gratitude which incarnates the attitude of praise and reliance on something far greater than self. Faith holds that expressions, prayers, and virtues of gratitude and thanksgiving can bring about the cessation of crisis and distress by honoring God and by influencing and tempering neighboring onlookers. Sung confessional thanksgiving is a form of evangelism in the churches and at the Dinner Table.

The cultivation of virtues makes one the captain of one’s excellence, authenticating self-control of the narrative of one’s spiritual maturation & achievements. Congruently, virtuous behavior serves the common good by influencing others, bringing about shalom through positive social mimesis (cf. Prov. 27.19). Not only are virtues ends in themselves, their cultivation takes time so that they also are *means for being* embedded with the teleology of becoming. By this, individual excellence is encompassed by time & collective human space to realize the ever-emerging Kingdom of God.

Praise cannot be a private matter involving only those who praise and are praised. The imperative hôḏâ is addressed to all and sundry. There is a summons to tell others, or the worshipper suggests such a summons by announcing his intention to speak (Ps. 9:2[1]; 79:13). He describes those who will hear as the “godly” (Ps. 52:11[9]), the company of the upright, a congregation of indefinite size (Ps. 111:1). It comprises many (Ps. 109:30), appears as a great congregation and a mighty throng (Ps. 35:18). Ultimately it includes the entire world. The peoples and nations are to experience the praise (Ibid., 435).

Here are some expressions of Thanksgiving taken from the Psalms:



Ps 118:19–21, 28-29: Open to me the gates of righteousness,

that I may enter through them

and give thanks to the LORD.

20 This is the gate of the LORD;

the righteous shall enter through it.

21 I thank you that you have answered me

and have become my salvation…

28 You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;

you are my God, I will extol you.

29 O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,

for his steadfast love endures forever.



Ps 75:1: We give thanks to you, O God;

we give thanks; your name is near.

People tell of your wondrous deeds.



Ps 107:8–9,21-22: Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,

for his wonderful works to humankind.

9 For he satisfies the thirsty,

and the hungry he fills with good things...

21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,

for his wonderful works to humankind.

22 And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices,

and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.



Ps 30:11–12: You have turned my mourning into dancing;

you have taken off my sackcloth

and clothed me with joy,

12 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.

O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever.



As the American national holiday, Thanksgiving originally was intended to transform private lament into collective praise of the Creator. For me, it has not yet been coopted like Armistice Day by Veterans’ Day to become a celebration of nationalism. For me, American Thanksgiving dispenses with the idolatrous narratives of regionalism and national supremacy instead to focus outside oneself and one’s tribe for the blessings and endowments we all share in neighborliness inside God’s good creation.

@BrianZahnd notes: ”When the gospel is reduced from an overarching metanarrative to a formula for postmortem salvation, Christians reach for some other Big Story to interpret the world. This opens the door for the myths of religious nationalism to displace fidelity to Christ and his kingdom."

Religious nationalism has created an environment for the deranged and intellectually unvirtuous to gorge on and shovel insults, lies, and incitements to violence. The vices of nationalism include claims of racial superiority and insensitivity to privation and need. Counter to these vices are the virtues of thanksgiving which this day of celebration and commemoration should be more in evidence than all others. This year's challenges can make celebration feel alienating. Quiet gratitude and comprehensive recollection can serve the reinvigoration of sociality.

Among other things, Thanksgiving has a mythic connotation of hospitality extended by Wampanoag to pilgrims, calendrically leads into the Christian season of Advent, and legislatively commemorates of our nation's gratitude for turning back the coup of Confederate slavedrivers. It thus is involved in the ongoing Exodus of the indigenous, the expectant Palestinian peasant, and the enslaved.

I cannot envision how I make thanksgiving without turning toward compassion for the oppressed, deprived, and brutalized. These thoughts guide my table prayers.

The American holiday of Thanksgiving does well to relate the sense of thanksgiving in the Bible to renewing and re-invigorating praise and confession of God and bring about inside us the virtuous commitment to God’s purposes. Enacting the virtues of Thanksgiving in gratitude and recollection, we can move from being people who respond self-interestedly to the wealth and competitive *merits* of our fellow humans to those who instead respond to others' authentic *needs,* singing to Creation rather than calculating within as we go. Matching God’s willingness to meet us with our willingness to meet God is how thanksgiving and compassionate love relate in the intended nature of nations in God’s good earth.

Notes from an Uncoiled Life

 

Notes from an Uncoiled Life

Douglas Olds

16 November 2020

“Your body is constantly replacing its cells so much so that, every 10 years your entire body has replaced itself.” -AsapScience

 "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." -2 Corinthians 4:16

   Conscience is the tide of the soul: it fluxes in times of stress and ebbs in times of satisfaction. Its pangs prolong in times like these. Conscience is a spur to the virtue of recollection wherein we strive to connect the details of our past with hope that it is makes sense of the whole. And that the whole is decent, and if not, recollection spurs us to repent and take steps. 

