Thanksgiving Is Not Ash Wednesday: A Time to Kill the Fatted Calf

Has our heritage of the great feast day, the sacramental meal, gone stale?

Thanksgiving Day is our biblical holy day as a nation, set aside in memory of our founding as a chosen people, but its meaning is under strange and strong attack. On the one hand, the forces of secularism exemplified in the three-day weekend keep trying to turn it into the sorry situation of Independence Day, where even parades and fireworks with a quick community prayer are losing out to sleeping in or backpacking through “God’s” wilderness. Showing witness to the God “through whose mighty power our fathers won their liberties of old” is about “out.” A sign of these times may be found in the Episcopal Proposed Book of Common Prayer, which subtly changes that old collect by saying instead, “Lord God almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves.…” We are surely more than conquerors in his name, but did we establish the country or did he?

This is similar to the change of pace that has crept into our observance of Thanksgiving. In my university, urban community, at Thanksgiving there is an interfaith service with the combined choirs of all the churches and synagogues that carries with it a once-a-year togetherness that is beautiful to behold. But at the same time there is this stark tendency to depreciate the very cause of our being assembled under one temple roof. One of the best expressions of this tinkering with intention is again found in my own denomination’s Proposed Prayer Book.

Our old Thanksgiving collect echoes its biblical origins by saying simply: “O merciful Father, who hast blessed the labours of the husbandman in the returns of the fruits of the earth; we give thee humble and hearty thanks for this thy bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness to us, that our land may still yield her increase, to thy glory and our comfort …” (italics mine). Now in the Proposed Book instead we pray: “Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need.…” Of course we Americans must be faithful stewards of our bounty and mindful of the needs of others, but historically and biblically that is not meant to be the dominant theme of Thanksgiving days. It is as if we are all determined to be the grumbling elder brother who complains about wasting family wealth on the celebration when his prodigal younger brother comes home, or worse, echo the disciple who wanted to use for the poor the money spent to anoint the feet of Jesus.

We cannot any longer celebrate the glorious fact of our founding because as Americans we are no longer comfortable with the idea of being chosen. It is vulgar to assume that God had a peculiar destiny for us and blasphemous to expect him to continue to give us what one rabbi called “great booty.”

The difficulty is that we are turning this holy day on its head, acting as if like Joel we are really called to: “Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly; gather the people.… Let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep between the porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare thy people, O LORD, and give not thine heritage to reproach … wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God.” But that prayer, of course, is for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

As I have thought about this curious national change of heart, trying to see why I felt that it instead of being ethical is impious, I realized that my own approach to Thanksgiving has been shaped by two experiences that reinforced one another and have become for me a part of all Thanksgiving days.

The earlier experience is representative of all the Thanksgivings during the 1930s when the Great Depression was going on. Most stories about the Depression focus on triumph over adversity, of making do with nothing but a full heart. But mine were not like that at all, because my father and mother, both of whom had come from small midwestern towns and large families, were “rich.” My father was a tenured professor, so instead of being down and out, we were the center of a widespread family’s hope and trust for the future and in the Lord. Innumerable cousins lived with us and babysat and were put through college, my grandmothers were sent rent money and new hats, uncles and friends one after the other were given my father’s “treatment”—helping them to regain the self-confidence to tackle yet another doubtful job offer until they finally made it. My young brother and I basked in the undeserved, but enjoyed bounty of the affection of many adopted “aunts and uncles” who, unable to afford children of their own, saved their pennies and nickles to treat us to an occasional ice cream cone.

One of my most delightful memories of what for me was a happy, joyous time was a fall afternoon just before Thanksgiving when I was around eight. I came into our kitchen to find my mother talking with a young cousin’s husband, a recent immigrant from Germany who was trying to sell eggs and butter door to door. Joachim was in tears because he could not pay the rent and he and Polly might have to accept the offer of our spare bedroom. My mother saved his face, and his faith in himself, by gently kidding him, telling him that she and dad had great confidence in his ability as a salesman and knew that one day he would be a millionaire and take us to Europe first class to meet his family. This idea pleased him and he went on peddling until he did make good in a big way. Then he spent the rest of his life trying to convince my parents they had promised to let him take them to Europe first class on the Queen Elizabeth. That year between Thanksgiving and Christmas the only thing he could do to show his appreciation was to save enough money to trim a tree with real candles for my brother and me to see and remember all our lives.

But still Thanksgiving itself was the great feast day, when everyone we knew who lived near enough to get there came to share our bounty in a sacramental meal. Now I can see that the solemn polishing of grandmother’s silver candlesticks, the washing of the old white plates with thin gold bands, and the making of an autumn harvest centerpiece of grapes and apples and oranges, all to be eaten, set the tone of such a ceremony. We were really setting up the altar of the Lord, mindful of his mercies, and sharing all we had. That turkey was no golden idol but a true fatted calf, and fed not only those nearest and dearest to us, but always someone else, like the Deuteronomic feast where we are told: “A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt … and became a nation, great, mighty and prosperous … and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand … and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold … bring the first of the fruit of the ground … And you shall set it down before the LORD … and you shall rejoice in all the good which the LORD … has given you and to your household … and the sojourner who is among you.”

Then I didn’t quite understand why we always had an old lady from across the alley who lived on nothing or friends of the cousins who could not afford busfare home or even the handyman who had to have dad’s help with the screens. But I knew instinctively that they all belonged, as representative Americans, at the banquet.

Then, as a young college graduate I retraced the steps of my New England ancestors, finding myself, after a summer in Quaker workcamp soon after the war, living in London lodgings, uncertain where I really belonged. A family friend sent a young GI couple to look me up, the veteran blind from war wounds, his wife a gay American-Irish girl with a green temper and egalitarian ways that did not sit well with her new British neighbors. (She was caught having coffee with a telephone repair man after he finished a job for her.) They adopted me and my problems and finally invited me and another college friend, exiled at the London School of Economics, to Thanksgiving dinner. And it was that day that I learned just what that holy day is all about.

All of us Americans had been treated to a great deal of rudeness about our nationality and our nation, its rich, insufferable, overspending ways, our naïve belief in the rights of man and our accidental prominence as a world power for which by nature, Englishmen and Frenchmen and Finns assured me, we were not meant. Whether we were ashamed of our country or not, we had seen signs on Paris streets saying “Americans, go home,” and we were weary and homesick.

Thanksgiving Day we had Sam, the turkey, named by the young couples’ two-year-old, who fortunately did not object to eating his large friend. Sam was bought at the navy PX. The rest of the feast we all found here and there, some corn meal, cranberry jelly with a funny taste, and apple pie, although we ought to have been able to find mincemeat in England. But as we gathered about the plastic tablecloth in the dusk of a London evening, where outside on the streets Londoners were hurrying home from work as if it were an ordinary day, our two candles lit and the turkey smelling like home, we all nearly cried. We knew we were singing the Lord’s song in a strange land and it was terribly sad, but joyful, because we had the chance to celebrate what we, as the chosen people, must celebrate—our national creation and preservation. The next day I got up and went and bought a ticket home. It is the remembrance of that moment of glory that I have celebrated each year since and want preserved for my children’s children.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

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