I tend to avoid like the plague
the ecumenical or interfaith community Thanksgiving services most local churches feel obligated to hold at this time of year. In fact, I find these events excruciating - both awkwardly orchestrated (in an attempt, perhaps, to avoid any possible offense) and bizarrely vacuous (which probably accounts for the usually sparse attendance).

I wonder why local church leaders put themselves through the exercise. There is, after all, nothing sacred about Thanksgiving Day. This is a national holiday whose only religious connection has to do with the colonist Pilgrims who happened to be a religious sect. It is grimly ironic, in fact, that the first official proclaiming of a "Thanksgiving Day" was to celebrate the massacre of 700 native people guilelessly gathered for their own traditional religious observance of thanksgiving.

I suspect it is the Christian community,
in particularl, which, like a moth drawn to flame, is compelled to find some sort of religious significance in a holiday whose central image is a meal celebrated out of gratefulness for a victory (though admittedly few are likely to be aware of the referenced massacre, inclining to think instead mostly of the invaders' hard-won survival). And since we've been told from childhood that the Pilgrims were seeking religious freedom when they ventured across the Atlantic, it understandably looks like a good opportunity to celebrate and foster mutual respect of difference - and knowledge of the (surprising?) fact that most everyone cherishes similar sorts of blessings.

The universal nature of life's blessings is the focus, in fact, of the collect for Thanksgiving Day found in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer: "Almighty and gracious Father [sic], 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, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen."

No prayer could more aptly contain the impulse
behind this issue. In our significantly urbanized, suburbanized and regional sprawlized national life, the joy and relief that accompanies a harvest successfully weathered is, of course, mostly lost. As is the sober, bone-weary knowledge of the labor involved - or even what "in season" means when it comes to our favorite fruits and vegetables.

Our ignorance also embraces a scandal. Men, women and children are dying in the fields which yield such national abundance. And the crops themselves increasingly pose a risk to the very welfare of the creation we boast as God's own, including to the health of those we warmly invite to dinner.

As people who find contained in a meal the very substance of salvation, it seems sacrilegious for Christians not to be scrupulously mindful of the qualities and cost of the national feast. Perhaps, as with much of the Thanksgiving Day story, we'd prefer not to delve too deeply. If we did we'd probably find the occasion would better merit a fast.

But fasting is not the only form of resistance we can choose
if we take the church's prayerful Thanksgiving Day intention as our own. Every community member has a hunger for healthy food, sustainably and justly produced - which gives flesh to the interfaith solidarity for which so many church leaders seem to long.

Perhaps in working towards that aim we'd generate some community religious gatherings with true heart, everyone compelled to attend because of a passionate need to express deep gratefulness for a common goal achieved - a living-wage campaign successfully undertaken, an attempt to water down food labelling standards successfully rebuffed, a program of community-supported agriculture successfully established.

To my mind such victories would be well worth celebrating - maybe even worth a feast.

Julie A Wortman <julie@thewitness.org> is a publisher and co-editor of 'The Witness'.

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