    Because humans are both embodied and ensouled, we may display our relationship with spirit and soul in a new cellular pattern of muscle memories and metabolic rhythms every decade, giving the (auto-)biographical impression not of an arrow's progress, but rather of a double-helical coiling of maturation--of body at a mirrored remove from soul, but in flux and sympathy with it. [1] What follows is a biographical sketch of how a body consisting of cellular matter manifests its linked polarities and kinematics with soul in decade-spanning, accretive processions. It is not the body that is continuous, but rather it is the soul, though we may be unaware of it.  

    I first began to discern God’s other face during my childhood. Later in adulthood, I learned to discern God in Christ in the faces and mouths of other people, but in my youth, I was enchanted by the other face of God [Ps. 80.3/Gen. 9.13] found in the woods, lakes, snow, and breezes of northern Michigan.

    There I discerned a Spirit bounteously and wonderfully clothed. I fell asleep to bullfrogs calling forth mates with staccatos of muted tubas--and woke to loons trilling in daffy hilarity at first dawn. I would hike a trail among giant white pines, making a final turn toward a lake that emerged shimmering with morning sunlight dappling the turquoise ripples stirred up by the open breeze.  Along the banks of sloshy bogs stood formal elms, maples, and aspens whose quaking leaves matched semaphore with whispers. The air smelled of damp pine and dank mushrooms. The rain that drummed on my bedroom window or tapped the flaps of my tent under the sky brought a tickling freshness to the breeze. On spring afternoons, I would lie on my back in the deep meadow grass and milkweed searching the billowy clouds for the kind of art the sky’s wind makes against the vivid blue. These sensations filled me with a sense of poignancy and awe. As a youth, I was awake to the other face of God, inviting me as by a whistling breeze. I lived inside a privileged child’s enchantment.

    At 10, I became proficient with snow skiing. The whooshing wind was my companion. I rocked my knees and ankles while I sang silently in the pull of the slopes. At 20, I swung tennis rackets matched with the thwops of never-perfectly hit balls and imaged internally through my muscle memory of team sports as I sat in large, state-university bleachers. At 30, I became a fairly adept swimmer which set my neck--where ancient Israelites located the soul--rotating in helical space to enable my gasps. At that point of my life, my body was not in harmony with my soul. As I huffed in the shoulder and neck helices of solitary distance swimming, my mind was diverted by the blur of problem solving interrupted by grievances.

    My life in the body, which I thought was the only reality, dispensed with the desire of the soul, which to me, as for C. S. Lewis, “were in the sharpest conflict... Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” 

    My discovery of Christianity revealed the reality of the soul, so that I began to harmonize its expressions with the experience of my body. I found both a place to stand (forth) and a story to understand myself. My onset at 40 of Christian spirituality and discovery was accompanied by a newly developed skill with partner dancing honed on a boat, its micro-balancing married to the wake of my swimmer shoulders and skier knees and ankles so that I began to be conscious of that double helix of body and soul. I communicated to partners through dance the music that bridged the beating of our hearts. Through dance, I soon synchronized hearts with the mother of my children who then added new and gratifying rhythms to my life: trembling fingers wearily grasping post-midnight bottles; to-and-fro lifting and securing of infants in and out of car seats; the gentle exertions of equalizing my efforts with my children’s furrowed-brow initiations of competitiveness. My son would dribble by me for a layup, and I would offer a delayed scale of resistance appropriate to showing what was difficult without squelching his drive. 

    At 50, I settled into a pattern of again hiking through forests and river lands, matching my steps to the plinking, like from a Javanese gamelan, of copper-colored stones percussing under gently rushing currents. As I walked in this music, I felt ever nearer to God.  

    At 60, I’ve become more introverted--and in these troubled times where God's judgment seems close--increasingly and tidally conscious of causing offense to God's favored. I have retired more and more to the cold beaches of northern California, experiencing from my chair in the damp sand the zipper surf caused by the kinematics of shore topography and back and forth angles of incoming and backwashing currents--waves that express my inner life of fear and joy in God: sounding now muffled and fizzing at the shoreline, now booming against the rocks jutting from the headlands.    

    Family built a new world for my soul and body. I began finally to perceive a deeper reality. The body in this "mortal coil" begins, gets lost, gets found, returns to God, and repeats anew this cycle lurching  forward in time. In the process, it discovers and develops and strengthens the soul while solidifying a loving relationship with the Spirit.

    Each decade’s uncoiling of my body’s facilities keeps a connection with my soul's history--with what has gone previous, a transition with continuity--to which is added a corresponding integration of perception and appreciation.  As my stamina and vigor slow, I grow in gratitude for my life in the body, the partner of my soul soon to be disrupted.  I hope that the recoil of its powers will not be matched with an unwinding of my soul's awareness or virtue.  But if unwind I must as I peer toward my 70s, let it be by returning to a childlike docility and gentleness—a body’s trust in the fecund beauty and goodness of the Living God's  pulsing and enveloping sea, land, and sky.

Note:

[1] [Christian anthropology connects body and soul in a linked and eschatologically realized [at the culmination of history] whole (as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 15.44 and as the gospels claim of the resurrected spiritual body of Jesus that came forth from the tomb on Easter). In Christ is the meeting place of soul and body, heaven and earth, God and human. This anthropology of the interlinked and intertwined moiety of soul and matter constituting the Christian self is unlike classical paganism's gnostic philosophy of the incorruptibility and eternity of soul alongside the corruption and eventual cessation of the material.]