Thanksgiving is in the details

Versions of the following appeared in the Nov. 26 editions of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch and The Dayton Daily News.

As fall turns toward winter, each year we remember that we will soon celebrate “Thanksgiving.” But what exactly is Thanksgiving?

In school we learned that the Plymouth Pilgrims invited the local Indians to a Thanksgiving feast to enjoy the fruits of their first successful harvest. But why did they do that, and what did it mean?

More important, what meaning does it still have in a largely urban, consumer society at the end of the 20th century? The answers can be found in an obscure, unpublished treatise, The Whole Body of Divinity by the Rev. Samuel Stone.

Written about 1650, a generation after that first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Stone’s 540-page treatise is almost surely the first systematic treatment of any subject written in the new American colonies.

Stone was one of the first-generation of pastors who emigrated from England in the 1630s and, although he is totally unknown today, he provides a fascinating view of attitudes at the dawn of our own society.

Cotton Mather refers to his treatise, and apprentice pastors in New England were often apparently required to copy it out in longhand.

One of the founding ministers of the First Church at Hartford, Conn., Stone was probably unaware of the actual events in Plymouth Colony.

But he did articulate the theory for that and all similar thanksgiving celebrations, a theory which the Pilgrims, along with the rest of colonial New England, almost certainly took for granted as they celebrated.

Stone focuses the context in which the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth took place. To him, Thanksgiving fit under the category of prayer.

Considered in the abstract, thanksgiving was the “kind of prayer” that recognized God’s hand in the benefits people enjoyed and gave God explicit thanks for them.

Because of this general principle, Stone went on to reflect, people also had an obligation to react in a special way to any divine blessing that went beyond the ordinary.

For instance, if the tiny Connecticut militia (whose chaplain Stone was) returned victorious from a battle, or if rain brought an end to a prolonged drought, this would represent what Stone called an “Extraordinary mercy from God,” and the only appropriate response would be to proclaim immediately a special “day of Thanksgiving.”

Stone’s “day of Thanksgiving” was a day of prayer and feasting declared spontaneously, at any time of the year, whenever God had showered some unusual blessing on the colonists. It was not an annual harvest festival.

The “day of Thanksgiving,” as Stone described it, served as the New England pattern through the 17th and 18th centuries. Colonists feasted and prayed on the spur of the moment, whenever they saw the hand of God in their good fortune.

It was during the 19th century that the nature of God’s relationships with the world came to be seen primarily as orderly, predictable, understood better through regular events than through the extraordinary.

The “day of Thanksgiving” was no exception; it, too, became predictable and was eventually assigned by government decree to the fourth Sunday in November.

But as we approach one of the final Thanksgiving days of the 20th century, is an annual harvest festival still relevant? Do more Americans believe in an orderly, predictable God than in Stone’s God of extraordinary blessings, or even in no God at all?

There is much to be said, it seems to me, in favor of reclaiming Stone’s original notion of a spontaneous Thanksgiving Day. For one thing, far fewer Americans rely for their livelihood on a successful annual harvest.

The blessings for which most of us give thanks are at least as varied as those that inspired the New England colonists.

We may accept the date of our annual Thanksgiving feast, set as it is by federal mandate, but reserve the right to decide for ourselves, as most Americans surely already do, what blessings we choose to celebrate.

We can create a Thanksgiving that is less an occasion to total up our net worth (is this not the practical meaning of “counting our blessings” for many of us today) and more an opportunity to express thanks in a concrete fashion.

But if the heart of Thanksgiving Day once again became spontaneous prayer, would this not disenfranchise the non-prayerful, the countless Americans who find no higher power to whom to pray?

Not at all, for if the purpose of this particular kind of “prayer” is a concrete expression of thanks for some very specific blessing, we can all be prayerful.

At Wittenberg University, my own institution, we have a motto that reflects this: “Having light, we pass it on to others.” Any wisdom, any good fortune we enjoy is not ours to hoard.

There is nothing privileged about universities in this regard; a better example might be the vast global economy in which virtually all of us take part.

We rely for our food, our clothing, our water supply, the heat for our apartments and houses, on the labors of others.

How might we express our gratitude – give our thanks – concretely to the countless human beings around the world, personally unknown to us, whose labors contribute to our well-being? Nothing could be simpler.

Rather than just “counting our blessings,” we can use the occasion of Thanksgiving to make a donation of time or of money to a charity whose purpose is to serve other human beings. What could be a better way to honor this American tradition?

I think even Samuel Stone would applaud it.

— Baird Tipson, Wittenberg president