I meant to write a post about the pre-Advance GOP blameshifting / infighting / maneuvering, but it is getting late and I still need to pack for Thanksgiving travel. So, I will share a few happier thoughts instead. And, if I get to a critical appraisal of the state of the Grand Old Party over the holiday, I’ll post it for you when I return.
In the meantime, we have more important business to which we must attend: the serious duty of gratitude, which, for those who see it clearly, is among the most uproarious of life’s delights.
Since I can give you no greater thoughts than of those much wiser than I, allow me to pass along a few of my favorites:
If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have someone to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet in mine? – Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. – The Bible, I Timothy 4:4-5
“We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country” –C.S. Lewis
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
Today, I read one other quote that seems particularly appropriate. Perhaps you have heard it before.
This year, our country faces recession, we are confronted with numerous serious policy questions, we are under constant threat of attack from enemies whose weapon is fear and we – as every generation before us – are uncertain of our future. Yet, as serious as our individual or collective circumstances may be, we still have much for which to give thanks.
When Abraham Lincoln established the fourth Thursday of November as our national day of Thanksgiving and remembrance, circumstances were as dire as any our nation has faced. We were torn in two – divided into those who believed that we could no longer deny inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on the basis of skin color and those who saw some people as property. The blood that covered our battlefields and the grief that stained our hearts were almost too great to bear. Yet, President Lincoln led the country in the giving of Thanks.
Thanksgiving Proclamation
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
An appropriate reminder for our own time, don’t you think?
What inspired Lincoln to declare the National Thanksgiving Day that we still celebrate? Well, this proclamation was the reward of over twenty years of work by Sarah Josepha Hale. Hale was a single mother of five who loved learning; an abolitionist (but never a suffragette); a poet, novelist and editor of a prominent journal for most of her adult life. She wrote to Governors, wrote persuasive editorials in her Godey’s Ladies Journal and wrote letters to the President urging the establishment of the Thanksgiving Holiday. In her first novel, Northwood, she described the traditional practice of the festival she so loved:
“[It] is considered as an appropriate tribute of gratitude to God to set apart one day of Thanksgiving in each year; and autumn is the time when the overflowing garners of America call for this expression of joyful gratitude.”
Wouldn’t you agree?
