Dear ones,
On this thanks giving day, I wish you a day of meaningful connection, of gratitude, and of knowing that you are cared for and loved. Know that I am grateful for you, grateful in ways that were amplified by my recent time away.
Each day comes with its layers of complexity, and Thanksgiving Day layers can feel especially tangled:
Some of us will register the weight of history on this day, the pain and the loss of genocide, boarding schools, and violent erasure carried in the blood and bones through the generations. Some of us will embody resilience and the deep threads to ancestors, also carried in the blood and bones. Some of us will nonetheless celebrate with family over a delicious traditional meal, not so different in key human ways from Norman Rockwell’s familiar “Freedom from Want” painting, except for the ways it is completely different.
Some of us will be fed by the glow of deep family love and trust and joy in being together, heightened by beautiful and delicious food. And some of us will be treading water, surrounded by those who…, who would not be our first choice for holiday companions, or lost in a well of despondency or the aching hollow once filled by someone we have loved.
Some of us will enjoy a laughter and conversation filled thank-goodness-I-didn’t-have-to-clean-my-house afternoon with friends. And some of us will spend yet another day alone, maybe quietly eyeing a balloon-topped and Santa Claus-punctuated parade, or an annual parade of carefully preened purebred canines, or gridiron antics whose importance escapes some of the rest of us. Maybe content to be solitary. Maybe lonely. Maybe much more than lonely.
Some among us will find our way to a free meal, possibly with mixed feelings, maybe holding some sense of where we will sleep tonight, maybe not.
Some of us will find tears in our eyes remembering yet more lives (how could such hatred still find purchase) lost in violence in the rare, “safe” space of a Colorado nightclub, or on so very many streets where brown or black intersect white. Some of us are despairing that humanity will ever get this right, despite all our trying, despite… everything.
Dear ones, the layers are complex and many, for some of us. Up to a point, it is the nature of being human.
If this is not a day that brings or allows you joy, may it be a day graced for you with kindness, and love, and gentle courage. May you discover a thread of blessing running through it, no matter what.
If this day is filled with your seven favorite kinds of warmth, may it be a day graced with kindness, and love, and courage. May you discover a thread of blessing running through it and tie that thread around your finger to remind you of exactly what you are needing to remember about being a blessing in the world.
And if your experience of this thanks giving day is somewhere in between, may it be a day graced with kindness, and love, and courage. May you discover a thread of blessing running through it and follow that thread wherever it leads.
With care,
Rev. Kevin