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Lincoln and the Real Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving Day something happens inside the soul of a mother and father. The quickening of the heart, the immediate sense of euphoria, and the propensity for the face to break into a profound smile are all the result of the moment parents see their children after they have been gone for considerable time. The radiance of the moment of reunion is a real phenomenon, and though emotionally driven, these sensations provide for us an example of what "Thanksgiving" looks like. The turkey, the dressing, and even the pumpkin pie are peripheral aspects of the "internal feast" celebrated by those who come together as family and as friends.

Strip away the expectations that parents have for their children. Strip away past conflicts. Strip away all of the examples wherein the children disappoint their parents and what you have is the child laid bare and as naked as they were when they were born. It is this child on the doorstep, returning after a time away, perhaps like the prodigal son, or perhaps the daughter who has been faithful to her loyalties to her parents. To the parent, it almost doesn't matter. The moment the door opens and you see what is unquantifiable before you, your heart leaps with a kind of real ecstasy making us really be "beside ourselves" and in another world of happiness. All the accompanying stress of the holiday disappears at that moment and all that matters is that we embrace what has been away from us.

Notwithstanding the commercialization of the holiday of "Thanksgiving," the day is a day of real smiles, of real enthusiasm, of real forgiveness for past wrongs, and real reunion of friends and family in a way that begs the question, "Why can't everyday be Thanksgiving?"

That is a good question. It seems Abraham Lincoln saw fit to declare a day in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving, and it was not in remembrance of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Actually, it was about a "national reunion" spawned by the desire to have the quickening heart, the sense of euphoria and the radiance of a national smile, especially after having experienced the ravages of the nation being split apart. The amazing appeal by Lincoln was to the Christian God of his upbringing and his solid faith that true "acts of giving thanks" assumes there is a God who is larger than ourselves. Like Lincoln, a recognition of the source of all things good will result in the immediate internal blessings of peace, reunion, sorrow for past wrongs, and the phenomenon of forgiveness as an alternative to retaliation.

It is imperative that we welcome back into our cultural and linguistic repertoire our belief in a "creator" who endowed us with those rights Jefferson wrote about. It is time we understand that unless we embrace the truth as if it were our child returning home after a long time away, on Thanksgiving Day we will be celebrating a sterile holiday filled with nothing but the bird, the pumpkin, and instant replay worship of our football heroes. Without an inner sense of true Thanksgiving for the indescribable effervescent joy of just being together, we will be celebrating the "day before Black Friday" and all of its vapid promises to satisfy our desire to assuage our emptiness by spending our way to happiness. It is that emptiness, that estrangement from a truth so high, and so beautiful, that causes us to be no more than the shell of a carved pumpkin soon to be discarded into the trash can of a life without God -- the God to whom we owe the "thanks."

It is time for us to do as Lincoln did in difficult times: "...while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him (God) for such singular deliverances and blessings, 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 interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union."
Have an ecstatic Thanksgiving!

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