River News: Our View

The Rolling Stones, in their inimitable, ageless way, once offered up some wisdom for the ages in a single verse: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need, oh yeah.”

Oh yeah.

When we as individuals finally come to understand that what’s ultimately important in life is not our own sweet ambitions and attainments —the earthly things we dream of more than anything — but the journey toward them using that which we have been given and earned, we begin to understand what gratitude is all about. 

It’s about appreciating what we have in the moment rather than bemoaning what we do not yet have, even as human impulse drives us to attain more. It awakens our senses to the world and the people around us. It helps us realize that we, our families, and our communities have needs that sometimes demand the sacrifice of our personal and visionary Mount Everests for the practical realities of everyday living.

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is tied to a belief that God provides both physically and spiritually, though not always in the way we expect or desire. In this worldview, God provides for our earthly needs not necessarily by fulfilling the earthly person’s bucket list, but often by opening unexpected doors when other doors have closed. 

Needs aren’t magically erased, nor dreams dashed; they are reshaped through faith, persistence, and steady hard work. They take us down roads that often detour or send us circling endlessly through the roundabouts of the years. But they also take us to the most beautiful places we never dreamed we would go, and we give thanks for our blessings.

As numerous historians have observed, it is never an easy journey. Hardship has always been Thanksgiving’s tag-along little sibling, but the curious thing about gratitude is that it flowers in the rockiest of gardens. The first Thanksgiving followed a year of unimaginable tragedy in which nearly half the Pilgrims died of disease and exposure. And yet they gave thanks.

So many years later, President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, in the darkest days of the Civil War. Brother fought brother, entire cities burned, livelihoods as well as lives were forever lost, and not just those of the wealthy. Yet Lincoln called on the nation to give thanks. And the nation did.

He proclaimed Thanksgiving not to ignore hardship but to confront it. Exactly 70 years later, with the Great Depression grinding millions of families into despair, the holiday was preserved again, and soon after landed on its now-familiar fourth Thursday in November. Many Americans observed it with hardly more than beans and Spam on their plates, if they were lucky, but these hard-fighting Americans refused to give up on gratitude. 

That remains true today. Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to embrace our entire story, its chapters of good times but also of bad. A good number of people this year will gather around tables absent loved ones who once graced it with their loving presence. Others will walk into the holiday suffering with medical conditions, financial stress, unresolved grief, or other private burdens they never include in their letter of holiday cheer. 

Gratitude doesn’t erase those harsh realities, nor will hope always overcome them. It doesn’t pretend they don’t exist. It simply insists that hardship is not the whole story and that, even in the worst of times, life offers luminosity, sparkling starpoints of light in the sky, if we are willing to look for it. 

That is the history and that is the message of Thanksgiving: Giving thanks and holding onto to hope no matter what. Faith, persistence, and hard work still matter. We can still get what we need, if we try sometimes, even if it’s not always exactly what we wanted.

Beneath the familiar Thanksgiving counting of blessings lies something even more demanding. Being thankful for our own good fortune by definition requires an understanding that there are things we don’t have, and it is precisely this felt need — the almost imperceptible gnawing in every human heart — that sharpens our awareness of the world around us.

It sets our own needs squarely beside the recognition that many more live lives with greater unmet needs than ours, many more dreams smashed, and an entire universe of unresolved insecurities. It inevitably nudges us toward compassion for the needs of our fellow humans. We are pushed to reach out and help someone else find their footing. That is the heartbeat of the holiday.

On Thanksgiving, we can pause to reflect not merely on our journey through this life but on the multitudes of people, close to us and far away, who are making the trek with us. Our journey may be a safari of unknowns, but the one thing we know for sure is that we are always walking in the footsteps of others. Some take greater strides, and others lesser ones, but at no time do we travel by ourselves. 

For that alone, we can give thanks.

What we see along the way is that human desire and human need are two sides of the same coin, and they are served up in equal portions on humanity’s travel to its destiny. On each side, though, the plates of some are piled high while the dishes of others are meager. The fulfillment of Thanksgiving’s promised land is reached only when the opportunities and promises of gratitude find their way to scant platters. 

Thanksgiving is actualized when we understand that we can give thanks not only for what we have but for what we are able to give. From within that common humanity emerges the embodiment of gratitude and hope that is expressed as our day of Thanksgiving. It is the very aspiration of the day.

Inevitably, a sunny day fades to twilight. On Thanksgiving, the fading light leads to the best hours of the day — Thanksgiving’s nightcap of hope. We have feasted on reflection, and perhaps a football game or two; we have embraced loved ones and given our steadfast thanks for our bounty, that is, life itself; and now we are free to sit by the window and drink in the setting sun. 

We have thought about things as they are, and now we can gaze out toward that stretches ahead. We see the holiday season and festiveness right down the street, glistening under the street lamp in the next block. We squint to look a little farther, and we see a new year and its wide boulevards on the horizon, just waiting for us to travel down.

The needy next door look down the same avenue with the same human hope. So do our well-heeled neighbors across the street. We are all preparing for the next journey, giving thanks for the last one, hoping for big things and good things for all in the one ahead.

Turns out, we suddenly realize, gratitude is nothing but last year’s hope given wings and come to earth to settle and sleep comfortably in our hearts. Gratitude cannot survive without hope, and hope cannot live without humanity’s lofty dreams.

Inevitably, on this Thanksgiving night, we look down the street, and there is no detour in sight. The sky is clear; the forecast, good. Early tomorrow we shall set out in anticipation, eager to achieve as much as we can on our earthly list of ambitions, but confident that, in our faith and compassion, no matter what, we shall get what we need for ourselves and our families and our communities in the year ahead.

May it be so for your family and our communities. Happy Thanksgiving to all.