I was three years old on Thanksgiving Day of 1963. I was too young to understand the assassination of President Kennedy six days earlier, but I registered the grief of the adults around me. I was in the living room with my mom and dad as they watched a million people line the route of the funeral procession in Washington, from the Capitol back to the White House, then to St. Matthew's Cathedral, and finally to Arlington National Cemetery.
Three days after JFK’s funeral we watched again as people lined the streets of New York City for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Mom says I turned my 3-year-old face from the TV and asked, “Who died?” I now associated parades and crowds with death.
In 1963 our nation observed Thanksgiving in the shadow of heartbreak.
My own family felt that shadow 36 years later, as we gathered around our Thanksgiving table eight days after the funeral of my father. As was our custom, before the mealtime blessing, with tears in our eyes each of us shared something for which we were grateful.
Thanksgiving in the shadow of heartbreak.
Now today, there’s a heaviness in the air as we prepare to sit down at the Thanksgiving table. Within the last ten days:
four college students stabbed to death in Idaho
three college athletes shot to death on a bus in Charlottesville
five people shot to death and 25 others wounded in a queer bar in Colorado Springs.
And only minutes before sitting down to write this column, six people were gunned down in a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia.
Thanksgiving in the shadow of heartbreak.
How do we find within ourselves an “attitude of gratitude” when what we mostly feel is grief, anger, disbelief, and loss?
It’s my conviction that gratitude and prayer are inextricably joined. Richard Rohr says it beautifully: “Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful…”
Brian McLaren echoes this notion in his book, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words: “Perhaps at some point, all of us are reduced to despair, but my hunch is…having lost everything, one may still be able to hold on to one’s attitude, one’s practiced habit of gratitude, of turning to God in Job-like agony and saying, ‘For this breath, thanks. For this tear, thanks. For this memory of something I used to enjoy but now have lost, thanks. For this ability not simply to rage over what has been taken, but to celebrate what was once given, thanks.’”
I leave you with a Thanksgiving gift: a brief, gorgeous meditation on gratitude by Bro. David Steindl-Rast, the Austrian American Catholic Benedictine monk and author. I invite you to settle into a comfy chair, take some deep breaths, paying attention to your breathing and your heartbeat, and let yourself be immersed in gratitude, beauty, and joy.
Thanksgiving peace to you…
