Dear Friends,
On Thursday in this country, thousands of people will gather around various dining room tables in small and large groups for what has become America’s tradition of eating and expressing thanks. Thanksgiving holiday is, like many traditions we celebrate, grounded partly in fact and partly in myth.
I imagine many of us learned that the first Thanksgiving occurred at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts in 1621 when Pilgrims and Native Americans had a three-day meal together to celebrate a successful harvest. There are other, less warm-and-fuzzy aspects of this story of friendship, including the slaughter of many New England Native Americans in the years that followed their thanksgiving meal. These contradictions of human life and the human spirit are ones that we continue to experience and wrestle with today.
Perhaps, then, Thanksgiving is a reminder not only of our blessings, but that we are human beings in need of saying grace. I believe that saying grace is not only about expressing our gratitude, but also about recognizing our imperfect humanness . . . that we do not always live up to our ideals and that we need courage to face and change our shortcomings.
You may have your own grace that you will say around your table on Thursday. But if not, I offer you this one, adapted from one written by Scottish Novelist and Poet Robert Louis Stevenson:
Behold our family here assembled.
We are thankful for this place in which we dwell,
for the love that unites us, for the peace accorded us this day,
for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies
that make our lives delightful,
for our friends in all parts of the earth.
Give us courage, gaiety, and the quiet mind.
Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come.
May we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune loyal and loving to one another.
May it be so.
Warmly,
Terry