Perhaps the pilgrims and the Indians did indeed sit down to a great feast and a peace pipe; there were probably plenty of wild turkeys around in the early days of the pre-U.S. But all of those things had nothing to do with the beginnings of Thanksgiving Day — you knew that, of course.
Nope. It was Abraham Lincoln’s effort to bring a little peace into the fractured country he found himself trying to lead, at a time about as fractured here as the world is, today, everywhere. Abe thought a little reverence and repentance would be a good thing. Here, in part, is what he had to say:
“But we have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace…”
Poor Abe. If he thought he knew deceitfulness and intoxication, he should have seen what’s going on in health reform. And if he looked beyond our shores he might have sensed wider “punishment and chastisements in this world” and called for a global pause.
Whatever its origin — Lincoln’s formal establishment of the day was in 1863, but what would preschool be without pilgrims and cornucopias? — Thanksgiving Day still offers a nice time to pause.
Here in San Francisco a few hundred or so of us will be doing that at the 5th Annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, where we’ll have a group Ommmm, a Muslim call to prayer, a bunch of other prayers to Whomever has not given up on us all, “with one heart and one voice” as Mr. Lincoln suggested we do. Then we’ll go home and eat stuffed turkey and watch ball games.
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all.